1*78 Canadian Record of Science. 



may determine what is chiefly useful toman, it is necessary 

 first to determine the use of man himself. Man's use and 

 functions (and let him who will not grant me this follow me 

 no farther, for this I purpose always to assume) is to be the 

 witness of the glory of God, and to advance that glory by 

 his reasonable obedience and resultant happiness. 



"Whatever enables us to fulfil this function, is in the 

 pure and first sense of the word useful to us. Pre-eminently, 

 therefore, whatever sets the glory of God more brightly 

 before us. But things that only help us to exist are, in a 

 secondary and mean sense, useful, or rather, if they be 

 looked for alone, they are useless and worse, for it would be 

 better that we should not exist than that we should guiltily 

 disappoint the purposes of existence. 



" And yet people speak in this working age, when they 

 speak from their hearts, as if houses and lands and food and 

 raiment were alone useful, and as if Light, Thought and 

 Admiration were all profitless, so that men insolently call 

 themselves Utilitarians, who would turn, if they had their 

 way, themselves and their race into vegetables; men who 

 think, as far as such can be said to think, that the meat is 

 more than the life, and the raiment than the body, who look 

 to the earth as a stable, and to its fruit as fodder ; vine- 

 dressers and husbandmen who love the corn they grind, 

 and the grapes they crush, better than the gardens of the 

 angels upon the slopes of Eden ; hewers of wood and drawers 

 of water, who think that the wood they hew and the water 

 they draw are better than the pine-forests that cover the 

 mountains like the shadow of God, and than the great rivers 

 that move like His eternity. And so comes upon us that 

 woe of the preacher, that though God '' hath made every- 

 thing beautiful in his time, also He hath set the world in 

 their heart so that no man can find out the work that God 

 maketh from the beginning to the end." 



" But the common consent of men proves and accepts the 

 proposition, that whatever part of any pursuit ministers to 

 the bodily comforts and admits of material uses is ignoble, 

 and whatsoever part is addressed to the mind only is noble ; 

 and that Geology does better in re-clothing dry bones and 



