istory of an Indo-European people vary from
those of a Semitic people. Hellenism is of Indo-European growth,
Hebraism is of Semitic growth; and we English, a nation of Indo-European
stock, seem to belong naturally to the movement of Hellenism. But
nothing more strongly marks the essential unity of man, than the
affinities we can perceive, in this point or that, between members of
one family of peoples and members of another. And no affinity of this
kind is more strongly marked than that likeness in the strength and
prominence of the moral fibre, which, notwithstanding immense elements
of difference, knits in some special sort the genius and history of us
English, and our American descendants across the Atlantic, to the genius
and history of the Hebrew people. Puritanism, which has been so great a
power in the English nation, and in the strongest part of the English
nation, was originally the reaction in the seventeenth century of the
conscience and moral sense of our race, against the moral indifference
and lax rule of conduct which in the sixteenth century came in with the
Renascence. It was a reaction of Hebraism against Hellenism; and it
powerfully manifested itself, as was natural, in a people with much of
what we call a Hebraizing turn, with a signal affinity for the bent
which, was the master-bent of Hebrew life. Eminently Indo-European by
its _humor_, by the power it shows, through this gift, of imaginatively
acknowledging the multiform aspects of the problem of life, and of thus
getting itself unfixed from its own over-certainty, of smiling at its
own over-tenacity, our race has yet (and a great part of its strength
lies here), in matters of practical life and moral conduct, a strong
share of the assuredness, the tenacity, the intensity of the Hebrews.
This turn manifested itself in Puritanism, and has had a great part in
shaping our history for the last two hundred years. Undoubtedly it
checked and changed amongst us that movement of the Renascence which we
see producing in the reign of Elizabeth such wonderful fruits.
Undoubtedly it stopped the prominent rule and direct development of that
order of ideas which we call by the name of Hellenism, and gave the
first rank to a different order of ideas. Apparently, too, as we said of
the former defeat of Hellenism, if Hellenism was defeated, this shows
that Hellenism was imperfect, and that its ascendency at that moment
would not have been for the world's good.

Yet