First, take the idea of the Unity of God. History makes it clear that divided Deities imply divided Peoples. The age of Tribal Deities was the age of Tribal wars: Imperial Deities have landed us in Imperial wars. The ascent of Man is traced by his successive advances from the cave to the hut, from the hut to the village, from the village to the city, from the city to the nation, from the nation to the empire, from the empire to Humanity. The last step awaits to be taken. The tribal chiefs were merely super-savages who frequently offered their war captives in sacrifice to their gods. The imperial savages of today are content to penalize their beaten foes by impossible exactions, and by reducing them to industrial helotry. The moral ascent of peoples is marked by successive discoveries that national “rights” are not seldom international “wrongs.” In the extent to which communities cease to attribute their own preferences and passions to the gods—in that degree does brotherhood become possible. When go the hostile gods, away go national hostilities.

To us, the history of the Semites is the most familiar example. Semitic history opens upon a whole catalog of tribal gods—Asshur of the Assyrians, Chemosh of the Moabites, Moloch of the Ammonites, Jehovah of the Hebrews. Monotheism was not yet born, and therefore separation was inevitable. A common religion is the most powerful of bonds, within its own limits, and when the limits are recognized to be no narrower than the Human Race, we get a Bond of Brotherhood that cannot be broken. When the Assyrians invaded Judah, Sennacherib warned the Israelites that they need not think to be protected by their tribal Jehovah; for the gods of Samaria and other nations had been unable to protect their devotees from his—the Assyrian power ; that is, from the Assyrian gods, who were more powerful than those of the Israelites (2 Kings xviii, 32-35). When the Assyrians carried away the Northern tribes of Samaria and repeopled the land with Babylonians, it is curiously stated that the new colonists did not know how to worship “the god of the land,” who therefore became angry and punished them by an invasion of lions, so that they had to bring some of the Samarian priests back to restore the worship of “the god of the land,” who was obviously an indigenous deity, as anthropologists term it—a deity who is limited and confined to the very soil, and unable to cross the border to succour his worshipers (2 Kings xvii, 26). This idea of the indigenous deity—the deity rooted in and confined to the very soil of a country — is curiously exemplified by the story of Naaman the Syrian, who, after being cured of his leprosy by the Hebrew Elisha, begged to carry back to Syria two mule-loads of Palestinian earth—a few spadefuls of Jehovah's land—on which, in Syria, he might build an altar, and offer sacrifice (2 Kings v, 17) . At that primitive stage of theology, the least conception of Humanity was impossible, or of a United Race, or of the General Good.

On this occasion, time forbids me to trace the expansion of theology in the Semitic and other Oriental forms of religion, with their glimmerings of the larger truth and wider internationalism; such as are found, for example in the Hebrew drama of Jonah. To the Greek Stoics belongs the credit of first and definitely affirming the notion of the Brotherhood of Man, from which in turn sprang the idea of Natural Rights; but it was not till the break-up of the Roman empire followed by the conflicts between Emperor and Pope and the appalling wars that accompanied the passing of Feudalism—it was not till then, I say, that the idea of International Law formulated itself in the human mind, was expressed by Grotius the Dutch Jurist, and is now embodied in the International Court of Justice at the Hague.