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 phenomena 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 of inductive physical science, save those whose minds have been saturated with this same view of Nature, which they have—­as an historic fact—­slowly but thoroughly learnt from the writings of these Jewish sages.

Such is the fact.  The founders of inductive physical science were not the Jews; but first the Chaldaeans, next the Greeks, next their pupils the Romans—­or rather a few sages among each race.  But what success had they?  The Chaldaean astronomers made a few discoveries concerning the motions of the heavenly bodies, which, rudimentary as they were, still prove them to have been men of rare intellect.  For a great and a patient genius must he have been, who first distinguished the planets from the fixed stars, or worked out the earliest astronomical calculation.  But they seem to have been crushed, as it were, by their own discoveries.  They stopped short.  They gave way again to the primeval fear of Nature.  They sank into planet-worship.  They invented, it would seem, that fantastic pseudo-science of astrology, which lay for ages after as an incubus on the human intellect and conscience.  They became the magicians and quacks of the old world; and mankind owed them thenceforth nothing but evil.  Among the Greeks and Romans, again, those sages who dared face Nature like reasonable men, were accused by the superstitious mob as irreverent impious atheists.  The wisest of them all, Socrates, was actually put to death on that charge; and finally, they failed.  School after school, in Greece and Rome, struggled to discover, and to get a hearing for, some theory of the universe which was founded on something like experience, reason, common sense.  They were not allowed to prosecute their attempt.  The mud-ocean of ignorance and fear in which they struggled so manfully was too strong for them; the mud-waves closed over their heads finally, as the age of the Antonines expired; and the last effort of Graeco-Roman thought to explain the universe was Neoplatonism—­the muddiest