And no people had been so thoroughly disciplined for receiving this idea as the Jews. They had been brought into closest contact with Egyptians, Assyrians, Persians, and other oriental people; and it had been that kind of contact which obliges men to understand what other people think. And after they had received this hard schooling from their neighbours, they had been brought into the same kind of contact with Greek thought. They had been obliged to take into their consideration the knowledge, and the ways of thinking, of the Greeks. They had even been to a great extent compelled to learn their language. Some of the writers of the New Testament, it is clear, had been taught Greek, just as we may be taught French; and Homer, it is evident, had been the school-book employed in teaching them the language. And now, together with all the rest of the world, they had become members of the universal empire of Rome. All this would have led to nothing except obliteration and absorption, as it did elsewhere, if the Jews had been like other people. They were incapable, however, of succumbing in this way, because they had ideas and moral sentiments that were, in some important respects, truer, and stronger, and better than those of their conquerors and oppressors. Hence originated the idea of their conquerors that they were the enemies of the human race. It was, then, for this reason, because, being indestructible and unassimilable, they had been obliged to consider the meaning and worth of other peoples’ ideas, and of facts, that Jerusalem came to be the definite spot upon which the fruitful contact of the different integers of the East with each other, and of East with West, of Europe with Asia, actually took place. Here were collected, as into a focus, the knowledge and the circumstances which would engender the new sentiment that was to reverse the old one. The old one had been that of narrow exclusiveness. It could not have been otherwise. The only one that could be engendered by the new knowledge, and the new circumstances, was one of universal inclusiveness: not the idea of a peculiar people, such as the Egyptians had regarded themselves, but its very opposite, that of the universal brotherhood of mankind. We see the embryo of the thought endeavouring to assume form at Rome, at the very time that it was being preached with the sharpest and clearest definition at Jerusalem. But it never could have assumed its proper, clear, distinct form at Rome, because morality would always there have been hazy and corrupt, and inextricably entangled with ideas of self and dominion. In Jerusalem only, the one true home of single-purposed morality, could it assume its true shape, pure and undefiled. When the words were uttered, “Ye all are brethren,” the idea was formulated. That was the moment of its birth. It then took its place in the moral creation, a living form, with life, and the power of giving life; with power to throw down and to build up.