BUCKLAND'S SERMON 
243 
piety has planted in our island more new churches and 
schools than have been founded in any one or in all the 
centuries since the Reformation of the English Church ; 
and already we are reaping the fruits thereof in sweet and 
holy experience, that ‘ the work of righteousness shall 
be peace ; and the effect of righteousness quietness and 
assurance for ever’ (Isa. xxxii. 17). 
“ The God of Nature has determined that moral and 
physical inequalities shall not only be inseparable from our 
humanity, but coextensive with His whole creation. He 
has also given compensations co-ordinate with these 
inequalities, working together for the conservation of all 
orders and degrees in that graduated scale of being which 
is the great law of God s providence on earth. From the 
mammoth to the mouse, from the eagle to the humming¬ 
bird, from the minnow to the whale, from the monarch to 
the man, the inhabitants of the earth and air and water 
form but one vast series of infinite gradations in an endless 
chain of inequalities of organic structure and of physical 
perfections : ‘ There are also celestial bodies, and bodies 
terrestrial . . . and one star differeth from another star in 
glory’ (1 Cor. xv. 40, 41). 
“ So also there never was, and, while human nature 
remains the same, there never can be, a period in the 
history of human society when inequalities of worldly 
condition will not follow the unequal use of talents and 
opportunities originally the same : industry and idleness, 
virtue and vice, lead the same talents, with the same means 
and opportunities, well used or abused, to most unequal 
results. . . . Equality of mind or body, or of worldly condi¬ 
tion, is as inconsistent with the order of Nature as with the 
moral laws of God. . . . There may be equality in poverty : 
equality of riches is impossible. Equality of poverty is the 
condition of the negro, the bushman, and the Esquimaux. 
Equality of wealth and property never has and never can 
exist, except in the imagination of wild transcendental 
theorists, so long as human nature shall continue to be that 
imperfect thing which God has placed in this world in a 
state of moral probation, and not of perfection. . . . 
