which they belong, where would they be now if it had not been for Israel, and for the stern check which Israel put upon the glorification and divinisation of this natural bent of mankind, this attractive aspect of the not ourselves? Perhaps going in procession, Vice-Chancellor, bedels, masters, scholars, and all, in spite of their Professor of Moral Philosophy, to the temple of Aphrodite! Nay, and very likely Mr. Birks himself, his brows crowned with myrtle and scarcely a shade of melancholy on his countenance, would have been going along with them! It is Israel and his seriousness that have saved the authorities of the University of Cambridge from carrying their divinisation of pleasure to these lengths, or from making more of it, indeed, than a mere passing intellectual play; and even this play Israel would have beheld with displeasure, saying: O turn away mine eyes lest they behold vanity, but quicken Thou me in thy way![1] So earnestly and exclusively were Israel's regards bent on one aspect of the not ourselves: its aspect as a power making for conduct, for righteousness. Israel's Eternal was the Eternal which says: 'Be ye holy, for I am holy!' Now, as righteousness is but a heightened conduct, so holiness is but a heightened righteousness; a more finished, entire, and awe-filled righteousness. It was such a righteousness which was Israel's ideal; and therefore it was that Israel said, not indeed what our Bibles make him say, but this: 'Hear, O Israel! The Eternal is our God, The Eternal alone.'
And in spite of his turn for personification, his want of a clear boundary-line between poetry and science, his inaptitude to express even abstract notions by other than highly concrete terms,—in spite of these scientific disadvantages, or rather, perhaps, because of them, because he had no talent for abstruse reasoning to lead him astray,—the spirit
