224 THE RT. HEV. BISHOP J. E. C. WELLDON, D.D., ON 



as its results the electric telegraph and telephone, the safety lamp, 

 the spectroscope, anaesthetic and antiseptic medicines, the motor 

 car, the aeroplane, and, last of all, the cinema. I can think of no 

 fact more remarkable than that the means of locomotion should 

 have remained virtually unchanged from the age of the Pharaohs 

 to the age of Queen Victoria, and that then within one generation 

 the civilised world should have passed, as the late Lady Dorothy 

 Nevill was fond of saying it had passed in her own experience, 

 from stage-coaches to aeroplanes. 



The consequence has been that the Victorian era, and indeed the 

 whole 19th century, has come to be generally regarded as the 

 age 01 scientific discovery. It is science w^hich has given the age 

 a peculiar name and fame; it is science which has stamped upon 

 the age a special character. 



I have sometimes thought that the spirit of science in the 19th 

 century invaded territories which are not properly its own. Thus, 

 science affected literature. Literature is not a science but an art. 

 It is in its nature selective, not exhaustive. Like painting or 

 sculpture it chooses its subjects with a discriminating taste. An 

 accurate portraiture of a dunghill is not artistic; it is the very 

 denial or the contradiction of art. But science admits no reserves, 

 no delicacies. Whatever is or appears to be the truth, science 

 must find it out and speak it out. Its one object is knowledge; it 

 scorns the veil which art throws over knowledge. Even in 

 biography it aims at recording a man's whole life from his birth to 

 his death ; not an act of his, not a speech, I had almost said not 

 a letter is omitted. What a contrast is presented by the ancient 

 masterpieces of biography, e.g., by the Agricola of Tacitus; may 

 I not reverently add, by the Gospels themselves ! The author of 

 the fourth Gospel concludes his narrative by telling of the many 

 other things which Jesus did, " the which, if they should be 

 written every one, I suppose," he says, " that even the world 

 itself could not contain the books that should be written," but 

 he does not tell them, and although he does not tell them, his 

 Gospel has enthralled the interest of the world. 



Again, science has invaded the province of morals. It is well 

 t.) consider that creeds are the parents of deeds. Fifty years ago it 

 was commonly assumed that, whatever might be the processes of 

 human thought, morality, like civilisation, was immutably 

 assured. But what is morality? It is impossible to judge the 

 moral effects of one intellectual or spiritual order by the lives of 

 men who have been educated under another. Society is not 

 uniform all the world over; there is a Mohammedan society, a 

 Hindu society, a Buddhist society as well as a Christian society 

 But Christian society cannot exist apart from the Gospel and the 

 Person of Tesus Christ. " Other foundation can no man lay than 

 that is laid, which is Christ Jesus. " The land-marks of Christen- 



