Still, they pursue this aim by very different courses.  The uppermost idea with Hellenism is to see things as they really are; the uppermost idea with Hebraism is conduct and obedience.  Nothing can do away with this ineffaceable difference; the Greek quarrel with the body and its desires is, that they hinder right thinking, the Hebrew quarrel with them is, that they hinder right acting.  “He that keepeth the law, happy is he;” “There is nothing sweeter than to take heed unto the commandments of the Lord;"+—­that is the Hebrew [146] notion of felicity; and, pursued with passion and tenacity, this notion would not let the Hebrew rest till, as is well known, he had, at last, got out of the law a network of prescriptions to enwrap his whole life, to govern every moment of it, every impulse, every action.  The Greek notion of felicity, on the other hand, is perfectly conveyed in these words of a great French moralist:  “C’est le bonheur des hommes”—­when? when they abhor that which is evil?—­ no; when they exercise themselves in the law of the Lord day and night?—­no; when they die daily?—­no; when they walk about the New Jerusalem with palms in their hands?—­no; but when they think aright, when their thought hits,—­“quand ils pensent juste.”  At the bottom of both the Greek and the Hebrew notion is the desire, native in man, for reason and the will of God, the feeling after the universal order,—­in a word, the love of God.  But, while Hebraism seizes upon certain plain, capital intimations of the universal order, and rivets itself, one may say, with unequalled grandeur of earnestness and intensity on the study and observance of them, the bent of Hellenism is to follow, with flexible activity, the whole play of the universal order, to be [147] apprehensive of missing any part of it, of sacrificing one part to another, to slip away from resting in this or that intimation of it, however capital.  An unclouded clearness of mind, an unimpeded play of thought, is what this bent drives at.  The governing idea of Hellenism is spontaneity of consciousness; that of Hebraism, strictness of conscience.

Christianity changed nothing in this essential bent of Hebraism to set doing above knowing.  Self-conquest, self-devotion, the following not our own individual will, but the will of God, obedience, is the fundamental idea of this form, also, of the discipline to which we have attached the general name of Hebraism.  Only, as the old law and the network of prescriptions with which it enveloped human life were evidently a motive power not driving and searching enough to produce the result aimed at,—­patient continuance in well doing, self-conquest,—­Christianity substituted for them boundless devotion to that inspiring and affecting pattern of self-conquest offered by Christ; and by the new motive power, of which the essence was this, though the love and admiration of Christian churches have for centuries been employed in varying, amplifying, [148] and adorning the plain description of it, Christianity, as St. Paul truly says, “establishes the law,"+ and in the strength of the ampler power which she has thus supplied to fulfil it, has accomplished the miracles, which we all see, of her history.