But in the province of religion and morals Hellenism alone is not sufficient. Greek polytheism, even as ennobled by the great poets, was incapable of generating religious conceptions which could satisfy the mind and heart, or of furnishing an adequate rule for the conduct of life. These must be sought from another source. Yet there is no inherent conflict between true Hellenism and spiritualised Hebraism, such as is contained in Christianity. The distinctive quality of the best Greek literature and art, that by which it has lived and will live, is the faculty of rising from the earth into a clearer air. "The divine," says Plato in the Phaedrus, "is beauty, wisdom, goodness, and the like; by these the wing of the soul is nourished, and grows apace; but when fed upon evil, it wastes and falls away." The Greek spirit, in its noblest form, is indeed, to borrow Plato's beautiful phrase, "the power of the wing" for the human soul. The visions to which it can soar are such as that described in the Phaedrus, where Beauty is beheld dwelling with Modesty, in a holy place. The best Greek work in every kind is essentially pure; to conceive it as necessarily entangled with the baser elements of paganism is to confound the accidents with the essence; the accidents have passed away; the essence is imperishable.
A further claim which may be made for the best Greek work is that it is capable of acting as an intellectual tonic, and of bracing us for the battle of
