5. Still the family circle itself is only a segment of the nation, which creates speech and custom, and assigns to each person his share in the common activity of the various classes of men. Only within the social bond of the nation or tribe is the interdependence of all brought home to the consciousness of the individual, together with all the common moral obligations and religious yearnings. Through the few elect ones of the nation or tribe, God’s voice is heard as to what is right in both custom and law, and through them the individual is roused to a sense of duty. It is society which enables the human mind to triumph over physical necessity by ever new discoveries of tools and means of life, thus to attain freedom and prosperity, and, through meditation over the continually expanding realm of God’s world, to build up the various systems of science and of art. 6. But the single nation also is too dependent upon the conditions of its historic past, of its land and its racial characteristics, to bring the divine image to its full development in a perfect man. Humanity as a whole comes to its own, to true self-consciousness, only through the reciprocal contact of race with race, through the coöperation of the various circles and classes of life which extend beyond the narrow limits of nationality and have in view common interests and aims, whether in the pursuit of truth, in the achievement of good, or in the creation of the useful and the beautiful. Only when the various nations and groups of men learn to regard themselves as members of one great family, will the life of the individual find its true value in relation to the idea and the ideal of humanity. Then only will the unity and harmony of the entire cosmic life find its reflection in the blending of the factors and forces of human society. 7. Judaism has evolved the idea of the unity of mankind as a corollary of its ethical monotheism. Therefore the Bible begins the history of the world with the creation of Adam and Eve, the one human pair. The covenant which God concluded after the flood with Noah, the father of the new mankind, has its corresponding goal at the end of time in the divine covenant which is to include all tribes of men in one great brotherhood; and so also the dispersion of man through the confusion of tongues at the building of the Tower of Babel has its counterpart in the rallying of all nations at the end of time for the worship of the One and Only God in a pure tongue and a united spirit on Zion’s heights.(997) Whatever the civilizations of Greece and Rome and the Stoic philosophy have achieved for the idea of humanity, Judaism has offered in its prophetic hope for a Messianic future the guiding idea for the progress of man in history, thus giving him the impulse to ceaseless efforts toward the highest of all aims for the realization of which all nations and classes, all systems of faith and thought, must labor together for millenniums to come.