Page:Hutcheson Macaulay Posnett - Comparative Literature (1886).djvu/300

 be made without any apparent danger of undermining Hebrew unity; and while there was less fear in this respect to be entertained of a people so different from themselves, the condition of Hebrew thought supplied special reasons for the preference. We have seen how the development of individual freedom, unaccompanied by ideas of personal immortality, had in Qôheleth terminated in one of the most despairful pictures of human origin and destiny which the literature of any age has ever produced. The vague Aramaic spirit-world of angels was, however, preparing the way for Platonic teaching; and when Hellenised Hebrews, acquainted with the ethics of Socrates and Plato, began to compare their own Ezekiel or Qôheleth with such philosophic inquirers, they must have observed that the thinkers who, against the individualism of the sophistic age, had endeavoured to teach the doctrines of conscience and personal immortality, had been engaged in solving, or attempting to solve, the very problems which had perplexed the master-minds Israel. If the literature of Greece came upon the Romans as an anticipation of all they could hope æsthetically to effect, a treasury of models in verse and prose which they could not do more than imitate with some success, upon the Hebrews, whose idea of literature had always been didactic and whose language was too inflexible for æsthetic purposes, it came as a great philosophic awakening, an evidence that other peoples in the world beside the sons of Israel had met the same great moral questions, and had far surpassed all Hebrew efforts towards their solution. To men whose highest spiritual guides had often appealed to social justice between man and his neighbour (as had the Hebrew nâbîs), with what force Platonic discussions on "What is Justice?" must have come home! To men whose spiritual guides had been