formulate their consciousness—regard Christianity as a historic unit. Christendom, as a word, bears witness to this; it has its moral code, its social life. Its parts hold together. This is recognized in international intercourse. Christian nations shape their consular and diplomatic acts according as they are to be applied to Christian, Mussulman, or pagan nations, not trusting their subjects to the laws, judiciary or executive, of the two latter. History, in those general surveys which our minds are ever taking of it, embraces chiefly the principles and events involved in the formation and growth of the fraternity of Christian nations.
If there shall seem to be exceptions to this position, they are of such nature as but to yield it a firmer support. The Hebrew commonwealth is a part of this historic unit, because in it was the germ of Christianity, and the two can no more be parted in our conceptions than can the roots and branches in our ideas of a tree. The peoples, languages, literature, sciences, arts, and institutions of Greece and Rome are almost fundamental to our historic system, because Christianity in its earliest progress appropriated them, just as young plant-life appropriates the vegetable generations as they fall into decay.
In reading accounts of modern pagan nations, we seem to ourselves to have before us foot-notes not belonging to the text of our history; and if nations have fallen off from Christendom, as did those of the Orient and Northern Africa when subjugated to the Arabian prophet, their connection with us becomes relaxed.
It is not too much to say that progress has never been at any time absolutely and in all its elements suspended in the aggregate of Christendom. A long period in history is sometimes designated as the “Dark Ages.” But
