Culture; Great Britain -- Social conditions -- 19th century
Now culture, because of its keen sense of what is really fatal, is
all the more disposed to be pliant and easy about what is not fatal.
And because machinery is the bane of politics, and an inward working,
and not machinery, is what we most want, we keep advising our ardent
young Liberal friends to think less of machinery, to stand more aloof
from the arena of politics at present, and rather to try and promote,
with us, an inward working. They do not listen [lviii] to us, and
they rush into the arena of politics, where their merits, indeed,
seem to be little appreciated as yet; and then they complain of the
reformed constituencies, and call the new Parliament a Philistine
Parliament. As if a nation, nourished and reared in Hebraising,
could give us, just yet, anything better than a Philistine
Parliament!--for would a Barbarian Parliament be even so good, or a
Populace Parliament? For our part, we rejoice to see our dear old
friends, the Hebraising Philistines, gathered in force in the Valley
of Jehoshaphat before their final conversion, which will certainly
come; but for this conversion we must not try to oust them from their
places, and to contend for machinery with them, but we must work on
them inwardly and cure them of Hebraising.
Yet the days of Israel are innumerable; and in its blame of
Hebraising too, and in its praise of Hellenising, culture must not
fail to keep its flexibility, and to give to its judgments that
passing and provisional character which we have seen it impose on its
preferences and rejections of machinery. Now, and for us, it is a
time to Hellenise, and to praise knowing; for we have Hebraised too
much, [lix] and have over-valued doing. But the habits and
discipline received from Hebraism remain for our race an eternal
possession; and, as humanity is constituted, one must never assign
them the second rank to-day, without being ready to restore them to
the first rank to-morrow. To walk staunchly by the best light one
has, to be strict and sincere with oneself, not to be of the number
of those who say and do not, to be in earnest,--this is the
discipline by which alone man is enabled to rescue his life from
thraldom to the passing moment and to his bodily senses, to ennoble
it, and to make it eternal. And this discipline has been nowhere so
effectively taught as in the school of Hebraism. Sophocles and Plato
knew as well as the author of the Epistle to the Hebrews that
"without holiness no man shall see God," and their notion of what
goes to make up holiness was larger than his. But the intense and
convinced energy with which the Hebrew, both of the Old and of the
New Testament, threw himself upon his ideal, and which inspired the
incomparable definition of the great Christian virtue, Faith,--the
substance of things hoped for, the evidence of things not seen,--this
energy of faith in its ideal has [lx] belonged to Hebraism alone. As
our idea of holiness enlarges, and our scope of perfection widens
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