When a higher religion of either family—the Judaic or the Buddhaic—comes into collision with an oecumenical empire, the conflict is of momentous importance. In an oecumenical empire, a higher religion is meeting its most formidable adversary—Man's worship of collective human power—in its least maleficent and least unedifying form. As an object of worship, an idolized oecumenical empire shines out against the foil of its fallen predecessors the parochial states in an antecedent time of troubles. In contrast to these fallen idols, as well as to a nascent Judaic higher religion, an oecumenical empire brings, not the sword, but peace. It is a régime under which, on the whole, the best elements of a dominant minority are in command; for the public spirit of its professional civil service and professional army counts for much more, in its effect on the lives of its subjects, than the personal unworthiness of individual emperors. In the third place an oecumenical empire is the antithesis of the fallen parochial states and the forerunner of the nascent higher religions in standing for the ideal of the unity and brotherhood of all Mankind. This remote oecumenical collective human idol may not be capable of evoking such warm positive devotion as the familiar parochial idols—a Sparta or an Athens, a Judah or a Tyre, an Assyria or a Babylonia, a Ts'i or a Ch'u; but, nevertheless, any threat to an oecumenical empire's stability, security, and survival will arouse alarm and opposition, not only among the dominant minority, but among the masses as well.
Alfred Toynbee, An Historian's View of Religion, Chapter 7. Were he writing today, he might consider use the word 'cosmopolitan' rather than 'oecumenical'; the former has come to mean something very like what Toynbee means by the latter. The primary advantage is that the latter more easily serves as an adjective to the word 'empire'.
