Page:Aesthetic Papers.djvu/74

64 a very different book from "Locke on the Human Understanding."

The time is not far distant. The cock has crowed. I hear the distant lowing of the cattle which are grazing on the mountains. "Watchman, what of the night? Watchman, what of the night? The watchman saith, The morning cometh."

 

this moment when so many nations seem to be waking up to re-assert their individuality, and, more than all, when the idea is started, that the object of Providence in societies is to produce unities of life, to which the individuals that compose them shall each contribute something, even as every limb and fibre of the physical system contributes to the wholeness of the body of a man,—it is wise to cast the eye back over the records of history, and ask whether there be any thing in the past which predicts such consummation.

The assertion of the Hebrew nation to an individuality which has ever been believed to be an especial object of Divine Providence, and the fact that this faith, developed in the patriarchs of the nation, and guarded by the system of religious rites which has rendered the name of Moses immortal, have resulted in accomplishing what it predicted,—rises immediately before every one's mind. But the case of the Hebrews, as it is commonly viewed, rather obscures than illustrates the general truth; for the very brilliancy of the illustration so dazzles the eyes which gaze upon it, that they do not see anywhere else in history the same truth illustrated; and thus it is looked upon rather as an exception than as an expression of a general principle on which nations may act.

There is, however, in antiquity another nation, whose idea was also something more than a blind instinct, but which, from the earliest times we hear of it, knew itself to be a moral being, and did not live by accident. This nation was 