before the
human spirit, is something grander, truer, and 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_[457] endeavor to develop 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 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 a 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[458] was an uprising
and reinstatement 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 Hebraizing revival, a return to the
ardor and sincereness of primitive Christianity. No one, however, can
study the development of Protestantism and of Protestant churches
without feeling that into the Reforrmation, too,--Hebraizing child of
the Renascence and offspring of its fervor, 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