The understanding of Solomon
is "the walking in the way of the commandments"; this is "the way of
peace," and it is of this that blessedness comes. In the New Testament,
the truth which gives us the peace of God and makes us free, is the love
of Christ constraining 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.
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