‘Stoop, boys: this gate Instructs you how to adore the heavens, and bows you To morning’s holy office: the gates of monarchs Are arched so high, that giants may jet through And keep their impious turbans on, without Good-morrow to the sun. Hail, thou fair heaven! We house i’ the rock, yet use thee not so hardly As prouder livers do.’ Omit only that part which speaks the bitterness of disappointed hopes which once centred round the doing as prouder livers do, and the rest breathes the fresh air of mountain life, different altogether from our life, free alike from its cares and temptations and moral responsibilities. Belarius gazes up with an unawful eye into the heavenly depths, and fearlessly pays his morning orisons. ‘Hail, thou fair heaven!’ There is no sense here of sin, humility, self-reproach. And in this respect--taking this for the moment as the type of an Aryan religion--how strongly it contrasts with the utterances of Hebrew writers! Is this the voice of natural as opposed to inspired religion? Not altogether; for the Semitic mind was throughout antiquity imbued with a deeper sense of awe or fear--awe in the higher religion, fear in the lower--than ever belonged to the Aryan character. We see this difference in the religions of Egypt and Assyria; and it will be remembered that, when speaking of the earliest records of the Semitic and Aryan races, we took occasion to say that it may very well have been to their admixture of Semitic blood that the Egyptians stood indebted for the mystic and allegorical part of their religious system; for among all the Semitic people, whether in ancient or modern times, we may observe a tendency--if no more--towards religious thought, and towards thoughts of that mystic character which characterized the Egyptian mythology.