lighten his wretchedness, only sneers at it. The treacherous beauty, the brilliant promise that only mocks performance, the cruel serenity which only smiles at human grief, the power to nourish, the impotence to protect man, so characteristic of Nature, characterised the Greek gods. And these qualities of deity, softened and sweetened indeed, but never essentially changed, continued to live alongside the deepening ethical consciousness of Greece, and gave to its genius the mournfulness, the tragic sense of the sad and unequal struggle between the will of man and the merciless. decrees of destiny, the insight into the bitter and ironical contrast between the passion and futile endeavours of the individual and the calm order and relentless march of the cosmic whole, that created what was most sublime and pathetic in Grecian poetry and history and philosophy.

For, however few ethical elements existed in the Greek religion, the Greek nature was eminently ethical. Faith in a moral order which man could not break unpunished, has had nowhere deeper root than in ancient Greece. This faith rose into sublimest expression when the nation was in its most heroic mood,-struggled into utterance in those tragedies of Eschylos which exhibit the fateful presence and inevitable action of Nemesis, in the sweeter and more refined and less gloomy dramas of Sophokles, where the picture is softened by a milder

character in God and greater reverence in man. Along-
side the deepening current of moral belief flowed the
stream of philosophical speculation, now metaphysical,
inquiring into the cause and reality of things; again
ethical, seeking to discover the origin, nature, and laws
of virtue. The one unified and sublimed the idea of
God; the other ennobled the nature and exalted the
end of man.
Greek thought could not rest satisfied
with the physical conception of deity; speculated on
the notion of cause and the idea of good till, trans-
cending the received Polytheism without grasping an
explicit Monotheism, it conceived an impersonal cause
rather than a creator, a highest good rather than a
one god. Religious thought, divorced from religion,
had groped its way towards a supreme, not person,
but abstraction. And so the ideas of personal reality
and righteousness, moral action and rule, were associ-
ated with man rather than with God. Humanity,
indeed, became the later Hellenic divinity, the vehicle
of what was most divine in the universe. Art and
philosophy combine to idealize man, the one to hold
the mirror to what in him was beautiful, the other to
what in him was good and true. Indo-European
thought, which had started by finding God in the
bright sky, appropriately ended in its most brilliant
representative by finding deity in the heart and con-
science of man.

III.

Hellenism may thus be regarded as the contrast and complement of Hebraism. The former came to reveal the dignity and divinity of man, while the latter had proclaimed the one righteous yet merciful God. Hebraism had found the supreme law in the Divine will, man's highest perfection in obedience to it. Hellenism discovered an eternal law of right written in the heart, realized in history, enforcing its authority by sanctions too dread to be despised. The prophets of the first spoke in the name of the Most High God, but the prophets of the second spoke in the name of man; were the poets who sang of his heroism, his loves, his sufferings, his struggle for life against a merciless or ironical fate, the sculptors who enshrine his beauties in forms so perfect that they needed but life to be god-like men, the philosophers who at once uttered his yearnings after the Supreme Good and pointed out the path that led to it. Neither was complete in itself. Hebraism needed Hellenism to soften and humanize it, to translate it from an austere and exclusive theocracy into a gentle and cosmopolitan religion, which could illumine the homes and inspire the hearts of men with its own sweet spirit. Hellenism needed Hebraism to pour into its blood the iron of moral purpose and precept, to keep it from falling into impotence under its own unsubstantial abstractions, and set it bare-footed, as it were, upon the living God as

1

upon an everlasting rock. And each had thus in different, even contrary, ways, been working towards a common end. It was the old story of two streams, in source far apart, in course wholly unlike, making for a single bed. One had sprung up in the hot and blistering desert, amid thunders that seemed the voice of God, had, swollen by many a prophetic rill, forced its way round the boulders of native infidelity, between the banks, now overhanging and again meeting, of foreign oppression, and had come into a clear and open place; the other had started from the foot of Mount Olympos, had flowed onward, answering with woven and mystic music the multitudinous laughter of the Ægean, through the heroic fields of epic and the amorous glades of lyric song, had stolen through the woods sacred to tragedy, now dark and fearful as midnight, now gleaming with light that never was on sea or shore, had glided past "the olive grove of Academe," and under the porch of the Stoics, had broadened into a soft and limpid lake. the fulness of the time the long converging streams joined. In obscurity and suffering a new faith arose, had as its founder the sweetest, holiest of beings, in whom his own and after ages saw God as well as Man. His death was everywhere preached as the basis of a new but permanent religion of Humanity, and time has only served to define and strengthen its claims.

until it

And in

"Is it not strange, the darkest hour

That ever dawn'd on sinful earth,
Should touch the heart with softer power

For comfort, than an angel's mirth ?”

But its strange might to quicken the best and subdue the worst in man had never existed had it not possessed as parents, on the one side, Hebrew Monotheism, on the other humanistic Hellenism.

Hebraism and Hellenism had thus each its own part to play in the Preparationes Evangelica. The one contributed the Monotheism, the other the Theo-anthropomorphism, which lie at the basis of Christianity. When driven out of Judaism it carried into the gentile world a few doctrines it had inherited from its fosterparent, and a few simple facts peculiarly its own. Had there been no expulsion there had been no Christianity; within the Synagogue there was room for the sect of Jesus of Nazareth, none for the religion of Christ. The Christian facts bore to the Hellenic mind another meaning than they had borne to the Hebrew, especially as they had to be interpreted in the light of the Monotheistic and Messianic beliefs of the land whence they had come. These facts were construed into doctrines which expressed and retained whatever was of ethical and permanent value in Hellenism, without losing what was universal and moral in Hebraism. The purest Monotheism, which forbade God and nature or God and man to be either confounded or compared, was