Having thus described the function of Hebraism, Arnold goes on to define Hellenism as “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.”  These two great forces divide the empire of the world between them; and we call them Hebraism and Hellenism after the two races of men who have most signally illustrated them.  “Hebraism and Hellenism—­between these two points of influence moves our world.”  The idea of Hellenism is to see things as they are:  the idea of Hebraism is conduct and obedience.  Our aim should be to combine the merits of both ideas, and be “evenly and happily balanced between them.”  Enlarging on this text, he traces the working of the two principles, which ought not to be rivals but have been made such by the perverseness of men, philosophy and history; and then, turning to our own day and its doings, he says that Puritanism, which originally was a reaction of the conscience and moral sense against the indifference and lax conduct of the Renascence, has gone counter, during the last two centuries, to the main stream of human advance; has hindered men from trying to see things as they really are, and has made strictness of conduct the great aim of human life.  “It made the secondary the principal at the wrong moment, and the principal it at the wrong moment treated as secondary.”  Hence have arisen all sorts of confusion and inefficiency.  Everywhere we see the signs of anarchy, and the need for some sound order and authority.  “This we can only get by going back upon the actual instincts and forces which rule our life, seeing them as they really are, connecting them with other instincts and forces, and enlarging our whole view and rule of life.”

From this short chapter, he passes on to Chapter V, which he heads:  “Porro unum est necessarium”; and here he pursues his controversy with modern Puritanism, which imagines that it has, in its special conception of God and religion, the unum necessarium, which can dispense with Sweetness and Light, self-culture and self-discipline.  “The Puritan’s great danger is that he imagines himself in possession of a rule telling him the unum necessarium, or one thing needful, and that he then remains satisfied with a very crude conception of what this rule really is and what it tells him, thinks he has now knowledge and henceforth needs only to act, and, in this dangerous state of assurance and self-satisfaction, proceeds to give full swing to a number of the instincts of his ordinary self....  What he wants is a larger conception of human nature, showing him the number of other points at which his nature must come to its best, besides the points which he himself knows and thinks of.  There is no unum necessarium, or one thing needful, which can free human nature