d many more, remind us that life could be
to the Hellene something of deeper moral import than a brilliant game,
or a garden of vivid and sweet sights and sounds where Beauty and
Knowledge entered, but Goodness was forgotten and shut out? For it
is not merely that these men, and very many more endowed with ample
portion of their spirit, were produced and reared among the race; they
were honoured and valued in a way that surely postulated the existence
of high ethical feeling in their countrymen. And even when the days
of unselfish statesmen and magnanimous cities were over, there were
philosophers whose schools were not the less filled because they
claimed a high place for righteousness in human life. To Solon and
Aristeides succeeded Socrates and Plato, to Epameinondas and Timoleon
succeeded Zeno and Epictetus. That the morality of the Hellenes was
complete on all sides, it would of course be irrational to maintain.
They had not, for instance, any more than the Hebrews, or any other
nation of antiquity, learnt to abhor slavery, though probably it
existed in a milder form at Athens than anywhere else in the old or
new world: they were more implacable in revenge and laxer in sexual
indulgence than the Christian ethics would allow in theory, though not
perhaps much more so than Christendom has shown itself in practice.
And though undoubtedly the greatest single impulse ever given to
morality came from Palestine, yet the ground which nurtured the seeds
of Christianity was as much Hellenic as Hebrew. It would be impossible
here to enter on an exhaustive comparison of the ethical capacities of
the two races, but before we pronounce hastily for the superiority of
the Hebrew there are surely some difficulties to surmount. We may
well ask, for example, Would Hellas ever have accepted as her chief
national hero such a man as David a man who in his life is conspicuous
by his crimes not less than by his brilliant gifts, and who dies with
the words of blood and perfidy on his lips, charging his son with the
last slaughterous satisfaction of his hate which he had sworn before
his God to forego? And though the great Hebrew prophets teach often
a far loftier morality than this, they cannot have been nearly so
representative of the feeling of this nation as were Aeschylus and
Sophocles and Pindar of the feeling of theirs. The Hebrews of the
prophets' age 'slew the prophets,' and left it to the slayers'
descendants to 'build their sepulc