CONCLUSION

Truly it was an old world, and even CÆsar's patriotic genius was not enough to make it young again. The dawn does not return till the night has fully set in.—Mommsen.

My thoughts are not your thoughts, neither are your ways my ways, saith the Lord.—Isaiah.

Thou shalt love the Lord thy God with all thy heart, and with all thy soul, and with all thy mind. This is the great and first commandment. And a second like unto it is this, Thou shalt love thy neighbor as thyself.—Jesus.

Render unto CÆsar the things that are CÆsar's, and to God the things that are God's.—Id.

Are not five sparrows sold for two farthings? and not one of them is forgotten in the sight of God. But the very hairs of your head are all numbered.—Id.

We love because he first loved us. If a man say, I love God, and hateth his brother, he is a liar.—John.

By one intelligible form, which is the divine Essence, and one conscious intention, which is the divine Word, things may be known in their multiplicity by God.—Thomas Aquinas.

If God acts in all things, and such action in no way derogates from his dignity, but even belongs to his universal and supreme power, he cannot consider it below him, nor does it stain his dignity, if he extend his providence to the individual things of this world.—Id.

Une immense espÉrance a passÉ sur la terre.—Alfred de Musset.

We have seen that the Greek ideal of life rested upon the complete identification of the man with the citizen. We have seen also how this ideal was paralyzed by the growth of individualism; how the wisest men thought to render this innocuous and even beneficent, by providing for it a sphere of contemplation, superior to that of practice, but organically related to it, and, finally how, with the failure of this attempt, the two sides of human nature, divorced from each other, degenerated, the one into selfish worldliness, the other into equally selfish other-worldliness, both conditions equally destitute of moral significance.

This sad result was mainly due to three causes, (1) that the remedies proposed for individualism were not sufficient, (2) that the best remedy was set aside, (3) that the conditions for which the remedies were offered soon ceased to exist. Both Plato and Aristotle wrote for the small Greek polities, which lost their autonomy through the Macedonian conquest. If it may be doubted whether even the proposals of the latter would have redeemed these polities, had they continued free, it is certain that they would have been ineffective under the changed circumstances. At all events, they were never adopted, and even for the super-civic man the teaching of Plato was preferred to his.

As the new cosmopolitanism deepened the gulf between the citizen and the individual, and immeasurably widened the sphere of the latter, in the same proportion did the teaching of Plato fail to bridge over that gulf, and provide activity for that sphere. To tell the super-civic man now that his function was to contemplate divine things and oracularly deliver laws for the guidance of the world, would have argued an absence of humor not common in those days. Besides, those persons who claimed to have contemplated divine things showed no such fitness for legislation as to induce practical men to accept their guidance. The sober fact was, that the contemplation of divine things, which more and more absorbed the energy of Greek thought, was, except for Aristotle, a mere vague asperation without moral value, and became ever more a sort of mystic ecstasy, in which the individual, instead of acquiring insight and power to live worthily and beneficently in the world, was thrown back upon himself, with his will paralyzed. Nor could this be otherwise, seeing the nature of the divine things, the contemplation of which was reckoned so important. Instead of being personal attributes, or a person imposing a moral law seen to be binding, they were mere abstractions, increasing in emptiness the higher they were in the series, the highest being absolute vacancy. In vain had Aristotle protested that all reality is individual: the Platonic theory, that all knowledge is of ideas or universals, prevailed, with the result that the highest knowledge was held to be knowledge of that which is absolutely universal, viz. indeterminate being or, as Plotinus held, something lacking even the determination of being—the Supreme Good. That the super-civic man should find satisfaction in gazing into vacancy, or be any more valuable in the world after he had done so, no matter how spotless his life and ecstatic his look, is inconceivable.

But while, in the Greek world, the sphere of activity of the super-civic man was vanishing into nothingness, among a small and obscure band of restored exiles of Semitic race, that sphere had come to claim the entire man and all his relations, practical and spiritual. Isaiah's little band of faithful followers (see p. 133) had grown into a nation, living by no law save that of Jehovah, a very real, very awful, and very holy personality, whom the heaven of heavens could not contain, but who yet watched the rising up and the sitting down of every son of man. Long before Quintilian wrote his elegant treatise on rhetoric, or Plotinus his pantheistic Enneads, there had sprung from the bosom of this people a man who, bursting, at the expense of his life, the narrow bounds of his nationally, elevated the theocracy of his people into a Kingdom of Heaven, which he had bade proclaim to all the world. It was proclaimed, and then (though to some it seemed a stumbling-block, and to others foolishness) the super-civic man, who for hundreds of years had been wandering in darkness, in search of his fatherland, suddenly became aware that he had found it in the Church of Christ. He now no longer tries to escape from the visible world into the emptiness of an abstract first principle; but, in the service of a First Principle who is the most concrete of realities, and who numbers the very hairs of his head, he goes down into the most loathsome depths of the material world to elevate and redeem the meanest of the sons of men. There is no question of bond or free, ruler or ruled, now. In the Kingdom of Heaven there are no such relations. The only greatness recognized there is greatness in service; the only law, the Law of Love. Love! yes, the whole secret is in that one word. By adding love to the conception of the God of his people, by exemplifying it in his own life, and demanding it of his followers, Jesus accomplished what had baffled all the wisdom of the Greek sages. He restored the moral unity of man, abolished the old world, and made a new heaven and a new earth. In vain have the advocates of an indeterminate, self-evolving first principle, whether calling themselves Neoplatonists, mystics, materialists, evolutionists, Hegelians, or Theosophists, striven to bring back the old world with its class distinctions and institutional ethics; in vain have they sought to sink the individual God and man of reality in the universal ideas of thought. The Law of Love, which is the ground of individuality, as well as of true society, has bidden, and will bid them, defiance.

APPENDIX