other, one would have supposed that they would have felt more the charm and loveliness of the outward world, and have taken a greater interest in discovering its unchangeable ordinances. Is it unreasonable to refer much of this to that difference of religion which constitutes the most striking distinction between the classic and the Christian world? In the first place, the selfish isolation, the jealous individualism of ancient life, gave no encouragement to that sense of common interests among all mankind which is the justification of the scientist's pecuniarily unprofitable labors. Among the Greeks, while the feeling of devotion to the state, or rather city, was intense, the sentiment of the general welfare or the cause of humanity hardly existed. It was only with the advent of Christianity that the idea of mankind as one great family, each one of whom must labor for all the rest, came in. This idea has been the nurse, not only of modern civil freedom, but of modern science. "Not till the word barbarian was struck out of the dictionary of mankind," says Max Müller, in his "Lectures on the Science of Language," "not till the right of all nations of the world to be classed as members of one genus or kind was recognized, can we look even for the first beginning of our science. This change was effected by Christianity."
The grand thought that accompanied this sense of human brotherhood, forming the other pole of gospel truth, viz., the belief in one God and Father of men, gave an equal contribution toward supplying the intellectual soil needed for the prosperous growth of science. With the multitude of national and local gods, and even tribal or family divinities, which prevailed in the classic world, the minds of men were constantly diverted from that unity that is the scarlet thread in every royal cable of science. But monotheism, establishing unity in the divine realm, gave unity also to the order of Nature. While surrounding nations looked upon Nature in dread, and in blind superstition sacrificed their own little ones to the meteor or the volcano, the Hebrew, tracing all things up to the power of the eternal I am, beside whom there is no other god, found in all the forces and marvels of Nature fountains of good cheer and grateful praise. The earth was "the Lord's and the fullness thereof." "Dragons and all deeps, fire and hail, snow and vapor, stormy wind, fulfilling his word—all these were to praise the name of the Lord. For he commanded and they were created. He hath also established them forever and ever; he hath made a decree which shall not be moved" (Psalm cxlviii.). Christianity took up and diffused this grand view of the relation of Nature to God and to man. Though the appreciation of Nature's beauty, order, and dignity, was swamped for a time by the tide of Oriental asceticism, Grecian metaphysics, and transformed polytheism, it rose gradually above it, and established itself firmly in the mind of Christendom. It is this new interest in all the aspects, changes, and laws of the material, vegetable, and animal realms, full as
