They only threw into the world millions of amulets and charms.

No great moral thought could proceed from races oppressed by a secular despotism, and accustomed to institutions which precluded the exercise of individual liberty.
The poetry of the soul--faith, liberty, virtue, devotion--made their appearance in the world with the two great races which, in one sense, have made humanity, viz., the Indo-European and the Semitic races.

The first religious intuitions of the Indo-European race were essentially naturalistic.

But it was a profound and moral naturalism, a loving embrace of Nature by man, a delicious poetry, full of the sentiment of the Infinite--the principle, in fine, of all that which the Germanic and Celtic genius, of that which a Shakespeare and a Goethe should express in later times.

It was neither theology nor moral philosophy--it was a state of melancholy, it was tenderness, it was imagination; it was, more than all, earnestness, the essential condition of morals and religion.