LINJfEAN SOCIETY OF LONDOX. 4I 



studies, fascinating but laborious, since pursued through so many- 

 years of my life, with it must be admitted a plodding industry, on 

 the results of which the President this afternoon has contrived in 

 his kindly review to shed a passing gleam of sunshine. Along 

 with these unambitious efforts my awakened mind could not 

 neglect the history and progress of science in some of its many 

 branches. For, turn where you will, to astronomy, geology, 

 biology, or almost any other compartment of human enquiry, you 

 learn in some important regards the very same lessons. Por 

 example, you find that the most eminent among teachers and 

 thinkers and practical men all from time to time make gross 

 blunders, so that confessedly we are all liable to error, even, as the 

 witty Cambridge philosopher added, even the youngest of us. But 

 apart from the stumblings of individual students, in every school 

 of thought and section of science we find continual changes of 

 opinion, new points of view and new discoveries upsetting old 

 theories, however firmly they seemed to be grounded. The 

 inference is clear that in man's intellectual efforts there is as yet 

 no finality. We are and always have been only making guesses 

 at truth. How absurd it would have been had any parliament of 

 science been enabled to enact that all scientific truth was enun- 

 ciated by a selected list of writers extending from Aristotle to 

 Lord Bacon, and that nothing could be true in science unless it 

 conformed with what those writers had already told us ! Now, 

 this is exactly what has happened with a selected list of old 

 Semitic literature, that very weapon which I was originally taught 

 to confide in as invincible, and which thousands of persons still 

 regard as a single book, instead of what it is in fact, a highly 

 diversified assemblage of writings, attended by all those incidents 

 of uncertainty to which human effort is at all times liable. 



There is, 1 think, nothing in science to prevent our believing 

 that, unseen by the physical eye, there may be horses and chariots 

 of fire camping round about the righteous to protect them from all 

 evil, or that there may be guardian angels whispering to the inner 

 ear, " This is the way, walk ye in it, turning neither to the right 

 hand nor to the left." But, because these things are possible, is 

 it not childish to maintain that the Hebrew literature, extending 

 over many centuries, is one and indivisible, while the facts show 

 plainly the very opposite of this contention ? From beginning to 

 end we find a long succession of guesses at truth, some of them 

 in the highest degree ennobling, consoling, full of hope, radiant 

 with sweet charit}'-, but others totally inconsistent with these, 

 grotesque or inhuman, such as have fettered the human mind for 

 ages and have exercised over it again and again an intolerable 

 tyranny. There is about to meet in this country a great Pan- 

 Anglican Congress, in which will be gathered ecclesiastics, not 

 only high in station but of lofty ideals, self-denying lives, men (be 

 it remembered) fully equal in mental calibre to our leading men of 

 science. Consider now the hold on general education which these 

 able theologians with an immense following will claim to exercise. 



