be abundantly quoted from both Hellenism and Hebraism to make it seem that one follows the same current as the other towards the same goal.  They are, truly, borne towards the same goal; but the currents which bear them are infinitely different.  It is true, Solomon will praise knowing:  “Understanding is a well-spring of life unto him that hath it."[439] And in the New Testament, again, Jesus Christ is a “light,"[440] and “truth makes us free."[441] It is true, Aristotle will undervalue knowing:  “In what concerns virtue,” says he, “three things are necessary—­knowledge, deliberate will, and perseverance; but, whereas the two last are all-important, the first is a matter of little importance."[442] It is true that with the same impatience with which St. James enjoins a man to be not a forgetful hearer, but a doer of the work,[443] Epictetus[444] exhorts us to do what we have demonstrated to ourselves we ought to do; or he taunts us with futility, for being armed at all points to prove that lying is wrong, yet all the time continuing to lie.  It is true, Plato, in words which are almost the words of the New Testament or the Imitation, calls life a learning to die.[445] But underneath the superficial agreement the fundamental divergence still subsists.  The understanding of Solomon is “the walking in the way of the commandments”; this is “the way of peace,” and it is of this that blessedness comes.  In the New Testament, the truth which gives us the peace of God and makes us free, is the love of Christ constraining us[446] to crucify, as he did, and with a like purpose of moral regeneration, the flesh with its affections and lusts, and thus establishing, as we have seen, the law.  The moral virtues, on the other hand, are with Aristotle but the porch[447] and access to the intellectual, and with these last is blessedness.  That partaking of the divine life, which both Hellenism and Hebraism, as we have said, fix as their crowning aim, Plato expressly denies to the man of practical virtue merely, of self-conquest with any other motive than that of perfect intellectual vision.  He reserves it for the lover of pure knowledge, of seeing things as they really are,—­the[Greek:  philomathhaes][448]

Both Hellenism and Hebraism arise out of the wants of human nature, and address themselves to satisfying those wants.  But their methods are so different, they lay stress on such different points, and call into being by their respective disciplines such different activities, that the face which human nature presents when it passes from the hands of one of them to those of the other, is no longer the same.  To get rid of one’s ignorance, to see things as they are, and by seeing them as they are to see them in their beauty, is the simple and attractive ideal which Hellenism holds out before human nature; and from the simplicity and charm of this ideal, Hellenism, and human life in the hands of Hellenism, is invested with a kind of aerial ease, clearness, and radiancy; they are