1. As there is but one Creator and Ruler of the universe, so there is before Him but one humanity. All the nations are under His guidance, while Israel, His chosen people, points to the kingdom of God which is to embrace them all. Israel was called the “first-born son” of God(1247) at the very moment of his election, implying that all the sons of men are His children. All of them are links in the divine plan of salvation. In the same sense God spoke through Isaiah: “Blessed be Egypt, My people, and Assyria the work of My hands, and Israel Mine inheritance.”(1248) As the first page of Scripture assigns a common origin to them all in the first man, so, the prophets tell us, at the end of time they shall all be filled with longing for the one God and form with Israel one community on earth, a great brotherhood of man serving the common Father above.(1249) Still, the actual world began, not with the unity, but with the wide diversity and dispersion of mankind. The idea of the unity of man came as a corollary to the kindred conception of the unity of God, after a long historical process. Just as the creation of the world opens with the separation of light from darkness, so the process of the spiritual and moral development of mankind begins, according to the divine plan of salvation, with the separation of Israel from the heathen nations.(1250) The sharper the contrast became between the spiritual God of Israel and the crude sensual gods of heathendom, the wider grew the chasm between Judaism and heathenism, between Israel and the nations. As light is opposed to darkness, so Israel’s truth stood opposed to the idolatry of the nations, until Christianity and Islam, its daughter-religions, arose between the two extremes. Henceforth Israel waits with still more confidence for the age whose dawning will bring the full knowledge of God to all mankind, leading the world from the night of error and discord to the noon-day brightness of truth and unity, when a universal monotheism will make all humanity one.