Again, I need hardly refer to the Book of Job, especially from the 37th to the 41st chapters, where both single appearances of the world and the arrangement of the whole are depicted in language which has graven itself on the heart of all nations: “The Lord walks on the heights of the sea, on the ridges of the towering waves heaped up by the storm.” Or again: “The morning dawn illumines the border of the earth, and moulds variously the canopy of clouds as the hand of man moulds the ductile clay.” Or turn again to the great poet-prophet Isaiah. Here you find no detailed descriptions, but all Nature fused and molten before the intense fire, now of his indignation, now of his adoring awe, now of his spiritual joy; one moment lifting his eyes to the midnight heavens as the proof and witness of the Divine Omnipotence; another, in his soul’s exultation over God’s redemptive mercy, calling aloud to the heavens to sing, and the lower parts of the earth to shout for joy, “Break forth into singing, ye mountains, O forest and every tree therein.” But this transport comes from no mere love of Nature. It has a deeper origin. It is for that Jehovah hath comforted his people, and will have mercy upon his afflicted. This is the solemn spiritual joy in which he calls on the heavens and the earth to sympathize. The following seem to be some of the chief notes of Hebrew poetry in its dealing with Nature:— 1. Nature, as we have seen, is never represented as an independent power or as resplendent with her own beauty, but as the direct creation, one might almost say, the garment of the great Jehovah. In fact it is remarkable that the word Nature, in the sense we now use it in, never occurs in the Bible. Neither the word nor the thing, as a separate entity, seems ever to have been present to the Hebrew mind. In everything they saw or heard God himself as immediately present, ready as it were to rend the veil and manifest himself. 2. The sober, truthful estimate of all things in the external world. They are spoken of exactly as they are. There is no temptation to make too much of them; for He who is behind them and who made them is so much greater, so much more present to thought, that reverence for Him precludes exaggeration. The accuracy of the Bible descriptions of these things is quite unexampled in other literature.[13] This faithfulness to fact, this veneration for natural truth, this feeling that things are too sacred to be exaggerated or distorted, or in any way trifled with, comes directly from the habit of regarding all visible Nature as created and continually upheld by One Omnipresent God. Habitual reverence for Him from whom they come sobers the writers and makes them truthful.