the supremacy of Zeus in Olympus was a sufficient assertion of the superiority which belongs to the moral law in the little republic of the soul: but as the son of Kronos in the Greek heaven was only a limited monarch, and often, as the Iliad plainly indicates, obliged to wink at the contravention of his own commands by the unruly aristocracy of the skies, so Polytheism could never invest the τὸ ἡγεμονικόν--the regulating principle of the soul--with the absolute sovereignty which to its nature rightfully belongs. Christianity, as an essentially monotheistic faith, applied a perfect remedy to this evil. The highest part of man’s nature was now the only sacred part. The flesh, so far from being glorified and worshipped, was denounced, degraded, and desecrated as a synonym for all corruption. The deification of mere sensuous pleasures, which with Polytheists had passed for orthodox, was now impossible; the moral law became supreme; and surely the sanction which this law requires can never be conceived in more imperative terms than as the distinctly enunciated command of the all-powerful, all-wise, and all-beneficent Father of the human family. No sanction, deduced from a mere reasoning process, can ever approach this in broad practical efficiency. It is the impersonated, incarnated, and enthroned Reason, to which all {205} reasonable creatures owe an instinctive and a necessary obedience. But there is another corollary to a monotheistic creed, which, in estimating the influence of Christian faith on Christian Ethics, is by no means to be overlooked. If there is only one God, the father of the whole human race, then there is only one family; all men are brethren; nationality ceases; philanthropy, or love of men in the widest sense of the word, becomes natural; mere patriotism has now only a relative value; Leonidas is no longer the model hero; the Jew is no longer of the one chosen people; and the Greek, full of wisdom, and full of conceit, must condescend to call the ignorant barbarian his brother. This breaking down of the middle wall of partition between Jew and Gentile, between every nation and its neighbour, removed two of the greatest obstructions which have ever stood in the way of a generous morality, in the shape of what Lord Bacon would have called idols of the place and of the race; these idols could be worshipped no longer; and no shibboleth of separation could be mumbled to consecrate the unreasonable prejudices which every nation is so apt to entertain against its neighbour. No doubt towards the propagation of these catholic and cosmopolitan principles, ancient philosophy also, and specially Stoicism, contributed its share;[205.1] the consolidation of the Roman empire and the policy of the Roman emperors worked in the same direction; {206} but the monotheistic creed of the Christian Church, proclaimed with such dignity and moral courage by St. Paul in his discourse on the Hill of Mars, supplied the only effective leverage.