nation had its own god. In the new Roman world this theological
exclusivism broke down, and the priests of a particular god, scattered
like their followers among the cities of the eastern world, began to
seek a cosmopolitan rather than a nationalist following. In the temple
of each of the leading gods of the time--Jahveh, Serapis, Mithra, and so
on--people of all races and classes were received on a footing of
equality. The doctrine of the brotherhood of man spread all over that
cosmopolitan world.

When the old world, to the south and east of the Mediterranean, was
blotted out of history, and Europe in turn became a group of conflicting
nationalities, racial hatred was revived and in its political and social
aspects the doctrine of the brotherhood of man was virtually forgotten.
But the Christian Church had embodied that doctrine in its sacred
writing, and was bound to maintain it. In its ambition of a universal
dominion it was the direct successor of the Roman Empire. All the races
of Europe were to meet as brothers under the one God of the new world
and under the direction of his representatives on earth. It was this
change in the features of the world which gave a certain air of
insincerity to the Christian gospel. In the older days there had been
political unity with a great diversity of religions; now there was
religious unity spread over a great diversity of antagonistic political
bodies. Men were brothers from the religious point of view and, only too
frequently, deadly enemies from the political point of view. The discord
was made worse by the feudal system which was adopted. Even within the
same race there was no brotherhood. In effect the clergy as a body did
not insist that the noble was a brother of the serf, and did not exact
fraternal treatment of the serf. Thus the phrase, "the brotherhood of
man," which had been a most prominent and active principle of early
Christianity, became little more than a useless theological thesis.