The synagogue was already full when Helon and his friends entered it, and after the usual salutation, the service began by praising God. The reader then going up to the rolls, which lay under the circular roof, read a passage from the law, which he at the same time interpreted to the people. After a second ascription of praise, he read the following passage from the prophet Jeremiah: “Ah Lord God; behold thou hast made the heavens and the earth, by thy great power and thy stretched-out arm, and there is nothing too hard for thee: thou showest loving-kindness unto thousands, and recompensest the iniquities of the fathers into the bosom of the children after them. The great the mighty God, the Lord of Hosts, is thy name: great in counsel and mighty in work art thou, whose eyes are open upon all the ways of the sons of men, to give to every one according to his ways, and according to the fruit of his doings; who hast shown signs and wonders in the land of Egypt, even to this day, and in Israel, and among other men, and hast made thee a name, as it is at this day, and hast brought forth thy people Israel out of the land of Egypt, with signs and with wonders, and with a strong hand and with a stretched-out arm, and with great terror; and hast given to them this land, which thou didst swear to their fathers to give them, a land flowing with milk and honey.”[123] When he had read this passage, and translated it into the common dialect of the country, the celebrated teacher of the law, whom we have mentioned, rose up, and proposed to deliver a discourse. Footnote 123: Jer. xxxii. 17-22. Myron had objected to his friend Helon, that the people of Israel were destitute of skill in all the fine arts; and in respect to eloquence, resembled their lawgiver, who was “slow of speech and of a slow tongue.”[124] To the former part of the imputation Helon had already replied; to the latter he might have answered, that although his nation never possessed an Isocrates or a Demosthenes, no people ever had orators, whose eloquence was more vigorous, animated, or spirit-stirring than the prophets in Israel. What artificial rhetorician, of the schools or the Agora, ever graved his words so deep in the hearts of his hearers as they did? They spoke the word of Jehovah, by the command and inspiration of Jehovah; the Greeks, the words of human wisdom, at the suggestion of vanity, or to promote the purposes of ambition. How different is the effect of a discourse, in which a divine power dwells, from those which have been composed with the strictest adherence to the rules of art! Footnote 124: Exod. iv. 10.