Page:Hutcheson Macaulay Posnett - Comparative Literature (1886).djvu/305

 of these ideas to certain opinions of the Greeks is carefully noted by Josephus; and the famous passage of the Phædo, which contains the same simile of an imprisoned soul, will come to the mind of any Greek scholar.

But the true interest of the Essenes lies not so much in their adoption of Greek conceptions of personality as in their combining this individual culture with socialism of an advanced type. If in Ezekiel we have individualism struggling to get free from clan ethics, if in Qôheleth we have it freed from such ethics but bound up with pessimism, if in the Sophia of Solomon we have it ennobled by Greek conceptions of immortality, in the Essenes we have this eternal conception of individuality joining with the old social spirit of the Hebrews no longer confined within the limits of nationality. Spiritualised socialism and spiritualised individualism thus meet in the Essenes; and in Christianity they meet in a world-creed. But, it may be asked, was their meeting of any significance to literature? Are we justified in regarding that union of Hebrew and Greek thought which ultimately issued in Christianity as lying within the domain of comparative literature? And, if this question be answered in the affirmative, are we justified in regarding the social as the dominant aspect of Christian world-literature?

In answer to the first of these questions—whether the union of Hebrew and Greek thought issuing in Christianity lies within the domain of comparative literature—it will be conceded that the cosmopolitan tendencies of the Alexandrian Greeks and those of Post-Babylonian Hebrews are sufficiently similar and dissimilar to form an interesting study in literature treated comparatively. Athens and Jerusalem, taking their origin alike in those