But we must not accept even an inspiring idea blindly. Were these people of the Middle Ages right in this plan and conception of theirs? Plato hints at some such thought in his contention that knowledge and virtue are fundamentally identical, and that if virtue be divine in its origin, so must knowledge be also. Ancient Egypt, too, was not in the dark in this matter. “Pharaoh said unto his servants, can we find such a one as this, a man in whom the Spirit of God is.” Practical discernment and knowledge of every-day matters, and of how to deal with emergencies, were not held by this king of Egypt to be teachings unworthy of the Spirit of God. “The Spirit of God came upon him and he prophesied among them,” we are told of Saul, and we may believe that this is the history of every great invention and every great discovery of the secrets of nature. “Then David gave to Solomon his son ... the pattern of all that he had by the spirit, of the courts of the house of the Lord.” We have here a suggestion of the source of every conception of beauty to be expressed in forms of art. But it is not only with high themes of science and art that the divine Spirit concerns Himself. It sometimes occurs to one to wonder who invented, in the first place, the way of using the most elemental necessaries of life. Who first discovered the means of producing fire, of joining wood, of smelting ores, of sowing seed, of grinding corn? We cannot think of ourselves as living without knowing these things; and yet each one must have been a great idea when it first made a stir in the mind of the man who conceived it. Where did he get his first idea? Happily, we are told, in a case so typical that it is a key to all the rest:-- “Doth the plowman plow all day to sow? Doth he open and break the clods of his ground? When he hath made plain the face thereof, doth he not cast abroad the fitches and scatter the cummin, and cast in the principal wheat and the appointed barley and the rie in their place? For his God doth instruct him to discretion, and doth teach him. For the fitches are not threshed with a threshing instrument, neither is a cart wheel turned about upon the cummin; but the fitches are beaten out with a staff, and the cummin with a rod. Bread corn is bruised; because he will not ever be threshing it, nor break it with the wheel of his cart, nor bruise it with his horsemen. This also cometh forth from the Lord of Hosts, which is wonderful in counsel, and excellent in working.”--Isa. xxviii. 24, &c.