pre-eminently above all ancient races which we know, the scientific
instinct; the teachableness and modesty; the clear eye and quick ear; the
hearty reverence for fact and nature, and for the human body, and mind,
and spirit; for human nature, in a word, in its completeness, as the
highest fact upon this earth. Therefore they became in after years, not
only the great colonisers and the great civilisers of the old world--the
most practical people, I hold, which the world ever saw; but the parents
of all sound physics as well as of all sound metaphysics. Their very
religion, in spite of its imperfections, helped forward their education,
not in spite of, but by means of, that anthropomorphism which we
sometimes too hastily decry. As Mr. Gladstone says in a passage which I
must quote at length--"As regarded all other functions of our nature,
outside the domain of the life to Godward--all those functions which are
summed up in what St. Paul calls the flesh and the mind, the psychic and
bodily life, the tendency of the system was to exalt the human element,
by proposing a model of beauty, strength, and wisdom, in all their
combinations, so elevated that the effort to attain them required a
continual upward strain. It made divinity attainable; and thus it
effectually directed the thought and aim of man

'Along the line of limitless desires.'

Such a scheme of religion, though failing grossly in the government of
the passions, and in upholding the standard of moral duties, tended
powerfully to produce a lofty self-respect, and a large, free, and varied
conception of humanity. It incorporated itself in schemes of notable
discipline for mind and body, indeed of a lifelong education; and these
habits of mind and action had their marked results (to omit many other
greatnesses) in a philosophy, literature, and art, which remain to this
day unrivalled or unsurpassed."