Page:The Ancient City- A Study on the Religion, Laws, and Institutions of Greece and Rome.djvu/529

 CHAP. III. CUKISTIANITY. 523 of faith unto the gentiles." "Is he the God of the Jews, only? Is he not also of the gentiles?" "We are all baptized into one body, whether we be Jews or gentiles." In all this there was something quite new. For, everywhere, in the first ages of humanity, the divinity had been imagined as attaching himself especially to one race. The Jews had believed in the God of the Jews; the Athenians in the Athenian Pallas; the Ro-- mans in Jupiter Capitolinus. The right to practise a worship had been a privilege. The foreigner had been repulsed from the temple ; one not a Jew could not enter the temple of the Jews ; the Lacedaemonian had not the right to invoke the Athenian Pallas. It is just to say, that, in the five cen- turies which preceded Christianity, all who thought Avere struggling against these narrow rules. Philoso- phy had often taught, since Anaxngoras, that the god of the universe received the homage of all men, without distinction. The religion of Eleusis had admitted the initiated from all cities. The religion of Cybele, of Serapis, and some others, had accepted, without dis- tinction, worshippers from all nations. The Jews had begun to admit the foreigner to their religion ; the Greeks and the Romans had admitted him into their cities. Christianity, coming after all this progress in thought and institutions, presented to the adoration of all nr.en a single God, a universal God, a God who be- longed to all, who had no chosen people, and who made no distinction in races, families, or states. For this God there were no longer strangers. The stranger no longer profaned the temple, no longer tainted the sacrifice by his presence. The temple was open to all who believed in God. Tiie priesthood