Let us pause here for a moment. The history of religion marked an enormous advance, religion itself was established afresh, when through poets and thinkers in Greece on the one hand, and through the prophets in Palestine on the other, the idea of righteousness and a righteous God became a living force and transformed tradition. The gods were raised to a higher level and civilised; the warlike and capricious Jehovah became a holy Being in whose court of judgment a man might trust, albeit in fear and trembling. The two great provinces of religion and morality, hitherto separated, were now brought into close relation; for “the Godhead is holy and just.” It is our history that was then developed; for without that all-important transformation there would be no such thing as “mankind,” no such thing as a “history of the world” in the higher sense. The most immediate result of this development may be summed up in the maxim: “What ye would not that men should do unto you, do ye also not unto them.” Insufficient and prosaic as the rule may seem, yet, if extended so as to cover all human relationships and really observed, it contains a civilising force of enormous strength. But it does not contain the ultimate step. Not until justice was compelled to give way to mercy, and the idea of brotherhood and self-sacrifice in the service of one’s neighbour became paramount—another re-establishment of religion—was the last advance accomplished that it was possible and necessary to make. Its maxim, “What ye would that men should do unto you, do ye also unto them,” also seems prosaic; and yet rightly understood it leads to the summit and comprises a new method of apprehension, and a new way of judging one’s own life. The thought that “he who loses his life shall save it,” runs side by side with this maxim and effects a transvaluation of values, in the certainty that a man’s true life is not tied to this span of time and is not rooted in material existence.
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