We find ourselves here once more in the presence of Mr. Matthew Arnold. In his judgment, the modern world has been made what it is by the influence of two peoples, the Greeks and the Jews, representing respectively two distinct and almost opposed ideas, which are contending with each other for the possession of the modern mind. For Greece—the brilliant, but in spite of its subtlety of spirit, somewhat superficial Greece—art and science fill the measure of life. For the Hebrews life might be summed up in one word, justice. And by justice must not be understood a rigid respect for the rights of others, but a willingness to renounce one’s own interest, one’s own pleasure, a self-effacement in the presence of the eternal law of sacrifice personified in Javeh. Greece and Judea are dead; Greece faithful to the last moment to its belief in the all-sufficiency of art and science, Judea faithless at the last moment to its belief in the all-sufficiency of justice, and falling by reason of that very infidelity. Mr. Matthew Arnold finds the two nations symbolized in an Old Testament story. It was before the birth of Isaac, the veritable inheritor of the divine promise, who was humble but elect. Abraham looked upon his first son Ishmael, who was young, vigorous, brilliant, and daring, and implored God: “Oh, that Ishmael might live before Thee!” But it could not be. Greece, the Ishmael among nations, has perished. Later the Renaissance appeared as its successor; the Renaissance was full of vitality, of future; the dream, the sombre nightmare had passed away, there was to be no more religious asceticism, we were to return to nature. The Renaissance held in horror the tonsured and hooded Dark Ages, whose spirit was renouncement and mortification. For the Renaissance itself the ideal was fulness of life, growth of the individual, the free and joyous satisfaction of all our instincts, of art and science; Rabelais was the personification of it. Alas! the Renaissance fell, as Greece fell, and the natural successor of the Renaissance, in Mr. Matthew Arnold’s judgment, is George Fox, the first Quaker, the open contemner of arts and sciences. Finally, in our days, a people in Europe has taken up the succession; the modern Greece, dear to the enlightenment of all nations, the friend of art and science, is France. How often, and with what ardour, has this prayer in its favour been raised to God in heaven: “Oh, that Ishmael might live before Thee!” France is the average sensual man, and Paris is his city, and who of us does not feel himself attracted? The French possess this element of superiority over the Renaissance, that they are more balanced than other peoples, and though France has aimed to liberate mankind and to enfranchise them from the austere rule of sacrifice, she has not conceived man as a monster, nor liberty as a species of madness. Her ideas are formulated in a system of education which lies in the regular, complete, and