g us to it.
Therefore the bright promise of Hellenism faded, and Hebraism ruled the
world. Then was seen that astonishing spectacle, so well marked by the
often-quoted words of the prophet Zechariah, when men of all languages
and nations took hold of the skirt of him that was a Jew, saying:--"_We
will go with you, for we have heard that God is with you_."[451] And the
Hebraism which thus received and ruled a world all gone out of the way
and altogether become unprofitable, was, and could not but be, the
later, the more spiritual, the more attractive development of Hebraism.
It was Christianity; that is to say, Hebraism aiming at self-conquest
and rescue from the thrall of vile affections, not by obedience to the
letter of a law, but by conformity to the image of a self-sacrificing
example. To a world stricken with moral enervation Christianity offered
its spectacle of an inspired self-sacrifice; to men who refused
themselves nothing, it showed one who refused himself everything;--"_my
Saviour banished joy!_"[452] says George Herbert. When the _alma Venus_,
the life-giving and joy-giving power of nature, so fondly cherished by
the pagan world, could not save her followers from self-dissatisfaction
and ennui, the severe words of the apostle came bracingly and
refreshingly: "Let no man deceive you with vain words, for because of
these things cometh the wrath of God upon the children of
disobedience."[453] Through age after age and generation after
generation, our race, or all that part of our race which was most living
and progressive, was _baptized into a death_; and endeavored, by
suffering in the flesh, to cease from sin. Of this endeavor, the
animating labors and afflictions of early Christianity, the touching
asceticism of mediaeval Christianity, are the great historical
manifestations. Literary monuments of it, each in its own way
incomparable, remain in the _Epistles_ of St. Paul, in St. Augustine's
_Confessions_, and in the two original and simplest books of the
_Imitation_.[454]

Of two disciplines laying their main stress, the one, on clear
intelligence, the other, on firm obedience; the one, on comprehensively
knowing the ground of one's duty, the other, on diligently practising
it; the one, on taking all possible care (to use Bishop Wilson's words
again) that the light we have be not darkness, the other, that according
to the best light we have we diligently walk,--the priority naturally
belongs to that discip