Page:Hutcheson Macaulay Posnett - Comparative Literature (1886).djvu/306

 miniature social groups which we have preferred to call by the general name of clan, passed out upon two ideal worlds of spiritual influence—the world of individual self-culture and the world of social brotherhood. Unlike the vigorous human life of Athens—the life of the Ekklesia, the law-courts, the theatre—the city of Jerusalem owed its dignity to a religious centralism which recalls the Delphic Amphiktiony or the Koreish and Mecca. Here there was little scope for the development of the purely individual spirit compared with the varied field of Athenian activities. Surrounded by agricultural communities based on the clan organisation, and with its own hierarchy formed on the same model, Jerusalem could never become a congenial home for individualism; whatever steps it made within the circle of the priesthood and landowning nobility (chôrim), individualism must have always presented an invidious aspect to Hebrew associations. Hence, when we find in Christianity the meeting-place of two such divine spirits, each the master-spirit of its own sphere, are we not warranted in maintaining that no more profoundly interesting problem is to be found in the whole range of human thought than the progress of that Hebrew and Greek cosmopolitanism through which the social and individual spirits sought reconciliation? No doubt it may be replied that this is matter of ethical rather than literary interest; that the function of literature is to collect and build with the most beautiful ideas irrespective of their moral significance. But it is one thing to resolve literature into didactic prose or verse, and another to maintain that the "best ideas" which literature seeks to discover and express must be valued after standards which involve either an ideal of individual self-culture or an ideal of social happiness; must, in other words, represent either the Greek or