the Hebrew spirit, or possibly endeavour to combine both. Any literature which really mirrors human life, any literature which is something greater and nobler than a graceful imitation of classical models, must ultimately derive its inspiration from individual or social being, or (the most life-giving of all sources) from that conflict between these aspects of human existence which has raged so fiercely in certain epochs of man's development.
Yet another question remains to be answered—are we justified in regarding the social as the dominant aspect of Christian world-literature, are we justified in treating the teaching of Christ and his disciples as the most splendid example of the social spirit in world-literature? No doubt the Christian idea of personal immortality is widely removed from the clan ethics of inherited guilt, and would seem at first sight to be conceived in a purely Greek spirit of individualism. But the kernel of Greek individualism—action from self-interest—is not to be found in the Christian literature. Far from this, the fundamental doctrines of Christianity—inheritance of sin by every member of the human race, and the vicarious punishment of Christ—are the ethics of early Hebrew life universalised; and ideas of social brotherhood, besides being practically expressed in early Christian communism, meet us everywhere in extant accounts of the great social Reformer. It is true that Christianity, as a grand social reformation, is far from having yet produced the fruits which it seems destined to bear. It is true that in the conditions of the Roman empire—its cruel slavery of man, its intense selfishness, its accepted materialism—the sufferings of the early Christians and the hopelessness of social reform turned away Christian thought from the realisation of the human ideal society to an ideal beyond the range of space and time.
