

6 % RELICS FROM THE WRECK 



" The hope of truth grows stronger day by day ; 

 I hear the soul of Man around me waking, 

 Like a great sea its frozen fetters breaking, 

 And flinging up to heaven its sunlit spray, 

 Tossing huge continents in scornful play, 

 And crushing them with din of grinding thunder 

 That makes old emptiness stare in wonder." 



Disputation is an irksome and thankless employment, 

 and scarcely answers the purpose of conviction ; because the 

 mind naturally sets up its own old defences whenever its 

 prejudices are attacked. "Men do not willingly," says the 

 Rev. Thomas Milner, "abandon notions that have grown 

 with their growth, and strengthened with their strength, 

 and struck their roots deep and fast into their ( heart of 

 hearts.' Besides being mortifying to intellectual vanity 

 to admit an error, they disrelish the mental disturbance oc- 

 casioned by the breaking up of old associations of ideas, 

 and the toil which a correct conception of truth may require. 

 Much of the suspicion with which the scientific have been 

 visited, may be referred to prejudices in favor of early im- 

 bibed opinions, to which the demonstrations of science have 

 been opposed prejudices which are known in the pages of 

 Lord Bacon as idola specus, the individual mind being the 

 den to which that sagacious observer of human nature al- 

 ludes, and repugnant as it is to the owner and guardian of 

 the mental cavern to have its chambers of imagery searched, 

 and the occupant of any niche ejected, men have beeh com- 

 pelled repeatedly to submit to the process, however they 

 may have resisted the attempt. A country schoolmaster 

 may still discourse of the four elements fire, air, earth, and 

 water ; and his boys may look up to him as a prodigy of 

 erudition ; but cttemical analysis teaches us to smile at the 

 enumeration, though old as the days of the Greek philoso- 

 phers. So the antiquated notion of the earth being an ex- 

 tended plane, like a table, as motionless as that household 

 instrument, the sun coming to take his daily peep at it, like 



