character in God and greater reverence in man, Alongside the deepening current of moral belief flowed the stream of philosophical speculation, now metaphysical, inquiring into the cause and reality of things; again ethical, seeking to discover the origin, nature, and laws of virtue. The one unified and sublimed the idea of the other ennobled the nature and exalted the God; end of man. Greek thought could not rest satisfied with the physical conception of deity; speculated on the notion of cause and the idea of good till, transcending the received Polytheism without grasping an explicit Monotheism, it conceived an impersonal cause rather than a creator, a highest good rather than a one god. Religious thought, divorced from religion, had groped its way towards a supreme, not person, but abstraction. And so the ideas of personal reality and righteousness, moral action and rule, were associated with man rather rather than with God. Humanity, indeed, became the later Hellenic divinity, the vehicle of what was most divine in the universe. Art and philosophy combine to idealize man, the one to hold the mirror to what in him was beautiful, the other to what in him was good and true. Indo-European thought, which had started by finding God in the bright sky, appropriately ended in its most brilliant representative by finding deity in the heart and conscience of man. III. Hellenism may thus be regarded as the contrast and complement of Hebraism. The former came to reveal the dignity and divinity of man, while the latter had proclaimed the one righteous yet merciful God. Hebraism had found the supreme law in the Divine will, man's highest perfection in obedience to it. Hellenism discovered an eternal law of right written in the heart, realized in history, enforcing its authority by sanctions too dread to be despised. The prophets of the first spoke in the name of the Most High God, but the prophets of the second spoke in the name of man; were the poets who sang of his heroism, his loves, his sufferings, his struggle for life against a merciless or ironical fate, the sculptors who enshrine his beauties in forms so perfect that they needed but life to be god-like men, the philosophers who at once uttered his yearnings after the Supreme Good and pointed out the path that led to it. Neither was complete in itself. Hebraism needed Hellenism to soften and humanize it, to translate it from an austere and exclusive theocracy into a gentle and cosmopolitan religion, which could illumine the homes and inspire the hearts of men with its own sweet spirit. Hellenism needed Hebraism to pour into its blood the iron of moral purpose and precept, to keep it from falling into impotence under its own unsubstantial abstractions, and set it bare-footed, as it were, upon the living God as upon an everlasting rock. And each had thus in different, even contrary, ways, been working towards a common end. It was the old story of two streams, in source far apart, in course wholly unlike, making for a single bed. One had sprung up in the hot and blistering desert, amid thunders that seemed the voice of God, had, swollen by many a prophetic rill, forced its way round the boulders of native infidelity, between the banks, now overhanging and again meeting, of foreign oppression, and had come into a clear and open place; the other had started from the foot of Mount Olympos, had flowed onward, answering with woven and mystic music the multitudinous laughter of the Ægean, through the heroic fields of epic and the amorous glades of lyric song, had stolen through the woods sacred to tragedy, now dark and fearful as midnight, now gleaming with light that + never was on sea or shore, had glided past "the olive grove of Academe,” and under the porch of the Stoics, until it had broadened into a soft and limpid lake. And in the fulness of the time the long converging streams joined. In obscurity and suffering a new faith arose, had as its founder the sweetest, holiest of beings, in whom his own and after ages saw God as well as Man. His death was everywhere preached as the basis of a new but permanent religion of Humanity, and time has only served to define and strengthen its claims. "Is it not strange, the darkest hour That ever dawn'd on sinful earth, For comfort, than an angel's mirth?" But its strange might to quicken the best and subdue the worst in man had never existed had it not possessed as parents, on the one side, Hebrew Monotheism, on the other humanistic Hellenism. Hebraism and Hellenism had thus each its own part to play in the Preparationes Evangelica. The one contributed the Monotheism, the other the Theo-anthropomorphism, which lie at the basis of Christianity. When driven out of Judaism it carried into the gentile world a few doctrines it had inherited from its fosterparent, and a few simple facts peculiarly its own. Had there been no expulsion there had been no Christianity; within the Synagogue there was room for the sect of Jesus of Nazareth, none for the religion of Christ. The Christian facts bore to the Hellenic mind another meaning than they had borne to the Hebrew, especially as they had to be interpreted in the light of the Monotheistic and Messianic beliefs of the land whence they had come. These facts were construed into doctrines which expressed and retained whatever was of ethical and permanent value in Hellenism, without losing what was universal and moral in Hebraism. The purest Monotheism, which forbade God and nature or God and man to be either confounded or compared, was married to the most perfect Humanism, and ever since Christianity has stood loyally by both the "God who so loved the world that He gave His only begotten Son" for its life, and the Son who has ever seemed “the brightness of the Father's glory," "full of grace and truth." This essay might at this point, had space allowed, have entered on a new field of inquiry and illustration. The genius of race has contributed to the development both of Christianity in general and those specific varieties of it that are known as the Greek, the Latin, and the Protestant Churches. The Hellenic mind, educated into capacity to interpret the Christian facts through the Hebrew faith, created those theo-anthropomorphic doctrines which have ever since been regarded as the most distinctively catholic and the most essentially orthodox. The Latin mind, less speculative, more practical, political rather than theological in genius, while it touched doctrine only to exaggerate it, often in a very dismal way, was yet able to frame a Church polity on the old imperial model, to build a civitas Dei where the civitas Roma once stood, giving to its visible head such absolute authority and divine honours as the emperor had once claimed, to its subjects such rights and privileges, only spiritualized, as the Roman citizen had once enjoyed. The Teutonic mind, fresh, vigorous, childlike in its simplicity and love of reality, without either the blessing or the bane of a splendid intellectual past like Greece, or |