have existed, and still exist, which are absolutely based on religion. Religion has given them their constitution, drawn up their laws, settled their civic duties, marked out their frontiers, and prescribed their foreign policy. Such societies have only been able to persist by placing themselves under a more or less strict theocracy. We can no more imagine their living without their rites and creeds than we can imagine the rites and creeds existing by themselves, without the people. The whole of antiquity was more or less in this condition. Roman statesmanship certainly invented the legal tolerance of creeds, and a decadent theology produced a vast system of fusion and assimilation of cults; but these belonged to the latest age of paganism, when the fruit was already rotten on the tree. While it was young and flourishing, there were as many Jupiters, Mercuries, and Venuses, as there were towns. The god was a jealous god, in a sense quite different from the jealousy of the Jewish God; he was still more exclusive, and recognized no one but his fellow citizens in this world and the next. Every ancient civilization rose to greatness under the aegis of some divinity, of some particular cult. Religion and the State were united so closely and inseparably that the responsibility for all that happened was shared between them. We may speak, if we will, of " finding traces of the cult of the Tyrian Heracles in the public policy of Carthage"; but I think that we can really identify the effects of the doctrines taught by the priests with the policy of the suffetes and the trend of social development. Again, I have no doubt that the dog-headed Anubis, Isis Neith, and the Ibises taught the men of the Nile valley all that they knew and practised. Christianity, however, acted in this respect quite differently from all preceding religions; this was its greatest innovation. Unlike them, it had no chosen people. It was addressed to the whole world, not only to the rich or the poor. From the first it received from the Holy Ghost the gift of tongues,[1] that it might speak to each man in the language of his country, and proclaim the Gospel by means of the
- ↑ Acts ii, 4, 8, 9-11.
