separate nation. There can scarcely be any general
history of the religion of the world, in addition to those special
histories. Some epochs, it is true, stand out as having witnessed
simultaneous religious movements in many lands, as if the mind of the
whole human race had then been passing through the same crisis of
thought. The sixth century B.C. is the age of Confucius and of
Laotsze in China, of Gautama in India, of Jeremiah, Ezekiel and the
Unknown Prophet of the Exile, of Pythagoras, Heraclitus, and
Xenophanes, and also of the rise into prominence of the Greek
mysteries. Widely different as the movements are which thus took
place contemporaneously in these lands, we may discern in all of them
alike the tendency to plant religion in the mind and heart, and to
create a deeper union than the old external one, a union based on
common intellectual effort and spiritual sympathy. The period
immediately before and after the Christian era might also appear to
be one in which the mind of the world as a whole made a great step
forward. The union of many nations under the sway of Rome, and the
universal diffusion of the Greek language as a means of general
communication, made men conscious at this time as they had never been
before, of the unity of mankind in spite of all differences of race
and speech. A philosophy also was popular at this time which was
cosmopolitan in its character, and occupied itself with the great
problems, which are the same for all, of man's relation to the gods
and of his moral duty. If we add to this the combination which took
place at Rome and wherever different races met, of various rites and
creeds, we see that the age was one singularly disposed to the
breaking down of artificial barriers between men, and singularly
fitted to promote the growth of a belief in which men of all nations
might unite and feel themselves to be brethren.

In these two periods we may recognise important steps in that great
Education of the Human Race which the Apostle Paul refers to in a
bold philosophy of history (Galat. iv.), and which later thinkers
have striven to set forth in detail. After the long servitude of
mankind to irrational practices and to gods who were no gods, there
comes first the period when men recognise that the true God is to be
found not merely outside them but within their hearts and minds, and
then the period when they find that the true God is the same to all
men, that they are all children o