At last came a large instalment of what many preachers of righteousness had anticipated, and had desired to see, but had not seen. That they had anticipated it under such adverse circumstances, and had lived and died in the faith of it, is one of the chief contributories to the historical argument for natural morality. What they had anticipated came about, however, in a manner and from a quarter of which they could have had no foresight. Beyond the Great Sea in the distant West, a city, whose name Isaiah could never have heard, and which was not even a name in the days of Rameses, and for many centuries after his time, had grown into an empire, in which had come to be included the whole civilized world. All nations had been cast into this crucible, and were being fused into one people. Egyptians, Hebrews, Greeks, were each of them the children of a more ancient, and, in some respects, of a higher and better civilization; but they, like all the rest, had been absorbed into the world-embracing dominion, and were powerless within it, except so far as ideas give power. Every people was now being brought face to face with all other people, and into union and communion with them. The way in which the religions of the world were thus made acquainted with each other acted as a confutation of each in particular, or rather of its external distinctive mythology. We can form no adequate conception of what the effect must have been. They were all alike discredited. The exclusiveness of each was confuted by the logic of facts. It was out of this conjuncture of circumstances that arose the new idea and sentiment of the brotherhood of mankind. What had hitherto everywhere obscured the view of it was now falling into decay; and what must suggest it had been established.