is our strong point and favourable characteristic, rather than intelligence.  But we may give to this idea a more general form still, in which it will have a yet larger range of application.  We may regard this energy driving at practice, this paramount sense of the obligation of duty, self-control, and work, this earnestness in going manfully with the best light we [143] have, as one force.  And we may regard 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, as another force.  And these two forces we may regard as in some sense rivals,—­rivals not by the necessity of their own nature, but as exhibited in man and his history,—­and rivals dividing the empire of the world between them.  And to give these forces names from the two races of men who have supplied the most signal and splendid manifestations of them, we may call them respectively the forces of Hebraism and Hellenism.  Hebraism and Hellenism,—­between these two points of influence moves our world.  At one time it feels more powerfully the attraction of one of them, at another time of the other; and it ought to be, though it never is, evenly and happily balanced between them.

The final aim of both Hellenism and Hebraism, as of all great spiritual disciplines, is no doubt the same:  man’s perfection or salvation.  The very language which they both of them use in schooling [144] us to reach this aim is often identical.  Even when their language indicates by variation,—­sometimes a broad variation, often a but slight and subtle variation,—­the different courses of thought which are uppermost in each discipline, even then the unity of the final end and aim is still apparent.  To employ the actual words of that discipline with which we ourselves are all of us most familiar, and the words of which, therefore, come most home to us, that final end and aim is “that we might be partakers of the divine nature.”  These are the words of a Hebrew apostle, but of Hellenism and Hebraism alike this is, I say, the aim.  When the two are confronted, as they very often are confronted, it is nearly always with what I may call a rhetorical purpose; the speaker’s whole design is to exalt and enthrone one of the two, and he uses the other only as a foil and to enable him the better to give effect to his purpose.  Obviously, with us, it is usually Hellenism which is thus reduced to minister to the triumph of Hebraism.  There is a sermon on Greece and the Greek spirit by a man never to be mentioned without interest and respect, Frederick Robertson, in which this rhetorical use of Greece and the Greek [145] spirit, and the inadequate exhibition of them necessarily consequent upon this, is almost ludicrous, and would be censurable if it were not to be explained by the exigences of a sermon.  On the other hand, Heinrich Heine, and other writers of his sort, give us the spectacle of the tables completely turned, and of Hebraism brought in just as a foil and contrast to Hellenism, and to make the superiority of Hellenism more manifest.  In both these cases there is injustice and misrepresentation.  The aim and end of both Hebraism and Hellenism is, as I have said, one and the same, and this aim and end is august and admirable.