Moreover, every nation is in itself not only the combination of individual citizens, but also of minor groups within itself, all of which have these same marks, and all of which are in the real genuine sense persons, spiritual individuals with a life of their own.
Now, as we look over the history of the development which thus goes on side by side in the individual and in society, we find that its principle in the fragment of history that we really know has been that isolated excellences should be brought to perfection first; and after something like perfection has been reached in the separate departments taken singly, the combination of them is brought about, in order that the richer and fuller life may be perfected, in which all of them find a place.
European history derives its whole life from Palestine, Greece and Rome; and in each of those three peoples, some one excellence was developed to a peculiar degree. Rome perfected and has bequeathed to us the instincts for social order, as embodied in law. The history of the Roman people is of significance, precisely because one may there trace the growth and working out of this instinct for social or political life. There has never been anything to rival it in history. No modern nation has shown the same extraordinary political sense and sanity. The Romans were not great political philosophers. They did not think very much about the principles on which they acted; but simply because of their peculiar gift in this direction they welded together a social order which lasted throughout their Empire in a wonderful way; and to this day the law of Europe is to an enormous extent the law of ancient Rome.
To ancient Greece, it is hard to say what we do not owe. Her peculiar characteristic is intellectual passion; a passion for reaching perfection in just what the intellect is particularly qualified to grasp, truth and beauty. No doubt the ancient Greeks themselves thought a great deal about their ordinary politics and their military activities, and the wars between the various States; but these matter very little. The Greek people are significant for evermore not because of the Athenian trireme or the Macedonian phalanx, but because Aeschylus stood in astonished awe before the operation of the Divine Justice; because Sophocles reflected the whole of human life, even its ugliest manifestations, in the mirror of a soul so calm and pure, that as we look at that reflection all life seems bathed in peace and beauty; because Euripides entered into the sorrows of simple folk; because Thucydides, with a still unrivalled zeal for the genuine truth of history, said the wise word about nearly every political condition that has arisen since his time; because Plato dreamed "a Vision of all time and all existence," proclaimed that it can never be just to do harm to any man whatever harm he may have done to us; proclaimed also that "God is in no way unrighteous, but in all ways absolutely righteous, nor is anything more like to God than whosoever among men shall become perfectly righteous;" foreseeing also that if a perfectly righteous man should come on earth he would die, scourged and crucified.[#] There is nowhere before the New Testament anything that comes nearer to its own highest truths, not in the Old Testament itself, than what you will find in Plato.
[#] Republic i. 335*d*; Theaetetus 176*c*; Republic ii. 361*e*.
This influence,—the influence of this intellectual passion—has been the driving force in nearly all the movements since that time. It has been said there is nothing in the world which moves that is not Greek in origin, and it is almost true; it is from the Greeks that we have learnt "the use of reason to modify experience" and they derived it from the intellectual passion for truth and beauty.
To Palestine we owe the inspiring and governing faith of which I have already spoken—the one faith that can give real significance to these other two, faith in the Holy God at work in history.
It is noticeable that each of these countries was conspicuously weak in those other qualities which were not especially entrusted to it. Ancient Rome was not at all specially religious and was conspicuously unintellectual. The people of Greece again are not conspicuously religious, though in their cults there is a haunting beauty; and they were not at all politically successful; the history of Athens, the flower of Greece, is the history of a State in which almost every generation threw up a supreme genius who proceeded to change the constitution in accordance with his magnificent ideas; the result was political instability of an appalling character.[#] And Palestine has contributed very little to us as regards social organisation, and is markedly lacking in the scientific and artistic gifts. We have only to consider the great images that are set before us, let us say in the Book of Ezekiel, or again in the Book of Revelation, to see that there is no attempt in these efforts of the imagination to achieve a beautiful or harmonious whole. The symbolic elements are added one to another because of the value of their meaning; but there is no effort to visualise the whole; and if we try to make it, we quickly find that such a thing was never intended.
[#] It is of course true that the Greek genius gave us what we now mean by civilisation, namely, the combination of political unity and personal freedom. On this see the admirable first chapter of Mr. Edwyn Bevan's The House of Seleucus. But it remains true that the race from whose intellectual genius this whole product sprang had not in any considerable degree the capacity for controlling their own invention.
Each of these then reached a genuine supremacy in its own department; and the history of Europe is to an enormous extent the history of the inter-action of these three forces as they mingle and combine in the polities of the barbarian invaders who wrecked the Roman Empire. We watch the periods of domination of each successively. Christianity grew up within the Roman Empire, and the fascination of that great Empire cast a glamour about it in the minds even of those who destroyed it, so that the life which emerges out of chaos in the Middle Ages is predominantly very Latin. The Renaissance is precisely the invasion of Greek influence, and the Reformation is very largely the rediscovery of the Hebrew.