found amongst the inhabitants of India, beyond the limits of the empire. Ideas like these prove undoubtedly that that narrow-minded notion of nationality, that particularly isolated view of mankind, which had been fostered by the various religions of Paganism (which were, as might be expected, essentially local and national), had gradually yielded to the pressure of outward circumstances, and to the Roman yoke which was now borne by so many hundreds of conquered nations. We have before us a regular system of universalism—a kind of Pagan universalism; and yet we can trace through it all, and at every step, the aristocratic spirit of antiquity. Grecian pride, and the high disdain which every man born and nurtured in Grecian civilisation felt for all other nations, were ever asserting their rights. We are reminded by this of the case of the Christianised Jews in the two first centuries, who preached the doctrines of a religion which in theory was to be universal, and yet which was to retain, at all costs, the Divine and exclusive privileges of the Israelites. With them, as with
