We can only judge of His purpose by what of it has been disclosed. Humanity, essentially and fundamentally one, exhibits most manifold variety. While the unity of the race secures its sympathy with all its members, in its variety there is secured its indefinite expansion and progress. No family could always keep together in one spot: the differences of disposition and character among its members demand their separation as the condition of harmony. The family of man is a scattered one, not merely to prevent jealousy and hostility between its members, but to promote their education. The training of the race seems to proceed on principles somewhat analogous to those which we ourselves have adopted in the education of our children. We never could hope to educate a large number of children of various ages and mental capacities, by keeping them all in one class; so we break them up, and isolate, and grade them, and train some of them specially for the sake of all, that they may be their leaders and teachers. Even so, we find nations widely separated by natural barriers, that the characteristic energies of each may be developed, till the time comes when one or other of them is needed for the elevation or reformation of the rest. That the division of nations and the separate training of nations entered deeply into the counsels of Providence, may be learned by a glance at the configuration of the world, and the influences which are exercised by soil and climate and circumstance upon any single nation. The blessed effect of this division may be seen by the slightest survey of history in the corrective, educative, redemptive influence which they have exercised upon each other.[58] And yet a survey of the history of the last eighteen centuries will just as plainly indicate a Divine purpose of drawing the nations toward unity. Babel may mark the Divine purpose of the primeval economy, and Pentecost may be the sign of the present. The wonder in the plain of Shinar was, that through diversity of speech men were ceasing to understand each other. The wonder in Jerusalem was, that men of the most widely separate nationalities heard, each in their own tongue, Christian evangelists proclaim the marvellous works of God. Religion, which up till the coming of Christ, had proved a repellent and divisive force, began at that time to prove an attractive, harmonising, and transforming power. A new spring-tide dawned upon man’s religious conceptions, and truths after which all had been groping, but which none had attained to, emerged grandly into prominence. The Fatherhood of the One living and eternal God, the Divine Son, in whom all men are brethren, and the Holy Spirit, dealing with every man, working upon him and in him to conform him to the likeness of the highest and best, began to be revealed; and the more that revelation is accepted the more the reconciliation of the race advances.