x.] JEWISH SAGES AND NATURE-WOESHIP. 233 



Jews arose men a very few sages prophets call 

 them what you will, the men were inspired heroes and 

 philosophers who assumed towards nature an attitude 

 utterly different from the rest of their countrymen and 

 the rest of the then world ; who denounced superstition 

 and the dread of nature as the parent of all manner of 

 vice and misery ; who for themselves said boldly that 

 they discerned in the universe an order, a unity, a per- 

 manence of law, which gave them courage instead of 

 fear. They found delight and not dread in the thought 

 that the universe obeyed a law which could not be 

 broken ; that all things continued to that day accord- 

 ing to a certain ordinance. They took a view of Nature 

 totally new in that age; healthy, human, cheerful, 

 loving, trustful, and yet reverent identical with that 

 which happily is beginning to prevail in our own day. 

 They defied those very volcanic and meteoric phe- 

 nomena of their land, to which their countrymen were 

 slaying their own children in the clefts of the rocks, 

 and, like Theophrastus's superstitious man, pouring 

 their drink-offerings on the smooth stones of the valley; 

 and declared that, for their part, they would not fear, 

 though the earth was moved, and though the hills were 

 carried into the midst of the sea; though the waters 

 raged and swelled, and the mountains shook at the 

 tempest. 



The fact is indisputable. And you must pardon me 

 if I express my belief that these men, if they had felt 

 it their business to found a school of inductive physical 

 science, would, owing to that temper of mind, have 

 achieved a very signal success. I ground that opinion 

 on the remarkable, but equally indisputable fact, that 

 no nation has ever succeeded in perpetuating a school 



