IV. 
INTRODUCTION. 
39 
sneer at the “knowledge that puffeth up,” until, like the Apostle, they have sounded 
its depths and proved its shallowness. 
Why should the study of the physical sciences be supposed to have an evil influ- 
ence on the mind — a tendency to lead men to doubt every truth which cannot be 
made the direct subject of analysis or experiment ? I can conceive a one-sided 
scientific education having this tendency. If the mind be propelled altogether in 
one direction, and that direction lead exclusively to analytical research, it is possible 
that the other faculties of the individual may become clouded or enfeebled — and 
then he is the unresisting slave of analysis — not more a rational being than any 
other monomaniac. And yet, paradoxical though the assertion seem, he may be 
all his life a reasoner, forming deductions and inductions with the most rigid accu- 
racy, in his beaten track. 
I can conceive too the astronomer, conversant with the immensity of space and 
its innumerable systems of worlds, so prostrated before the majesty of the material 
creation, as not only to lose sight of himself and of the whole race to which he 
belongs, but of the world or even of the solar system, and be led to doubt whether 
things so poor, and mean, and small can have any value in the sight of the Lord 
of so wide a dominion. I can conceive him, too, observing the uniformity and the 
harmony of the laws that govern the whole system of the heavens ; the unde- 
viating course of all events among the stars coming round as regularly as the 
shadow on the dial ; and the little evidence there is that this uniformity has ever 
suffered any disturbance that cannot be accounted for by the law of gravitation, 
and made the subject of calculation by the mathematician, who, working an equa- 
tion in his closet, shall come forth and declare the cause of irregularity, though 
that cause may be acting at thousands of millions of miles distance — I can con- 
ceive him inferring from a uniformity like this the absence of a superintending 
Providence in human affairs. If the Creator, he will say, have given up the very 
heaven of heavens to the immutable laws of gravitation, can I believe that lie 
interferes by his Providence to superintend the puny matters of this lower world? 
His reasons seem plausible while the mind is pointed in that one direction. But 
they lose all their force when, laying aside for a moment the telescope, the philo- 
sopher investigates with his microscope the structure of any living thing, no matter 
how small and how seemingly simple the organism may be. Let the object 
examined but have life , and it will soon lead him to understand a little of the mean- 
ing of God’s glorious title, Maximus in minimis. And the further he carries his 
researches, the more the field of research opens, until, extending from the speck 
beneath his lens, it spreads wider and wider, and at length blends with infinity at 
the “ horizon’s limit.” Here his boasted analysis can afford him no help. He 
has laid bare the “ mechanism of the heavens he has weighed the sun and the 
planets ; he has foretold with unerring certainty events which shall happen a 
thousand years after he shall be laid in the dust ; — and yet he cannot unravel the 
mystery that shrouds the seat of life, even as it exists in the meanest thing that 
crawls. And if the life of this poor worm be thus wonderful, what is that spirit 
which animates the human frame ? What is that humanity which, but a moment 
ago, seemed like the small dust in the balance compared with the multitude and the 
