These people, at a very remote epoch, emerged from a country highly civilised, but sunk in the superstitions of nature-worship.  They invaded and mingled with tribes whose superstitions were even more debased, silly, and foul than those of the Egyptians from whom they escaped.  Their own masses were for centuries given up to nature-worship.  Now among those 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 permanence 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 according 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 phenomena of their land, to which their countrymen were slaying their own children in the clefts of the rocks, and, like Theophrastus’ 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