be repeated too often: “If any so-called religion takes away from this great saying of Micah, I think it wantonly mutilates, while if it adds thereto, I think it obscures, the perfect idea of religion.” No two minds were more unlike than Huxley’s and Coleridge’s--the one the scientist, the other the metaphysician; the one the agnostic, the other the mystic. Yet they agreed in perceiving in the prophetic teaching a unique expression of basic moral truth. BLANCO WHITE’S SONNET Fear is natural by night. Man in the day-time is beset by foes; but while he can use his eyes, he has a sense of security. Something he can effect towards self-protection. But in the dark he feels helpless. Hence it is natural that the Hebrew poets of the Midrash (on Psalm 92) have used as a theme Adam’s first experience of the dark. There was no darkness on the first Friday after Creation. The primeval light, which illumined the world from end to end, was not quenched, though Adam had already sinned before night-fall of the day on which he was born. But the Sabbath came with the Friday’s close, and the celestial rays shone on through the hours that should have been obscure. When, however, the Sabbath had passed, the heavenly light passed with it, and Adam, to his consternation, was unable to see. Would not the wily serpent choose this as a favorable moment for insidious onslaught? Then the light that failed in nature was kindled in man’s intellect. Adam, by the friction of two stones, cleverly made artificial light, and so could see again. So runs one form of the Jewish legend. Another (I am summarizing both from Prof. Louis Ginzberg’s _Legends of the Jews_, vol. i, pp. 86-89) expresses the thought differently. The primeval light does not figure in this version, but it is the normal sun that sinks before Adam’s gaze on the Saturday night. Adam was filled with compunction. “Woe is me!”, he exclaimed, “I have sinned, and because of me is the world darkened; because of me it will again return to a condition of chaos.” So he passed the long vigil of the dark in tears, and Eve wept with him. But with the day he dried his eyes. For he saw the sun rise once more, and realized that the alternations of day and night were part of the divine order of nature.