But meanwhile, by alternations of Hebraism and Hellenism, of a man’s intellectual and moral impulses, of the effort to see things as they really are, and the effort to win peace by self-conquest, the human spirit proceeds; and each of these two forces has its appointed hours of culmination and seasons of rule.  As the great movement of Christianity was a triumph of Hebraism and man’s moral impulses, so the great movement which goes by the name of the Renascence[458] was an uprising and reinstatement of man’s intellectual impulses and of Hellenism.  We in England, the devoted children of Protestantism, chiefly know the Renascence by its subordinate and secondary side of the Reformation.  The Reformation has been often called a Hebraizing revival, a return to the ardor and sincereness of primitive Christianity.  No one, however, can study the development of Protestantism and of Protestant churches without feeling that into the Reforrmation, too,—­Hebraizing child of the Renascence and offspring of its fervor, rather than its intelligence, as it undoubtedly was,—­the subtle Hellenic leaven of the Renascence found its way, and that the exact respective parts, in the Reformation, of Hebraism and of Hellenism, are not easy to separate.  But what we may with truth say is, that all which Protestantism was to itself clearly conscious of, all which it succeeded in clearly setting forth in words, had the characters of Hebraism rather than of Hellenism.  The Reformation was strong, in that it was an earnest return to the Bible and to doing from the heart the will of God as there written.  It was weak, in that it never consciously grasped or applied the central idea of the Renascence,—­the Hellenic idea of pursuing, in all lines of activity, the law and science, to use Plato’s words, of things as they really are.  Whatever direct superiority, therefore, Protestantism had over Catholicism was a moral superiority, a superiority arising out of its greater sincerity and earnestness,—­at the moment of its apparition at any rate,—­in dealing with the heart and conscience.  Its pretensions to an intellectual superiority are in general quite illusory.  For Hellenism, for the thinking side in man as distinguished from the acting side, the attitude of mind of Protestantism towards the Bible in no respect differs from the attitude of mind of Catholicism towards the Church.  The mental habit of him who imagines that Balaam’s ass spoke, in no respect differs from the mental habit of him who imagines that a Madonna of wood or stone winked; and the one, who says that God’s Church makes him believe what he believes, and the other, who says that God’s Word makes him believe what he believes, are for the philosopher perfectly alike in not really and truly knowing, when they say God’s Church and God’s Word, what it is they say, or whereof they affirm.