and the other sciences of the schools, being for the most part
ridiculous and trifling, have so pestilent an effect upon those who are
devoted to them, that their students cannot conceive of any higher
sciences than these, but fancy that all education ends in the knowledge
of words: but the true and great sciences, more especially natural
history, make men gentle and modest in proportion to the largeness of
their apprehension, and just perception of the infiniteness of the
things they can never know. And this, it seems to me, is the principal
lesson we are intended to be caught by the book of Job; for there God
has thrown open to us the heart of a man most just and holy, and
apparently perfect in all things possible to human nature except
humility. For this he is tried: and we are shown that no suffering, no
self-examination, however honest, however stern, no searching out of the
heart by its own bitterness, is enough to convince man of his
nothingness before God; but that the sight of God's creation will do it.
For, when the Deity himself has willed to end the temptation, and to
accomplish in Job that for which it was sent, He does not vouchsafe to
reason with him, still less does He overwhelm him with terror, or
confound him by laying open before his eyes the book of his iniquities.
He opens before him only the arch of the dayspring, and the fountains of
the deep; and amidst the covert of the reeds, and on the heaving waves,
He bids him watch the kings of the children of pride,--"Behold now
Behemoth, which I made with thee:" And the work is done.

Sec. XXXII. Thus, if, I repeat, there is any one lesson in the whole book
which stands forth more definitely than another, it is this of the holy
and humbling influence of natural science on the human heart. And yet,
even here, it is not the science, but the perception, to which the good
is owing; and the natural sciences may become as harmful as any others,
when they lose themselves in classification and catalogue-making. Still,
the principal danger is with the sciences of words and methods; and it
was exactly into those sciences that the whole energy of men during the
Renaissance period was thrown. They discovered suddenly that the world
for ten centuries had been living in an ungrammatical manner, and they
made it forthwith the end of human existence to be grammatical. And it
mattered thenceforth nothing what was said, or what was done, so only
that it was said with schola