was in the air just
before the Christian era. Christianity affected the conception in a
twofold manner. On the one hand it limited it, for the Stoic City of Man
became the City of God, who was to be sought and worshipped in one
prescribed order. On the other hand it deepened it, for the springs of a
common humanity were found to go beneath the superficial facts of a
citizen life into the depths of souls which have identical relations
with eternal things, with sin and suffering and hopes of the future.

It is not till after the outburst of science in the fifteenth and
sixteenth centuries, after that reawakening of the hopes of human powers
which takes our minds back to the Greeks, that we find the conception of
Humanity appearing in something like the form in which we can now
imagine it. It will have been gathered from our chapter on Science and
Philosophy how essential is the growth of organized thought to the
realization of any unity in a progressive world. For the realm of
thought is the only one in which no distinctions of race or nation are
possible, but it must be thought in which agreement is reached. So long
as men can differ, as they still do, on questions of human affairs,
politics, social arrangements, or even archaeological matters where race
or national predominance is involved, so far science does not exert her
unifying sway. But in mathematics, physics, chemistry, all the matters
in which it is impossible for a man to take another view because he is a
Frenchman or a German--here we reach a haven of intellectual peace; and
these calm waters are spreading over the world, in spite of the
tempests.

To return to the educational point from which we started, we can see now
another line of approach to unity in training our own minds and those of
others. In some respects it is a surer way, though less direct. When
studying the political life and history of other nations, even if we do
so deliberately in order to find out what we owe to them, we are bound
to be arrested here and there by things that we do not like, even among
our best friends. The French may seem frivolous or less self-restrained
than ourselves; they have had their sanguinary outbursts of revolution.
Where they have impeded our own movements, as in colonization, we are
the more conscious of their faults. Or we may feel that Americans have
their materialistic vein. And so on. This with our best friends, who, no
doubt, feel the same about us. But o