|
|
|
|
|
|
106 ARCHITECTURE AND PAINTING
them.” It was a pastoral country: his substance, besides camels and asses, was 7000 sheep. It was a mountain country, fed by streams descending from the high snows. “My brethren have dealt deceitfully as a brook, and as the stream of brooks they pass away; which are blackish by reason of the ice, and wherein the snow is hid: What time they wax warm they vanish: when it is hot they are consumed out of their place.” Again: “If I wash myself with snow water, and make my hands never so clean.” Again: “Drought and heat consume the snow waters.” It was a rocky country, with forests and verdure rooted in the rocks. “His branch shooteth forth in his garden; his roots are wrapped about the heap, and seeth the place of stones.” Again: “Thou shalt be in league with the stones of the field.” It was a place visited, like the valleys of Switzerland, by convulsions and falls of mountains. “Surely the mountain falling cometh to nought, and the rock is removed out of his place. The waters wear the stones; thou washest away the things which grow out of the dust of the earth.” “He removeth the mountains and they know not: he overturneth them in his anger.” “He putteth forth his hand upon the rock: he overturneth the mountains by the roots: he cutteth out rivers among the rocks.” I have not time to go farther into this; but you see Job’s country was one like your own, full of pleasant brooks and rivers, rushing among the rocks, and of all other sweet and noble elements of landscape. The magnificent allusions to natural scenery throughout the book are therefore calculated to touch the heart to the end of time.
80. Then at the central point of Jewish prosperity, you have the first great naturalist the world ever saw, Solomon; not permitted, indeed, to anticipate, in writing, the discoveries of modern times, but so gifted as to show us that heavenly wisdom is manifested as much in the knowledge of the hyssop that springeth out of the wall1 as in political and philosophical speculation.
1 [1 Kings iv. 33.]
|
|
|
[Version 0.04: March 2008]
