and call the new Parliament a Philistine Parliament.  As if a nation, nourished and reared in Hebraising, could give us, just yet, anything better than a Philistine Parliament!—­for would a Barbarian Parliament be even so good, or a Populace Parliament?  For our part, we rejoice to see our dear old friends, the Hebraising Philistines, gathered in force in the Valley of Jehoshaphat before their final conversion, which will certainly come; but for this conversion we must not try to oust them from their places, and to contend for machinery with them, but we must work on them inwardly and cure them of Hebraising.

Yet the days of Israel are innumerable; and in its blame of Hebraising too, and in its praise of Hellenising, culture must not fail to keep its flexibility, and to give to its judgments that passing and provisional character which we have seen it impose on its preferences and rejections of machinery.  Now, and for us, it is a time to Hellenise, and to praise knowing; for we have Hebraised too much, [lix] and have over-valued doing.  But the habits and discipline received from Hebraism remain for our race an eternal possession; and, as humanity is constituted, one must never assign them the second rank to-day, without being ready to restore them to the first rank to-morrow.  To walk staunchly by the best light one has, to be strict and sincere with oneself, not to be of the number of those who say and do not, to be in earnest,—­this is the discipline by which alone man is enabled to rescue his life from thraldom to the passing moment and to his bodily senses, to ennoble it, and to make it eternal.  And this discipline has been nowhere so effectively taught as in the school of Hebraism.  Sophocles and Plato knew as well as the author of the Epistle to the Hebrews that “without holiness no man shall see God,” and their notion of what goes to make up holiness was larger than his.  But the intense and convinced energy with which the Hebrew, both of the Old and of the New Testament, threw himself upon his ideal, and which inspired the incomparable definition of the great Christian virtue, Faith,—­the substance of things hoped for, the evidence of things not seen,—­this energy of faith in its ideal has [lx] belonged to Hebraism alone.  As our idea of holiness enlarges, and our scope of perfection widens beyond the narrow limits to which the over-rigour of Hebraising has tended to confine it, we shall come again to Hebraism for that devout energy in embracing our ideal, which alone can give to man the happiness of doing what he knows.  “If ye know these things, happy are ye if ye do them!”—­the last word for infirm humanity will always be that.  For this word, reiterated with a power now sublime, now affecting, but always admirable, our race will, as long as the world lasts, return to Hebraism; and the Bible, which preaches this word, will forever remain, as Goethe called it, not only a national book, but the Book of the Nations.  Again and again, after what seemed breaches and separations, the prophetic promise to Jerusalem will still be true:—­Lo, thy sons come, whom thou sentest away; they come gathered from the west unto the east by the word of the Holy One, rejoicing in the remembrance of God.