I have thus come to see that morality and religion,—and this includes my own morality and religion—are, in no sense, an arbitrary creation, but a world-old growth. Thousands of years ago they were forming themselves, in some stages of their growth, on the hill of Zion, as they had been previously in earlier stages on the banks of the Nile, and as they did subsequently in the grove of the Academy, on the seven hills of Rome, and in the forests of Germany. This has been brought home to me by actual acquaintance with people whose morality and religion are different from my own—the difference very much consisting in the fact that they are still in the early stage to which the ideas in the passages referred to belong. To associate and to deal with people who are mentally in the state, which the old historic peoples were in, is to have the old history translated for you into a language you can understand. What I now find in myself was once, in its earlier days, just what I find described in those passages. My morality and religion, which are my true self, have passed through that stage; that is to say they were once in the stage of the Patriarch and of the Psalmist. Virtually, I was in them. My more perfect condition, therefore, must share the blame which mistakenly appears—this is a mistake into which unhistorical minds fall—to belong only to their more imperfect condition. Both are equally parts of the same growth. I now look upon these earlier stages of my moral being as I do upon my own childhood. To speak of the ideas, or of the acts of the Patriarch, or of the Psalmist as, perhaps, I might have been disposed to speak of them formerly would, I now feel, be to blaspheme my own parentage. I look with a kind of awe on the failure—so shocking and so intelligible—of their efforts to find the right path upon which, through a long series of such efforts, I, their moral offspring, and heir, have at last been brought. Now I link myself to the past, and I feel the power and the value of the bond. Now I know that my religion and morality are not a something or other of recent ascertainable date; a something or other that has come hap-hazard; even that might, conceivably, never have been. They are something, I know, that appertains to man; that came into being with him, indeed that is of his very being; that has grown with his growth, and strengthened with his strength; and which accumulating experience and enlarging knowledge have, all along, ever been purifying, broadening, deepening. I see distinctly, now, that they rest on foundations in man himself, which nothing can overthrow or shake. A conviction is brought home to me that I am standing on an everlasting rock. Formerly there might have been some lurking germ of suspicion or misgiving that I was standing on ground that was not quite defensible. Universal history, rightly understood, dissipates these enfeebling misgivings, and generates that invaluable conviction.