speaks of a valley full of dry bones, and of life being breathed into
them, we know that he is speaking in the moral sense. A Hellene would
have meant a revival of intelligence. The Hebrew prophet speaks of
"taking the heart of stone out of them and giving them a heart of
flesh." A Plato would rather have spoken of taking the films from their
intellectual gaze and opening their eyes to the pure essences of things.
The Hebrew would sit in sackcloth and ashes to atone for his offences
and to induce the proper spiritual submission. The Hellene would only
fast, if he fasted at all, so that he might by his plain living secure
high thinking. No ardent missionaries, Jonahs or Pauls, could come out
of Greece; it could produce no martyrs. The _De Profundis_ of a Greek
would signify, not moral abasement, but physical and mental suffering.

Not that the Hellenes were shallow. Far from it. Racially, indeed, they
had neither the Hebraic zeal nor the Hebraic conscience. But of vastly
more importance is the fact that in their conception of life they
started with different premises. They found themselves in life, their
hope ending with life, and their object was to make the best and
happiest of it. The hereafter was not pleasant to contemplate. Achilles,
when he meets Odysseus in the netherworld, declares that he would rather
be a poor labouring thrall on earth than a king among the dead. Had the
Hellenes been shown the modern doctrine of evolution, it is easy to
fancy how eagerly they would have sprung at it. To the Hebraic spirit it
would have been flat, stale, and unprofitable. In a word, while to the
best of Hebrews life was almost a sacrament, to the best of Hellenes
there was nothing sacramental but intelligence. The national pride of
the Hebrews lay in a religious reason--their election as a peculiar
people; the national pride of the Greeks lay in the intellectual,
social, and artistic culture which distinguished them from the
_barbaroi_. If Hellas had had its Zion, it would have meant a city which
was the pre-eminent abode of perfected human thought, society, and arts.
"The name of the city of that day shall be the 'Lord is there,'" is of
the essence of Hebraism. The Hellene would have thought of a city filled
with Hymns to Intellectual Beauty, hymns to Athena, goddess of arts and
wisdom, and to Apollo, the embodied idea of light.

In their outlook upon nature, animate and inanimate, there was a
corresponding contrast. Neither