at,
though I have no share in your pride, I can in a large measure cordially
share in your admiration of them. In a large measure, I say, for I
propose to show how the mental view and temperament of Israel, when
Israel was his truest self, needed to be qualified and corrected by
another mental view and temperament--that of the Greeks, when the Greeks
were their truest selves. And if there were here any descendant of
Pericles or Sophocles or Phidias, I should similarly say to him that,
though I feel the keenest zest of admiration for the many sublime things
which his Athenian ancestors did and wrote and wrought, yet the full
perfection of human character and life was not reached by them, and
could not be reached by them, until their own spirit was corrected by
another, the spirit exemplified in the Hebrews. You will, I am sure,
allow me to say whatever I feel to be just. And that there may be no
misconception, let me add that, whenever I speak of the Hebraic spirit,
I shall mean, not the spirit which an individual contemporary Hebrew may
happen to display, but the spirit which was characteristic of Israel as
a nation before the dispersion. In the same way the Hellenic spirit
will mean the spirit which was characteristic of the pure Hellene before
he was demoralized and adulterated by Roman, Slav, and Turk.

Man, chameleon-like, is apt to take the colour of the land on which he
happens to be, and a Jew who lives in modern times, amid social and
religious conditions, education, and material circumstances so different
from those of ancient Palestine, may differ very widely from the type of
the race as we gather it from history and literature. Nor is race
everything. Even if the Jews once more gathered together into one nation
from all quarters of the earth, we should by no means necessarily behold
a people of the same spiritual attributes and ideals as the Hebrews who
built the Temple under Ezra, or who fought like lions under the
Maccabees. As with the early Saracens, it is often some one great idea
or principle which--for the time at least--determines the whole current
of a nation's mental and spiritual being. But that idea may gradually
lose its intensity and its energizing power, and the Saracen sinks into
the voluptuous Mussulman. Hebraism and Hellenism, therefore, mean the
diverse spirits of two peoples as they once were, not as they may be
now, or will necessarily be again.

One cannot with truth draw absolutely cle