an illustrious political history like Rome, accustomed to love the beautiful as embodied in woman, to enjoy the order and freedom peculiar to lands where the national will is the highest law and obedience to it the highest duty, could not be satisfied with the inflexible dogmatism of the Greek, or the iron ecclesiasticism of the Latin Church. The Teuton loved liberty in religion as elsewhere, asserted his right to get it, to stand before God for himself, to cultivate his domestic affections free from the shadow of a sacerdotal but unsanctified celibacy. While reverent to the past as his fathers had been, he could not allow it to tyrannize over the present, or rule the destinies of the future. And so he had to force his way into a religion roomy and elastic enough to suit natures that anticipated continual progress, and the changes it brings. Christianity as an authoritative letter is Latin, as a free spirit is Teutonic. The former is the refuge of those who feel there is no safety but in adherence to an accomplished and exhausted past; the latter is the hope of those who can trust themselves to a progressive and fruitful future. The sanctities of the Latin as artificial and arbitrary are moribund; of the Teuton as natural and essential are immortal as the humanity which God inhabits and inspires.

But these are matters that cannot be touched here and now. Enough to say, Christianity does not depend for either its existence or its authority on theories of

Infallibility or Inspiration. God reveals Himself in Humanity, and His voice can cease to speak only when the organ ceases to be. As man cannot outgrow his own nature, so he cannot leave behind the faith that is rooted in it. The struggle of faith and doubt will be perpetual, renewed in every generation under fresh forms, ending in each only to enter upon another phase with another disposition of forces. The limitations within which man must think will always give to doubt its more or less plausible argument; the necessities within which man must live will always give to faith its victorious answer. And so we are certain, that while new knowledge may change, it can never abolish ancient religion that remaining permanent as man. Science with its new conception of nature may annul the old conception of God, but the invincible faith in Him, which will ever create a new conception of Him, science cannot touch, because, on its present plane, science cannot know. As the generations behind us have transformed while transmitting the grosser ancient into the grander modern religions, so our age will purify and exalt its faith while handing it on to the future, and after ages will continue the work until, perhaps, in some distant time the old conflict between Science and Religion will cease, and the knowledge of nature and of man be found in their ultimate analysis to be-knowledge of the living yet immanent God.

PART IV.

THE RACES IN LITERATURE AND

PHILOSOPHY.

I.

MAN is by pre-eminence the thinker, realizes manhood as he grows into a conscious and creative mind. Men and peoples are great in the degree in which they manifest spirit, and help the spirits of other times and lands to a higher birth and a nobler growth. The race that produces most great men is the greatest race, best serves Humanity. The orders of greatness are indeed many, and differ as star from star in glory. Yet each has its place and use. The poet like Sophokles or Goethe-creative, subtle, sensitive to the sunny and translucent as to the black and stormy cloud, reading with the intuitive eye genius the struggle of will and destiny, life and character, and embodying what is seen in forms whose perfection secures their immortality-refines thought by refining both

of

its instrument and atmosphere, creates ideals that, whether realized or unrealized, help men

*

"Im Ganzen Guten Schönen

Resolut zu leben."

The thinker, like Plato or Aristotle, Spinoza or Hume, Kant or Hegel, who starts new problems, and attempts by real or possible solutions to explain the hitherto unexplained, awakens mind to many unperceived and even undreamt of realities, opens senses in it that have been shut, and supplies it with the fine gold it can mint into common coin for common life. The highest literature is the highest revelation of mind, and mind so revealed is a barrier against barbarism of immeasurable strength, a stimulus to culture of indeterminable potency. Into it the subtlest and purest essence of the past has been distilled, that the present may drink and enlarge the mind that is by the mind that has been. When the past has become a quick and quickening spirit to the present, human progress is made not only possible, but real and sure.

If, now, thought be at once a measure and a means of progress, the peoples who have not produced most, but most stimulated others to production, have been fruitful of propulsive and progressive forces. The two ancient nations most typical of our two great families-the Hebrews and

* So Hegel describes Winckelmann as one of the men "welche im Felde der Kunst für den Geist ein neues Organ zu erschliessen wussten" ("Aesthetik," vol. i. 81).

the Hellenes-were great literary nations, not in the quantitative, but in the qualitative sense, not for what they created, but what they have made others create. To the one we owe the books that are so sacred to the Christian world, the records of its faith; to the other we owe the literature that is par excellence classical, living in our midst unwithered by age, clothed in the perennial freshness which belongs to perennial beauty. Round the first much of our best philosophy, history, criticism, much of our noblest poetry and eloquence has crystallized; from the second there has come, with much more, our idea of literary form, our standard of literary perfection. Heine, an apostate Hebrew, but never so Hebraic as in his apostasy, divided men into "Jews and Greeks," or "men with ascetic, iconoclastic, fanatical impulses, and men of sunny, cultivated, cultivable and realistic natures;" and a well-known English critic has naturalized the distinction, and turned it to varied and even violent uses. But Hebraism and Hellenism are contrasts, not contraries, complementary opposites, not irreconcilable opponents. The cry for a return to pure and undefiled Hellenism is vain, and false as well as vain, the expression of a one-sided and ungenerous culture. The stern and exalted Hebraic spirit was never more needed than now. Were it to be lost, our modern manhood would soon lose its greatest source of moral dignity and strength. Even our noblest and most perfect modern Greek, Goethe, was Greek only on the surface, was Hebrew at the heart,