the very fact of the Roman empire
was the secret of the cosmopolitanism. Moral conceptions follow in the
wake of political expansion. The morality of a tribe is tribal; that
of a nation is national; and national morality only developes into
international morality with the growth of international interests and
international communication. Now the Roman empire had broken up the
old nationalities, and with them their local religions. The human mind
broadened with its political and social horizon. And the result was
that a cosmopolitan sentiment in morals, and a universal conception in
religion, naturally spread throughout the territory which was dominated
by the Roman eagles. Christianity itself was at first a Jewish sect,
which developed into a cosmopolitan system precisely because the
national independence of the Jews had been broken up, and all the roads
of a great empire were open to the missionaries of a new faith.

But let us return to Mr. Hughes's statements. He tells us that the
solidarity of mankind was "revealed to the human race through St.
Paul"--which is a great slur upon Jesus Christ, and quite inconsistent
with what Mr. Hughes affirms of the Nazarene. It is also inconsistent
with the very language of St. Paul in that sermon of his to the
Athenians; for the great apostle, in enforcing his argument that all men
are God's children, actually reminds the Athenians that "certain also of
your own poets have said, For we are also his offspring."

Mr. Hughes goes on to say that "our common humanity" is "a perfectly new
idea." "Max Muller," he tells us, "says that there was no trace of it
until Christ came. It is a purely Christian conception." Professor Max
Muller, however, is not infallible. He sometimes panders to Christian
prejudices, and this is a case in point. What he says about "humanity"
is an etymological quibble. Certainly the Greeks knew nothing about it,
simply because they did not speak Latin. But they had an equivalent word
in _philanthropia_, which was in use in the time of Plato, four hundred
years before the birth of Christ.*

* Mr. Hughes talks so much that he must have little time for
reading. Every educated man, however, is supposed to be
acquainted with Bacon's _Essays_, the thirteenth of which
opens as follows:--"I take goodness in this sense, the
affecting of the weal of men, which is that the Grecians
called Philanthropia; and the word humanity (as it is used)