In the land of Ham nothing was nobler than a few dull emblems of thought, sitting on a lotus leaf, immersed in the contemplation of their own divinity, or fierce warrior-deities, Molochs, Baals, or Saturns, while the classic West deified the sentiments of the human mind; and, though steeped in viciousness, yet represented as beings presiding over nature in beautiful and commanding forms. A potent spell of fascination dwelt in the mere abstractions of pagan thought embodied in a Hebe, Venus, or Minerva; and false as were the spiritual views of their authors, they exercised a charm of imagination which still speaks to more enlightened intellects, and evokes sad regrets from holier hearts. The province of Shem was faith and not philosophy. His descendants were never successful in dialectics, and the best of them under the old dispensation only stated the matter of their belief, but never undertook to prove it. When Job attempted religious argumentation, and would justify the ways of God to man by a process of theodicean philosophy, he acknowledged his failure by avowing the incomprehensibility of human destinies. And when the pious and philosophic Ecclesiastes attempted to argue on rationalistic principles, he fell into inextricable doubt, and could resist despair only by implicit submission to the word vouchsafed from heaven: "Fear God and keep his commandments, for this is the whole duty of man." Such was the last dictum of Hebraism in the fifth century before Christ, at the moment when the daring speculation of Japhet had passed its culminating point. This, too, was the age of Haggai and Malachi, in whom sacred truth is announced in purely didactic and not argumentative forms. Without anticipating the designs of Providence, we think with inexpressible delight of the last and best expression of Jewish faith united to Japhetic reason, and happily blended together in the splendors of an infinitely loftier wisdom to enlighten mankind.