"How, then, can man be justified with God, or how can he be clean that is born of a woman? _Man that is a worm, and the son of man, which is a worm_." This, then, is the standpoint of the Oriental. He believes he is a poor little worm. His philosophy must necessarily _trail_ in the dust. A worm cannot have the thoughts of an eagle; a worm cannot have the imagination of a _Titan_; a worm sees the world only as a worm may. This is the angle of vision of the Asiatic. He calls himself a worm, and naturally his view of life shrinks to the limits of his standpoint. To he perfectly fair, however, we must admit there are passages in all the bibles of the Orient which are as daring as those found in any European book, but they represent only the strayings of the Oriental mind, not its normal pulse. The habitual accent of the Oriental is that man, calling a woman his mother, is a worm. In the Psalms of David, or whoever wrote the book, we read these words: "_I am a worm, and not a man_." What did the Oriental see in the worm, which induced him to select it out of all things as the original, so to speak, of man? The worm _crawls_ and _creeps_ and _writhes_. Nothing is so distressing as to see its helpless wiggling--and its home is in the dust; dirt is its daily food. Moreover, it is in danger of being stamped or trampled into annihilation at any instant. A worm _represents the minimum_ of worth,--the dregs in the cup of existence; it is the scum or the froth of life, which one may blow into the air. It is impossible to descend lower than this in self-abasement.