there is a very important difference between the defeat inflicted on
Hellenism by Christianity eighteen hundred years ago, and the check
given to the Renascence by Puritanism. The greatness of the difference
is well measured by the difference in force, beauty, significance, and
usefulness, between primitive Christianity and Protestantism. Eighteen
hundred years ago it was altogether the hour of Hebraism. Primitive
Christianity was legitimately and truly the ascendant force in the world
at that time, and the way of mankind's progress lay through its full
development. Another hour in man's development began in the fifteenth
century, and the main road of his progress then lay for a time through
Hellenism. Puritanism was no longer the central current of the world's
progress, it was a side stream crossing the central current and checking
it. The cross and the check may have been necessary and salutary, but
that does not do away with the essential difference between the main
stream of man's advance and a cross or side stream. For more than two
hundred years the main stream of man's advance has moved towards knowing
himself and the world, seeing things as they are, spontaneity of
consciousness; the main impulse of a great part, and that the strongest
part, of our nation has been towards strictness of conscience. They have
made the secondary the principal at the wrong moment, and the principal
they have at the wrong moment treated as secondary. This contravention
of the natural order has produced, as such contravention always must
produce, a certain confusion and false movement, of which we are now
beginning to feel, in almost every direction, the inconvenience. In all
directions our habitual causes of action seem to be losing
efficaciousness, credit, and control, both with others and even with
ourselves. Everywhere we see the beginnings of confusion, and we want a
clue to some sound order and authority. This we can only get by going
back upon the actual instincts and forces which rule our life, seeing
them as they really are, connecting them with other instincts and
forces, and enlarging our whole view and rule of life.

EQUALITY[459]

When we talk of man's advance towards his full humanity, we think of an
advance, not along one line only, but several. Certain races and
nations, as we know, are on certain lines preeminent and representative.
The Hebrew nation was preeminent on one great line. "What nation," it
was just