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these circumstances as under the former ? Would he not see ruin and 

 misery for his son in mature Ufe 1 Might he not even be tempted to lay 

 the foundation of a respect for truth in an immediate application of the 

 birch rod ? 



This familiar illustration might be added to and enforced abundantly 

 if necessary : but it will probably be sufficient by itself as an indication 

 of the contrast upon which I am now dwelling. It may be added 

 that, as analogy is not identity, so contrast is not contradiction. I think 

 we may well compare human and divine science, or (if we please so to 

 describe them,) physical science and spiritual, to the military staircase 

 which some of us have seen in Dover cliff, or to the similar construction 

 of the famous S. Patrick's well at Orvieto. These staircases are double, 

 and consist of two spirals like each other, supported by one central 

 column, but such that a body of men can ascend by one while another 

 body of men simultaneously and without interference descend by the 

 other : their support is, as I have said, the same ; they are inextricably 

 intertwined with each other, and the beginning and end of them are 

 identical, only that one ends where the other begins, and begins where 

 the other ends. The physical sciences begin from below, and wind 

 upwards towards heaven, while religious trutli starts from heaven and 

 descends earthwards : but neither needs to jostle with the other, and 

 both in reality revolve about the same central column and rest upon the 

 same foundation. 



It is perhaps a misfortune of this particular epoch of scientific 

 history, that one can scarcely speak of the progress of science 

 without being tempted to say something of its moral and religious 

 aspects. If I am not mistaken, there was comparatively little of such 

 temptation fifty years ago. It may be that the particular fields in which 

 science was then chiefly at work did not give occasion to so much 

 anxiety as to a possible collision between human knowledge and divine: 

 it may be that the great popularization of physical knowledge in latter 

 years, and the consequent approximation of the physical and the moral 

 in the minds of the thousands of intelligent persons who nevertheless 

 have received no real scientific training, may have introduced a danger 



