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LIFE OF DEAN BUCK LAND. 
[CH. IX. 
at home gave serious ground for disquietude. The state 
of public affairs was in the mind of Buckland, who preached 
in the evening. In his sermon he went back to the church 
“ built on Thorney Island, once occupied by the pagan altars 
of the Roman conquerors of Britain—a site on which was 
raised one of the first sanctuaries for preaching of the gospel 
to our heathen forefathers, a site consecrated to God and 
Christ by the piety of our Sebert, and our Offa, and our 
Edgar, our Ethelred, our Alfred, and our Saxon Edward, 
and nearly six centuries ago reconstructed in its actual 
state of unexampled ‘ beauty of holiness * by our Henrys 
and Edwards, in times coeval with the Crusades. ... In this 
most holy temple I and some of you have, within the last 
ten months, enjoyed the privilege of witnessing the un¬ 
exampled ceremony of the simultaneous consecration of 
a chosen band of colonial bishops, who have gone forth 
under the national sanction of the Government of this 
country to preach the gospel in many of the extreme 
regions of the world. . . . Never before did the compass of 
Christianity circumscribe so vast a circle. 
“ Our modern schools of philosophy have changed their 
moral phases within the present century. In the days of 
our fathers and during the youth of many who are still 
living, the study of philosophy was too often, and some¬ 
times too justly, suspected to be allied to infidelity : the 
study of second causes halted short of arriving at the First. 
Modern professors, in carrying their researches more closely 
into God’s laws, by which He regulates the movement of 
the material world, have been permitted to gaze more 
intensely on the great source of light and life, and in every 
fresh discovery they find a further and another revelation 
of the infinite wisdom and power and goodness of the 
Creator. 
4 Deum namque ire per omnes 
Terrasque tractusque maris coelumque profundum.’ . . . 
“ In the last quarter of a century the renewed spirit of 
