8 LAY SERMONS, ESSAYS, AND REVIEWS. [i. 



no less certainly is the difference due to the improvement of our 

 knowledge of Nature, and the extent to which that improved 

 knowledge has been incorporated with the household words of 

 men, and has supplied the springs of their daily actions. 



Granting for a moment, then, the truth of that which the 

 depreciators of natural knowledge are so fond of urging, that its 

 improvement can only add to the resources of our material 

 civilization ; admitting it to be possible that the founders of the 

 Royal Society themselves looked for no other reward than 

 this, I cannot confess that I was guilty of exaggeration when 

 I hinted, that to him who had the gift of distinguishing between 

 prominent events and important events, the origin of a combined 

 effort on the part of mankind to improve natural knowledge 

 might have loomed larger than the Plague and have outshone 

 the glare of the Fire ; as a something fraught with a wealth of 

 beneficence to mankind, in comparison with which the damage 

 done by those ghastly evils would shrink into insignificance. 



It is very certain that for every victim slain by the plague, 

 hundreds of mankind exist and find a fair share of happiness in 

 the world by the aid of the spinning jenny. And the great fire&amp;gt; 

 at its worst, could not have burned the supply of coal, the daily 

 working of which, in the bowels of the earth, made possible by 

 the steam pump, gives rise to an amount of wealth to which the 

 millions lost in old London are but as an old song. 



But spinning jenny and steam pump are, after all, but toys, 

 possessing an accidental value ; and natural knowledge creates 

 multitudes of more subtle contrivances, the praises of which do- 

 not happen to be sung because they are not directly convertible 

 into instruments for creating wealth. When I contemplate 

 natural knowledge squandering such gifts among men, the only 

 appropriate comparison I can find for her is, to liken her to such 

 a peasant woman as one sees in the Alps, striding ever upward, 

 heavily burdened, and with mind bent only on her home ; but 

 yet, without effort and without thought, knitting for her children. 

 Now stockings are good and comfortable things, and the children 



