ADDRESS BY LORD HALSBURY, P.C. 



17 



two circles in their daily rotation. But here is a remark 

 made by one no mean authority upon such a subject that the 

 highest acquirement ever made by the most exalted genius 

 of man has only been to trace a part and a very small part 

 of that order which the Deity has established in His works. 



When we endeavour to subject the Divine Revelation to our 

 methods of physical research we are met at once by the obstacle 

 that we are endeavouring to penetrate into a region to which 

 our faculties are not appropriate. He avIio made the eye shall 

 He not see? He who planted the ear shall He not hear ? 

 He who has given man his faculties to acquire a limited and 

 narrowly circumscribed area of knoAvledge shall He be com- 

 prehended by the creature He has made in the vastness of 

 His infinite perfection ? It is no original observation that it 

 is not given to us to comprehend all the order of the 

 universe, and if ^\e try to pry into the courses of that order 

 we perceive the operation of powers which lie far beyond 

 the reach of our limited faculties. Those Avho have made 

 the furthest advances in true science will be the first to 

 confess how limited those faculties are and how small a 

 part we can comprehend of the ways of the Almighty 

 Creator. They will be the first to acknowledge that the 

 highest acquirement of human wdsdom is to advance to that 

 line which is its legitimate boundary, and there, contem- 

 plating the 'vvondrous field which lies beyond it, to bend in 

 humble adoration before a wisdom which it cannot fathom 

 and a power which it cannot comprehend. 



Professor Faraday, whose wisdom and learning as a 

 student of natural science none will doubt, while distin- 

 guishing between faith the hope set before us, said in earthly 

 matters he believed with St. Paul that the invisible things 

 of Him from the creation of the World are clearly seen, 

 being understood by the things that are made, even His 

 Eternal Power and Godhead. 



I have never seen, he adds, anything incompatible 

 between those things of man which can be known by the 

 Spirit of Man, which is within him, and those higher things 

 concerning his future which he cannot know by that spuit 

 alone. 



It is only necessary to take even the heathen much more 

 the Christian conception of the Deity to recognize the pro- 

 fane absiu'dity of attempting to measure, to analyse, or 

 examine Divine attributes by human instruments. Let me 

 take the heathen first. 



