Our Retrospect. 



105 



association for mutual culture or for any kind of progress tending 

 toward the better welfare and education of the people. It may seem, 

 at first sight, that evidence to the contrary might he adduced from the 

 utterances of Job and his three so-called friends. That these men 

 must have been animated with a spirit of keen enquiry might well 

 be judged from their conversation, which shows not only a cultivation 

 perhaps superior to their age, but an earnest appreciation of all fields 

 of knowledge, not to be controlled or kept in check, but compelling 

 them at almost every sentence to turn from that stern purpose of re- 

 crimination which seems to have brought them together, and indulge 

 themselves in an abundant variety of illustration and comparison from 

 nature's works. Arcturus, the Pleiades and the other wonders of the 

 firmament, behemoth, leviathan and the secrets of the great deep, 

 here and there a wandering into dreamland and the habitation of 

 spirits, with some faint dawning of the mysteries of psychology, — as 

 we search through the pages of that most wonderful poem of all ages 

 and languages, what department of sidereal or terrestrial science do we 

 find untouched by these four men in their seeming manifestation of 

 overflowing love of knowledge? But if we examine closely, we see 

 that even in these utterances there is very little real spirit of enquiry, 

 or at least little perception that enquiry could be of any avail. "Who 

 can measure the depths thereof?" That is the prevailing and hopeless 

 tone of the whole poem: not a desire for investigation, but rather an 

 apathetic condition of wonderment about things that it seemed to 

 those men could never be satisfactorily explained at all. 



And so the world seems to have run on, with little care for any thing 

 except the gratification of physical wants and sordid ambitions, and 

 with only an occasional thought of response to the tempting of na- 

 ture's marvels. I do not wish to be understood as implying that the 

 history of mankind shows no regard or capacity for knowledge or pro- 

 gression. There have been bright spots everywhere and in the annals 

 of all nations that have had sufficient richness of language to be ca- 

 pable of a literature, and there have been many men of genius who 

 have adorned those languages and left us imperishable treasures of 

 thought. But the fact remains that where there have appeared minds 

 in any way gifted for investigation and in sufficient numbers to invite 

 co-operation, it seems always to have been ordered for selfish or su- 

 perstitious purposes, with timid conception of the enlarged results 

 that might have been reached through generous method, and altogether 

 with very faint and desultory groping within narrow limits. There 

 were the schools of Greece, for instance, celebrated in their day as the 

 condensation of the intellects of gifted men and which have left us a 



