knowledge, as thou didst before the creation of the firmament, the division of light from darkness; let the children of thy spirit, placed in their firmament, make their light shine upon the earth, mark the division of night and day, and announce the revolution of the times; for the old order is passed, and the new arises; the night is spent, the day is come forth; and thou shalt crown the year with thy blessing, when thou shalt send forth laborers into thy harvest sown by other hands than theirs; when thou shalt send forth new laborers to new seed-times, whereof the harvest shall be not yet."[429]

HEBRAISM AND HELLENISM[430]

This fundamental ground is our preference of doing to thinking.  Now this preference is a main element in our nature and as we study it we find ourselves opening up a number of large questions on every side.

Let me go back for a moment to Bishop Wilson,[431] who says:  “First, never go against the best light you have; secondly, take care that your light be not darkness.”  We show, as a nation, laudable energy and persistence in walking according to the best light we have, but are not quite careful enough, perhaps, to see that our light be not darkness.  This is only another version of the old story that energy is our strong point and favorable characteristic, rather than intelligence.  But we may give to this idea a more general form still, in which it will have a yet larger range of application.  We may regard this energy driving at practice, this paramount sense of the obligation of duty, self-control, and work, this earnestness in going manfully with the best light we have, as one force.  And we may regard the intelligence driving at those ideas which are, after all, the basis of right practice, the ardent sense for all the new and changing combinations of them which man’s development brings with it, the indomitable impulse to know and adjust them perfectly, as another force.  And these two forces we may regard as in some sense rivals,—­rivals not by the necessity of their own nature, but as exhibited in man and his history,—­and rivals dividing the empire of the world between them.  And to give these forces names from the two races of men who have supplied the most signal and splendid manifestations of them, we may call them respectively the forces of Hebraism and Hellenism.  Hebraism and Hellenism,—­between these two points of influence moves our world.  At one time it feels more powerfully the attraction of one of them, at another time of the other; and it ought to be, though it never is, evenly and happily balanced between them.