ound of distant bells, calm evenings, summer
and the perfume of the flowers, fine characters, heroic deeds, and a
thousand other causes, within us and without: and, when the supreme
writer voices it for us, whatever it may be, we feel and know it at once
for the final and the perfect.

If that test is not sufficient, I know no other.

Hebraism and Hellenism

Students of the history of society and literature have grown fond of
distinguishing between two powerful influences upon our ways of thinking
and of looking at life. They find two chief attitudes of mind, two chief
animating spirits, so different from each other in the main that they
deserve and have received special and practically antithetical names.
Our manner of regarding life and society, morals and sentiment, nature
and art, is determined by whichever of these two spirits predominates in
us. Sometimes one whole nation has its view in almost all things
pervaded by the one set of principles; another nation is no less
manifestly informed by the other set. At other times it is an individual
who stands out in broad spiritual and intellectual contrast with another
of the same people and the same age. These two spirits have been called
by Matthew Arnold the "Hebraic" and the "Hellenic"; the one Hebraic,
because its clearest and most consistent manifestation has been among
the Hebrews; the other Hellenic, because its clearest and most
consistent manifestation has been among the Hellenes, or ancient Greeks.
And not only have these two spirits been specially manifested there, but
it is directly from those peoples that two corresponding influences have
spread to all the more highly civilized portions of the world. From the
Hebrews there has spread one great force, and from the Hellenes another
great force, and these two forces have in a larger or smaller measure
determined the characters and views of those peoples, who, being neither
Hebrews nor Hellenes, had not of themselves developed so intense a
spirituality or so active an intellectuality as one or other of these
two possessed.

It is rather in their historical aspect that I propose to make some
observations upon these two forces.

I feel a natural diffidence and some little constraint in treating such
a subject before a specially Hebrew gathering. But the Hebrews of whom I
have to speak are not yourselves, but your ancestors, and they are
ancestors with a history so remarkable and a spirit so potent th