426 LECTURES AND ESSAYS [1874- 



to know in His historical revelation is a living, loving 

 God, ever working and ever present to His people. Now 

 the whole universe is seen to be not instinct with dark 

 and cruel forces, but full of the spiritual harmony of a 

 gracious personal plan of righteousness and love. From 

 such a contemplation of the world in its relation to God, 

 a rich religious poetry could not fail to spring. Nature 

 itself in that harmony in which it is revealed to the eye 

 of faith is one grand poem, an embodied thought of God 

 set forth to be read by man, and not only to be read with 

 distant admiration, but to be grasped with personal 

 sympathy and trust. So conceived, no part of the universe 

 was indifferent to the believing Israelite. His was no 

 religion of asceticism, that should turn him away from the 

 contemplation and enjoyment of outer nature, and shut 

 up his spiritual life within himself. His keen zest for the 

 beauties and pleasures of the outer life was only quickened, 

 though it was purified and solemnised by the thought that 

 it is God s hand that crowns the year with goodness, and 

 His majesty and grace that all nature proclaims. Or 

 again, when nature frowns, the Hebrew, raised above 

 slavish fear of a malignant, destructive power, could hear 

 the voice of Jehovah thundering forth the declaration 

 that the merciful and gracious God is also the God of 

 judgment, whose holy justice will by no means clear the 

 guilty. To comprehend the full influence of the spiritual 

 religion on the development of the poetry of Israel, we 

 must remember that the idea of the universe as a natural 

 unity, of which our noblest nature-poetry is so full, was 

 entirely foreign to the Hebrew mind. The keen observa 

 tion and subtle sympathy with individual sides of natural 

 things which distinguishes Semitic poetry, is, as we have 

 already learned, altogether dissociated from the faculty 

 of artistic grouping and plastic composition of an organic 

 whole. The only unity which the poet can realise is a 

 unity of feeling and purpose. Thus a really grand and 

 catholic poetry of nature could be achieved by the Hebrews 



