The reaction into idolatry and Babylonian star worship in the long reign of Manasseh synchronized and was connected with vassalage 1 There is some danger in too strictly construing the language of the prophets and also the psalmists.
The reference seems to be not so much to the variety and complexity of phenomena as to the impossibility of construing them rationally or in such a way that man may foresee and provide for his future.
It is, of course, to the state courts that the duty belongs of construing the constitution as well as the statutes of the state, and if they find any state law to be inconsistent with the state constitution it is their duty to declare it invalid.
These and the property qualifications for suffrage, which was granted to " all inhabitants of this state, of full age, who are worth fifty pounds proclamation money, clear estate in the same," &c., were soon considered undemocratic; and the democratic tendency of certain election officers may be seen from their construing the words " all inhabitants of full age " to include women, and from their permitting women to vote.
Without forgetting that Augustine was partly a symptom and only in part a cause - without committing ourselves to the one-sidedness of the great-man method of construing history - we must do justice to his supreme greatness.
