To the domestic and tribal succeeds the national stage of religion. Political federations are formed, and the religious as well as the social consciousness of the people is enlarged. This phenomenon is seen in Greece in its most interesting form. The religion of Greece, as witness the Homeric poems, was a confederation of local cults and deities, just as Hellas was a federation of previously unconnected tribes.
The conquests of Alexander and the extension of the Roman Empire greatly enlarged the horizon of ancient thought. The philosophers in the time of Cicero and Seneca had already risen from the national idea to that of the human race. It must not be supposed, however, that the universal religion sprang from the philosophic or religious syncretism of the later ages of Graeco-Roman civilisation. The dissolution of the national religions had preceded that of political nationalities, and, so far from creating anything universal, the morbid curiosity of minds denuded of all national tradition abandoned itself to individual superstitions the most exotic and monstrous. Christianity was born, not in Greece, in the schools, nor in Rome, at the foot of the throne of the Cæsars, but in a race the narrowest, the most fanatical and intolerant that ever existed, and in the heart of a Son of Israel whom no extra-Palestinian influence seems ever to have reached.
Nowhere is a universal religion the fruit of an unconscious evolution, produced by the action of fatal and external laws. It presents itself everywhere as an individual creation, as the free and moral work of a few elect souls, in whom tradition by a profound crisis is purified and enlarged. This was the rôle of Confucius, of Buddha, of Socrates, of the prophets of Israel, of Mohammed in Arabia. All of them were reformers of the religion of their ancestors.... They did not discover the universal religion outside themselves, but in their consciousness and personal piety. Passing through their souls as through a filter, the traditional religion of their race was gradually clarified and freed from foreign or material elements, and it was found that, in the end, the new faith appeared the more human and universal as it had become more strictly religious, more inward, and more pure.... Not that all the ancient cults were capable of transformation or all the prophets equally inspired. Often the revelation would appear uncertain or incomplete. On only one point and in only one consciousness would it be seen to end in a clear and definitive conclusion. Progress implies selection. As we rise from one stage to another in the history of religious evolution we see the ranks enlightened and the number diminished of concurrent religions. At the lowest stage, the savage cults are almost innumerable. The great national or ethnic religions were much fewer. Only three are frankly universalist: Buddhism, Mohammedanism, and Christianity. And these three are universalist, if I may so say, in a very unequal degree.