212 NATURE AND MAN. 



has never before tried their solidity. New methods of research, 

 new bodies of facts, new modes of interpretation, new orders of 

 ideas, are concurring to drive onwards a flood which will bear 

 with unprecedented force against our whole fabric of doctrine ; 

 and no edifice is safe against its undermining power, that is not 

 firmly bedded on the solid rock of truth. How, then, are we to 

 prepare ourselves to meet it ? Shall we, like Canute and his 

 courtiers, rest secure in our own supremacy, and try to keep back 

 the waves by simply forbidding their advance? We need not go 

 as far as Rome for examples of this mode of dealing with the 

 difificulty ; for we have a good many minor popes at home, who 

 can scold quit? as well — and just as ineffectually. Shall we go 

 out, as Mrs. Partington did, with pattens and broom, to try and 

 sweep away the Atlantic ? Such seems to me the method of 

 those who aim to put down a great scientific hypothesis by 

 citing a text or two ; * setting themselves up on the pattens 

 of authority, and using arguments that are no more capable of 

 holding water than the incoherent twigs of a besom. Or shall 

 we imitate the able engineer, who, without experience of the 

 power of a Channel-sea driven onwards at highest spring-tide 

 by a south-west gale, thought to protect his railway-embankment 

 by a massive wall ? That wall was broken down, that embank- 

 ment washed away, by the very first storm that tested its security. 

 And so will it be with any barrier which the intellect of man may 

 try to erect against the progress of other intellects than his own ; 

 for it is only the Source of all Thought who can say " Hitherto 

 " shalt thou come, and no further, and here shall thy proud waves 

 " be stayed." 



To what example, then, can we look ? What better can we 

 wish for than is supplied by that wonderful edifice, which, for 

 more than a century, braving the violence of the most destructive 

 storms, has calmly and unintermittingly displayed its guiding light 

 to the wave-tossed mariner, and which has furnished the pattern 

 of every similar beacon elsewhere erected for the direction and 

 warning of the navigator. I need not tell you to what I refer ; 

 for Smeaton and the Eddystone are household words to every 

 Briton. But I would show you something of the mind of the man 

 * See " Priests and Philosophers," by the Rev. W. Greswell. 



