240 THE GOSPEL, AND THE SOCIAL CREED OF SCIENCE. 



should be, freed from the trial, difficulty, and danger 

 incident to human life. 



There are, indeed, other real ills which bring no 

 counterbalancing benefit in their train; ills in abun- 

 dance, for which no knowledge or arfc has provided 

 effective remedial drugs or even mental palliations. 

 There are the stings of conscience, the corrosions of 

 long-continued remorse and sorrow, the sickness of heart 

 for the hopes long deferred, the despair of heart for the 

 hopes for ever defeated and overthrown. There is the 

 fierce and prolonged probation, which paralyzes or slays, 

 which assaults us before and behind and from all sides, 

 and which, sufficiently long continued, will harden the 

 heart to pity and dull it to good; a probation which, 

 instead of improving our virtue, rather corrupts and 

 envenoms it, turning it into its opposite ; which, in dark 

 moments, may make even the virtuous man doubt the 

 reality of virtue, and the kindly man dislike his species. 

 There are these and other evils the wreck of health, 

 ruin of fortune, loss of friends by death or estrangement, 

 for which no physical or moral medicine has yet been 

 provided in the pharmacopoeia of science, and for which 

 scarcely any soothing anodyne has yet been discovered. 

 But if science has failed, did theology or philosophy ever 

 do much to cure or assuage these classes of human griefs 

 and pangs ? Theology offered a remedy which, ad- 

 mittedly, only operated occasionally through the medium 

 of complex moral and spiritual miracles ; philosophy, 

 with greater show of reason, according to the system we 

 consulted, advised us to fortify our spirits so as to bear 

 the ills, or to make light of them, or to fly from their 

 causes. Nevertheless, the pains remained in all cases : 

 men continued to suffer, in spite of religious or philo- 

 sophical consolations. We now know better ; that some 



