No words of devotion
and admiration can be too strong to render thanks to these beneficent
forces which have so borne forward humanity in its appointed work of
coming to the knowledge and possession of itself; above all, in those
great moments when their action was the wholesomest and the most
necessary.
But the evolution of these forces, separately and in themselves, is not
the whole evolution of humanity,--their single history is not the whole
history of man; whereas their admirers are always apt to make it stand
for the whole history. Hebraism and Hellenism are, neither of them, the
_law_ of human development, as their admirers are prone to make them;
they are, each of them, _contributions_ to human development,--august
contributions, invaluable contributions; and each showing itself to us
more august, more invaluable, more preponderant over the other,
according to the moment in which we take them, and the relation in which
we stand to them. The nations of our modern world, children of that
immense and salutary movement which broke up the pagan world, inevitably
stand to Hellenism in a relation which dwarfs it, and to Hebraism in a
relation which magnifies it.
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