onstraining us[446] to crucify, as he did, and with a like
purpose of moral regeneration, the flesh with its affections and lusts,
and thus establishing, as we have seen, the law. The moral virtues, on
the other hand, are with Aristotle but the porch[447] and access to the
intellectual, and with these last is blessedness. That partaking of the
divine life, which both Hellenism and Hebraism, as we have said, fix as
their crowning aim, Plato expressly denies to the man of practical
virtue merely, of self-conquest with any other motive than that of
perfect intellectual vision. He reserves it for the lover of pure
knowledge, of seeing things as they really are,--the[Greek:
philomathhaes][448]

Both Hellenism and Hebraism arise out of the wants of human nature, and
address themselves to satisfying those wants. But their methods are so
different, they lay stress on such different points, and call into being
by their respective disciplines such different activities, that the face
which human nature presents when it passes from the hands of one of them
to those of the other, is no longer the same. To get rid of one's
ignorance, to see things as they are, and by seeing them as they are to
see them in their beauty, is the simple and attractive ideal which
Hellenism holds out before human nature; and from the simplicity and
charm of this ideal, Hellenism, and human life in the hands of
Hellenism, is invested with a kind of aerial ease, clearness, and
radiancy; they are full of what we call sweetness and light.
Difficulties are kept out of view, and the beauty and rationalness of
the ideal have all our thoughts. "The best man is he who most tries to
perfect himself, and the happiest man is he who most feels that he _is_
perfecting himself,"[449]--this account of the matter by Socrates, the
true Socrates of the _Memorabilia_, has something so simple,
spontaneous, and unsophisticated about it, that it seems to fill us with
clearness and hope when we hear it. But there is a saying which I have
heard attributed to Mr. Carlyle about Socrates--a very happy saying,
whether it is really Mr. Carlyle's or not,--which excellently marks the
essential point in which Hebraism differs from Hellenism. "Socrates,"
this saying goes, "is terribly _at ease in Zion_." Hebraism--and here is
the source of its wonderful strength--has always been severely
preoccupied with an awful sense of the impossibility of being at ease in
Zion; of the difficulties whi