XX.  CHINA AND ROME:  THE SEE-SAW

That mankind is a unit;—­that the history of the world, however its waters divide,—­whatever islands and deltas appear,—­is one stream;—­how ridiculous it is to study the story of one nation or group of nations, and leave the rest ignored, coming from your study with the impression (almost universal,) that all that counts of the history of the world is the history of your own little corner of it:—­these are some of the truths we should have gathered from our survey of the few centuries we have so far glanced at.  For take that sixth century B.C.  The world seems all well split up.  No one in China has ever heard of Greece; no one in Italy of India.  What do the Greeks know about Northern Europe, or the Chinese about the Indians or Persians?—­And yet we find in Italy, in Persia, in India, in China, men appearing,—­ phenomenal births,—­evolved far above their fellows:  six of them, to do the same work:  Founders of Religions, all contemporary more or less; all presenting to the world and posterity the same high passwords and glorious countersigns.  Can you conceive that their appearance, all in that one epoch, was a matter of chance?  Is not some prearrangement suggested,—­a put-up job, as they say:  a definite plan formed, and a definite end aimed at?  Then by whom?  Can you escape the conclusion that, behind all this welter of races and separate histories aloof or barking at each other, there is yet somewhere, within the ringfence of humankind, incarnate or excarnate, One Center from which all the threads and currents proceed, and all the great upward impulses are directed?

Those Six Teachers came, and did their work; then two or three centuries passed; time enough for the seeds they sowed to sprout a little; and we come to another phase of history, a new region in time.  High spiritual truth has been ingeminated in all parts of the world where the ancient vehicle of truth-dissemination (the Mysteries) has declined; A Teacher, a Savior, has failed to appear only in the lands north and west of Italy, because there among the Celts, and there alone, the Mysteries are still effective:—­so you may say the seeds of spirituality have been well sown along a great belt stretching right across the Old World.  Why?  In preparation for what?  For something, we may suppose.  Certainly for something:  for example, for the next two thousand five hundred years,—­the last quarter, I would say, of a ten-millennium cycle, which was to end with a state of things in which every part of the world should be know to, and in communication with, every other part.  So now in the age that followed that of the Six Teachers, in preparation for that coming time (our own), the attempt must be made to weld nations into unities.  Nature and Law compel it:  whose direction now is towards grand centripetalism, where before they had ordained heterogeneity and the scattering and aloofness of peoples.