full of what we call sweetness and light.  Difficulties are kept out of view, and the beauty and rationalness of the ideal have all our thoughts.  “The best man is he who most tries to perfect himself, and the happiest man is he who most feels that he is perfecting himself,"[449]—­this account of the matter by Socrates, the true Socrates of the Memorabilia, has something so simple, spontaneous, and unsophisticated about it, that it seems to fill us with clearness and hope when we hear it.  But there is a saying which I have heard attributed to Mr. Carlyle about Socrates—­a very happy saying, whether it is really Mr. Carlyle’s or not,—­which excellently marks the essential point in which Hebraism differs from Hellenism.  “Socrates,” this saying goes, “is terribly at ease in Zion.”  Hebraism—­and here is the source of its wonderful strength—­has always been severely preoccupied with an awful sense of the impossibility of being at ease in Zion; of the difficulties which oppose themselves to man’s pursuit or attainment of that perfection of which Socrates talks so hopefully, and, as from this point of view one might almost say, so glibly.  It is all very well to talk of getting rid of one’s ignorance, of seeing things in their reality, seeing them in their beauty; but how is this to be done when there is something which thwarts and spoils all our efforts?

This something is sin; and the space which sin fills in Hebraism, as compared with Hellenism, is indeed prodigious.  This obstacle to perfection fills the whole scene, and perfection appears remote and rising away from earth, in the background.  Under the name of sin, the difficulties of knowing oneself and conquering oneself which impede man’s passage to perfection, become, for Hebraism, a positive, active entity hostile to man, a mysterious power which I heard Dr. Pusey[450] the other day, in one of his impressive sermons, compare to a hideous hunchback seated on our shoulders, and which it is the main business of our lives to hate and oppose.  The discipline of the Old Testament may be summed up as a discipline teaching us to abhor and flee from sin; the discipline of the New Testament, as a discipline teaching us to die to it.  As Hellenism speaks of thinking clearly, seeing things in their essence and beauty, as a grand and precious feat for man to achieve, so Hebraism speaks of becoming conscious of sin, of awakening to a sense of sin, as a feat of this kind.  It is obvious to what wide divergence these differing tendencies, actively followed, must lead.  As one passes and repasses from Hellenism to Hebraism, from Plato to St. Paul, one feels inclined to rub one’s eyes and ask oneself whether man is indeed a gentle and simple being, showing the traces of a noble and divine nature; or an unhappy chained captive, laboring with groanings that cannot be uttered to free himself from the body of this death.