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



reached this stage, and who have begun to cultivate natural 

 knowledge with no desire but that of &quot; increasing God s honour 

 and bettering man s estate.&quot; 



For example, what could seem wiser, from a mere material 

 point of view, more innocent, from a theological one, to an 

 ancient people, than that they should learn the exact succession 

 of the seasons, as warnings for their husbandmen ; or the position 

 of the stars, as guides to their rude navigators ? But what has 

 grown out of this search for natural knowledge of so merely 

 useful a character ? You all know the reply. Astronomy, which 

 of all sciences has filled men s minds with general ideas of a 

 character most foreign to their daily experience, and has, more 

 than any other, rendered it impossible for them to accept the 

 beliefs of their fathers. Astronomy, which tells them that 

 this so vast and seemingly solid earth is but an atom among 

 atoms, whirling, no man knows whither, through illimitable 

 space; which demonstrates that what we call the peaceful 

 heaven above us, is but that space, filled by an infinitely subtle 

 matter whose particles are seething and surging, like the waves 

 of an angry sea; which opens up to us infinite regions where 

 nothing is known, or ever seems to have been known, but matter 

 and force, operating according to rigid rules ; which leads us to 

 contemplate phenomena the very nature of which demonstrates 

 that they must have had a beginning, and that they must have 

 an end, but the very nature of which also proves that the 

 beginning was, to our conceptions of time, infinitely remote, and 

 that the end is as immeasurably distant. 



But it is not alone those who pursue astronomy who ask for 

 bread and receive ideas. What more harmless than the attempt 

 to lift and distribute water by pumping it ; what more absolutely 

 and grossly utilitarian ? But out of pumps grew the discussions 

 about Nature s abhorrence of a vacuum; and then it was dis 

 covered that Nature does not abhor a vacuum, but that air has 

 weight ; and that notion paved the way for the doctrine that all 

 matter has weight, and that the force which produces weight is 

 co-extensive with the universe, in short, to the theory of 



