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.
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