more satisfying, than it is in the particular forms by which St. Paul, in the famous fifteenth chapter of the Epistle to the Corinthians,+ and Plato, in the Phaedo, endeavour to develope and establish it.  Surely we cannot but feel, that the argumentation with which the Hebrew apostle goes about to expound this great idea is, after all, confused and inconclusive; and that the reasoning, drawn from analogies of likeness and equality, which is employed upon it by the Greek philosopher, is over-subtle and sterile?  Above and beyond the inadequate solutions which Hebraism and Hellenism here attempt, extends the immense [159] and august problem itself, and the human spirit which gave birth to it.  And this single illustration may suggest to us how the same thing happens in other cases also.

But meanwhile, by alternations of Hebraism and Hellenism, of 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* was an uprising and re-instatement 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 Hebraising revival, a return to the ardour and sincereness of primitive [160] Christianity.  No one, however, can study the development of Protestantism and of Protestant churches without feeling that into the Reformation too,—­Hebraising child of the Renascence and offspring of its fervour, 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 [161] 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