all, for we may apply to the nation, as well as to the individual, Tennyson's noble lines: 'Self-reverence, self-knowledge, self-control: These three alone lead life to sovereign power, Would come uncalled for), but to live by law; “In the vain and foolish exultation of the heart," said John Quincey Adams, at the close of his final lecture on resigning his chair at Boston, “which the brighter prospects of life will sometimes excite, the pensive portress of Science shall call you to the sober pleasures of her holy cell. In the mortification of disappointment, her soothing voice shall whisper serenity and peace. In social converse with the mighty dead of ancient days, you will never smart under the galling sense of dependence upon the mighty living of the present age. And in your struggles with the world, should a crisis ever occur, when even friendship may deem it prudent to desert you, when priest and Levite shall come and look on you and pass by on the other side, seek refuge, my unfailing friends, and be assured you shall find it, in the friendship of Lælius and Scipio, in the patriotism of Cicero, Demosthenes, and Burke, as well as in the precepts and example of Him whose law is love, and who taught us to remember injuries only to forgive them." Let me in conclusion quote the glowing description of our debt to science given by Archdeacon Farrar in his address at Liverpool College-testimony, moreover, all the more valuable, considering the source from which it comes. "In this great commercial city," he said, "where you are surrounded by the triumphs of science and of mechanism— you, whose river is ploughed by the great steamships whose white wake has been called the fittest avenue to the palace front of a mercantile people-you know well that in the achievements of science there is not only beauty and wonder, but also beneficence and power. It is not only that she has revealed to us infinite space crowded with unnumbered worlds; infinite time peopled by unnumbered existences; infinite organisms hitherto invisible but full of delicate and iridescent loveliness; but also that she has been, as a great Archangel of Mercy, devoting herself to the service of man. She has laboured, her votaries have laboured, not to increase the power of despots or add to the magnificence of courts, but to extend human happiness, to economise human effort, to extinguish human pain. Where of old, men toiled, half blinded and half naked, in the mouth of the glowing furnace to mix the white-hot iron, she now substitutes the mechanical action of the viewless air. She has enlisted the sunbeam in her service to limn for us, with absolute fidelity, the faces of the friends we love. She has shown the poor miner how he may work in safety, even amid the explosive fire-damp of the mine. She has, by her anæsthetics, enabled the sufferer to be hushed and unconscious while the delicate hand of some skilled operator cuts a fragment from the nervous circle of the unquivering eye. She points not to pyramids built during weary centuries by the sweat of miserable nations, but to the lighthouse and the steamship, to the railroad and the telegraph. She has restored eyes to the blind and hearing to the deaf. She has lengthened life, she has minimised danger, she has controlled madness, she has trampled on disease. And on all these grounds, I think that none of our sons should grow up wholly ignorant of studies which at once train the reason and fire the imagination, which fashion as well as forge, which can feed as well as fill the mind." CHAPTER X EDUCATION "No pleasure is comparable to the standing upon the vantage ground of truth."-BACON. "Divine Philosophy! Not harsh and crabbed as dull fools suppose, But musical as is Apollo's lute, And a perpetual feast of nectar'd sweets It may seem rather surprising to include education among the pleasures of life; for in too many cases it is made odious to the young, and is supposed to cease with school; while, on the contrary, if it is to be really successful it must be suitable, and therefore interesting, to children, and must last through life. The very process of acquiring knowledge |