long live in substantial harmony with reality before
they recognise its nature. Organs long exist before they reach their
perfect function. The fortunate instincts of a race destined to long
life and rationality express themselves in significant poetry before
they express themselves in science.

The service which Hebraism has rendered to mankind has been
instrumental, as that rendered by Hellenism has been imaginative.
Hebraism has put earnestness and urgency into morality, making it a
matter of duty, at once private and universal, rather than what paganism
had left it, a mass of local allegiances and legal practices. The Jewish
system has, in consequence, a tendency to propaganda and intolerance; a
tendency which would not have proved nefarious had this religion always
remained true to its moral principle; for morality is coercive and no
man, being autonomous, has a right to do wrong. Conscience, thus
reinforced by religious passion, has been able to focus a general
abhorrence on certain great scandals--slavery and sodomy could be
practically suppressed among Christians, and drunkenness among Moslems.
The Christian principle of charity also owed a part of its force to
Hebraic tradition. For the law and the prophets were full of mercy and
loving kindness toward the faithful. What Moses had taught his people
Christ and his Hellenising disciples had the beautiful courage to preach
to all mankind. Yet this virtue of charity, on its subtler and more
metaphysical side, belongs to the spirit of redemption, to that ascetic
and quasi-Buddhistic element in Christianity to which we shall presently
revert. The pure Jews can have no part in such insight, because it
contradicts the positivism of their religion and character and their
ideal of worldly happiness.

[Sidenote: Need of Hebraic devotion to Greek aims.]

As the human body is said to change all its substance every seven years,
and yet is the same body, so the Hebraic conscience might change all its
tenets in seven generations and be the same conscience still. Could this
abstract moral habit, this transferable earnestness, be enlisted in
rational causes, the Life of Reason would have gained a valuable
instrument. Men would possess the "single eye," and the art, so
difficult to an ape-like creature with loose moral feelings, of acting
on principle. Could the vision of an adequate natural ideal fall into
the Hebraising mind, already aching for action and nerved to practical