"Ill, 
 
 II
 
 Ex Libris 
 C. K. OGDEN
 
 w 
 
 ***> 
 
 /&v 
 
 Jl# 
 
 ^?

 
 
 INTELLECTUAL 
 
 MORAL DEVELOPMENT 
 
 THE PKESENT AGE 
 
 SAMUEL WARREN, F.R.S. 
 
 ONE OF HER MAJESTY'S COUNSEL, AND RECORDER OF HULL 
 
 WILLIAM BLACKWOOD AND SONS 
 EDINBURGH AND LONDON 
 MDCCCLIII
 
 PRINTED BY WILIJAM BT.ACKWOOD AND
 
 PREFACE. 
 
 THE origin of this little work is indicated in a 
 passage which may be seen near the commence- 
 ment. 
 
 It would be unbecoming in the Author to print 
 a copy of the too flattering Resolution of the 
 President and Council of the Hull Literary .and 
 Philosophical Society there referred to, and partly 
 in consequence of which, the paper in question, 
 somewhat modified and amplified, is now pre- 
 sented to the public. It treats of subjects which 
 have occupied his thoughts for many years ; and 
 all he begs to be given credit for, is a good inten- 
 tion. For the rest, he must surrender himself to 
 criticism with what fortitude he may. 
 
 Two-thirds of the paper were read on the even- 
 ing of Tuesday, the 28th December 1852, and 
 listened to with an attention amply repaying the 
 Author's efforts to present an extensive and diffi- 
 cult subject, in an acceptable manner, to a mixed 
 and very large audience. 
 
 2017855
 
 A deputation, in considerable numbers, from the 
 Mechanics' Institute of Hull, formed part of that 
 audience, in pursuance of a liberal and friendly 
 invitation from the President and Council of the 
 Literary and Philosophical Society : a circum- 
 stance which afforded the Author peculiar gratifi- 
 cation. 
 
 INNER TEMPLE, LONDON, 
 January 1853.
 
 MR PRESIDENT, 
 
 AND LADIES AND GENTLEMEN, 
 
 I HOPE that the special relation in which I 
 stand towards this populous borough, and its ancient 
 town and corporation* a town which has num- 
 bered among those of its citizens the noble names 
 of Andrew Marvel, and William Wilberforce will, 
 together with a fact which I shall presently men- 
 tion, satisfactorily account for my appearance be- 
 fore you this evening, in a position to myself at 
 once new, and responsible. As a member of the 
 Bar, and also exercising judicial functions among 
 you, such a position as I now occupy is intended, 
 
 * The town and county of Kingston-upon-Huil, commonly called 
 Hull, was constituted a free borough, with extensive immunities, 
 under a charter of Edward I., dated the 1st April 1299. For up- 
 wards of a century, however, before that time, it had been a sea- 
 port of considerable mercantile importance. See Frost's Notices 
 relative to the early history of the town and port of Hull, [A.D. 
 1827,] and The Encyclopaedia, Britannica, tit. "Hull." 
 A
 
 2 INTELLECTUAL AND MORAL DEVELOPMENT 
 
 I can assure you, to be a solitary one in my life- 
 time ; and it is also an embarrassing one, because 
 not in unison with my professional habits and ob- 
 jects. On the occasion, however, of my first judicial 
 visit to this town, in last October, I received an un- 
 expected and earnest request from the President and 
 Council of the Literary and Philosophical Society 
 of this place, to read a paper before the Society, and 
 on any subject which I might select. After much 
 consideration, I expressed my willingness to do so, 
 and chose the subject now before us. Some time 
 afterwards, I was honoured by receiving a unani- 
 mous resolution of the President and Council, 
 soliciting me " to take steps, by anticipation, to 
 commit the paper to the press, in order that it may 
 be perused, at as early a period as possible, by those 
 who cannot hear the paper read with a view to 
 its extended usefulness." I own that I was not a 
 little affected by so signal a mark of confidence ; 
 and have already, as far as I have been able, com- 
 plied with the request. 
 
 As I feel it a very responsible honour, under 
 these circumstances, to appear before you, so I beg 
 your indulgence, and your sustained attention, 
 while I endeavour to lay before you, though, it 
 may be, very imperfectly, some of the results of 
 nearly a quarter of a century's observation and 
 reflection, on many subjects of the highest interest 
 and importance. It is in vain for me, however,
 
 OF THE PRESENT AGE. 3 
 
 as it would be foolish, to attempt to burthen 
 you with all the dismaying mass of manuscript 
 which I hold in my hand ; and, finally, before start- 
 ing on our extensive and venturous expedition, 1 
 have to assure you, that nothing shall fall from me 
 calculated to provoke difference of opinion, except 
 so far as is unavoidable in addressing any mixed 
 and independent auditory. Above all things, I 
 shall eschew everything even approaching to a 
 political or sectarian character. This, indeed, your 
 rules discreetly prohibit; and to those rules my 
 own purpose and feelings dictate a rigorous adhe- 
 rence. 
 
 Well, then, we are here assembled, only a day 
 or two after Christmas Day ! Let us regard the 
 season the occasion as a halcyon interval of 
 repose, in which our cheerfulness is blended with 
 solemnity, while reflecting upon that Event, so sub- 
 lime and awful in the estimation of all Christians, 
 Avhich invests the close of every year with, as it 
 were, a grand halo. The eager, noisy world, 
 with all its wild passions, and the transient pur- 
 suits which stimulate them, is, for a while, happily 
 shut out ; leaving us to breathe a serene atmo- 
 sphere. 
 
 Be still, ye winds ! ye zephyrs, cease to blow, 
 While music most melodious meets my ear 
 
 the " still sad music of humanity," which may be 
 heard echoing while we fix our eyes upon MAN and
 
 4 INTELLECTUAL AND MORAL DEVELOPMENT 
 
 his mysterious manifestations in his momentous 
 relations to the Past, the Present, and the Future. 
 May I, however, in a more cheery spirit, make 
 a passing allusion to a topic occasionally exciting 
 a lively interest out of doors ? the budget of our 
 Chancellor of the Exchequer ! Let me conceive 
 myself to have been installed your Chancellor of 
 the Exchequer intellectual; and here, at your 
 service, is my Budget ; but it will be forced to deal 
 very summarily with the income and expenditure of 
 THOUGHT its Resources its Ways and Means 
 and the circulating medium of that thought, which 
 is its language or literature. I cannot, alas ! hold 
 out the hopes of taking off any taxes, but, on the 
 contrary, must impose a somewhat heavy one on 
 your attention! My Budget will deal with a vast 
 variety of topics some of them of great delicacy, 
 difficulty, and moment ; topics coming home to 
 the business and bosom of each of us, and chal- 
 lenging our anxious consideration. We cannot sur- 
 vey, for the purpose of practically estimating, the in- 
 tellectual and moral development of the age in which 
 we live and are playing our parts every man and 
 woman of us having his or her own responsible 
 mission to perform without attempting gravely 
 and comprehensively to consider man in ordained 
 relation to his power, and his knowledge, his ob- 
 jects, his sayings and his doings, his position past 
 and present, and his destiny. It is difficult to
 
 OF THE PRESENT AGE, 5 
 
 imagine any period for making such an attempt 
 more interesting and inviting than the present 
 one, in many respects, very dazzling ; and in others, 
 exciting concern and surprise. In one direction, it 
 may be that we see a vast space passed over in a 
 little time ; in another, a long time with scarce 
 any space passed over at all ; though in each case 
 human intellect has been occupied and taxed to its 
 uttermost apparent capabilities. These are mat- 
 ters justifying, and even demanding, attentive con- 
 sideration. It will be necessary, with this view, to 
 soar high and far, but swiftly, into the stupendous 
 starry solitude of space ; to descend, as far as rnan^s 
 limited means allow him, into the interior of the 
 earth; and, again, to travel all round its surface, 
 in order to ascertain what we know, or think we 
 know, of the human and animal denizens of that 
 earth, and of the nature and relations of that earth 
 itself; and, finally, to penetrate, as far as we may, 
 and with a tender respect, into that mystery of 
 mysteries, MAN himself.* And this, not with the 
 view of attempting an ostentatious display of his 
 doings, his discoveries of the exploits of his genius, 
 which might serve only to inflate a foolish pride, 
 to generate spurious motives to action, and, in 
 short, and above all, induce a fatal I repeat, a 
 
 * " Alas !" says Coleridge, speaking of the difficulty of fixing the 
 attention of men on the world within them, " the largest part of 
 mankind are nowhere greater strangers than at home."
 
 6 INTELLECTUAL AND MORAL DEVELOPMENT 
 
 fatal confusion between MEANS and ENDS ; which 
 last words contain the key of all that is to follow. 
 Let us, on the contrary, try to look at Man, as he 
 has been told by God that he t's, placed upon this 
 planet, by a direct incomprehensible act of creation, 
 by that God whose image, though now darkened, 
 he bears, and between whom and himself there 
 exist relations inconceivably awful and momentous. 
 Those relations it is surely of infinite consequence 
 to us to ascertain accurately, as far as we can ; 
 because they directly and permanently affect human 
 conduct and destiny. On a due perception, indeed, 
 of those relations, duly acted upon, rest the true 
 and only enduring dignity of human nature, the 
 actual inevitable difference between one man and 
 another, and the only real uses and aims of intel- 
 lect and knowledge. I hope to place in a distinct 
 point of view the proposition, that as it is possible 
 for a man to have a prodigious knowledge of 
 the facts of philosophy, without a glimmering of 
 its spirit ; so the human intellect may be endowed 
 with great strength and capacity, be consum- 
 mately trained in the exercise of its faculties, 
 and richly stored with the fruits of literature and 
 philosophy, and yet its possessor be all the while 
 mentally purblind nay more, destitute of an atom 
 of moral worth : serving, to the eye of the Christian 
 philosopher and moralist, only to illustrate the de- 
 plorable, degrading, and perilous consequences of a
 
 OF THE PRESENT AGE. 
 
 want of it, in the individual case, and, in the general 
 one, to reveal to us a sort of moral and intellectual 
 chaos. I say, intellectual as well as moral. And in 
 the former case, why should I not call up, for an in- 
 stant, the spectre of La Place, whose great intellect 
 could occupy itself during a lifetime with the sub- 
 limest truths of astronomy, to no better purpose 
 than to deny the existence of the Almighty Maker 
 of the universe ; impiously to insinuate that the 
 supposed useful purposes of our system could have 
 been accomplished otherwise, and better, than at 
 present ! and, finally, to discard religion, and the 
 sanctions which it derives from a future existence 
 and its conditions, as a cruel imposture practised 
 upon the ignorant credulity of mankind ! * Believe 
 me, there are real relations between physical and 
 moral science there are profound relations between 
 intellect and morality, involving everything that 
 concerns the highest interests of mankind ; and it 
 cannot be otherwise than interesting and import- 
 
 * It is right, however, here to state that M. La Place, not long be- 
 fore his death, intimated to a distinguished English philosopher (Pro- 
 fessor Sedgwick) a great change of opinion. Having spoken to him 
 earnestly on the religious character of our endowments, and course 
 of academical study, M. La Place added : " I think this right; and 
 on this point I deprecate any great organic changes in your sys- 
 tem ; for I have lived long enough to know what at one time I did 
 not believe that no society can be upheld in happiness and honour, 
 without the sentiments of religion." This remarkable statement is 
 made on the authority of Professor Sedgwick himself, who says it is 
 in the very words of M. La Place, " as nearly as I can translate 
 them." See the Discourse on the Studies of the University of Cain- 
 Iridge, 5th edit.
 
 8 INTELLECTUAL AND MORAL DEVELOPMENT 
 
 ant, to seek for every ray of light which may con- 
 tribute towards showing us the real nature of these 
 relations. The General is made up of the Particu- 
 lar the Whole, of its parts ; and there may be 
 personal consequences depending upon the minutest 
 moral actions of mankind, as real, great, and per- 
 manent, as the causes entailing them appeared 
 trivial and temporary, and were, in fact, while 
 operating, wholly unperceived. The old philoso- 
 phers said, that Nature does nothing in vain, in 
 the physical world ; and so, in the mighty moral 
 economy under which w r e have been placed by our 
 Almighty Maker, let us rest satisfied that nothing 
 has been done by Him in vain, and perhaps also, 
 nothing by the creatures whom He has made the 
 subjects of that economy. The possession and use 
 of intellect entail great moral and religious respon- 
 sibilities ; and between one who thinks otherwise, 
 and those with whom I think, there is fixed a great 
 gulf, in respect of speculation, action, and conduct; 
 there exists a distinction involving the entire theory 
 and basis of morality, its Motives and Sanctions, 
 its Means and Ends. 
 
 Do not, however, be startled by this sudden 
 glimpse into gloom into the profound abysses of 
 abstract speculation, which I now quit for a time ; 
 but remember, that these considerations constitute 
 a reality all the while, surrounding us even as the 
 atmosphere envelops the earth : and let us, in
 
 OF THE PRESENT AGE. 9 
 
 passing on to lighter subjects, and hovering over 
 them for a time, carry with us, nevertheless, an 
 oracular saving of Bishop Jeremy Taylor, '.' What- 
 ever we talk, things are as they are, not as we 
 grant, dispute, or hope ; depending on neither our 
 affirmative nor negative, but upon the rate and 
 value which GOD sets upon things." * 
 
 Permit me here to say what is sought to be in- 
 dicated by the word Development. I use it in 
 its strict etymological signification ; that is to say, 
 an ( opening,' f a ' showing forth/ a ' displaying' 
 of the intellectual and moral condition of man in 
 the present age. And you will say is this to 
 be done in a single evening's paper ? It sounds, 
 indeed, as hopeless as the notion of compressing the 
 Iliad within a nutshell. Nevertheless, the attempt 
 must be made to survey this vast field, however 
 rapidly, and however hard it may be to know where 
 to begin. The great object is for the observer to 
 select a right point of view. On that depends every- 
 thing ; for there is a point from which everything 
 within and without us is order and loveliness, and 
 another from which all is contradiction and confu- 
 sion. There is a string which, " untuned" we may 
 well call out fearfully 
 
 " Hark ! what discord follows ! " 
 
 * Works, vol. xi. p. 198, (Bishop Rebel's edition.) 
 
 f " Desveloper," "developer," perhaps from deorsum volvere, to 
 
 roll back, to open, unwrap, or unfold anything rolled in a volume. 
 
 Cotgrave, as cited in Richardson's Dictionary.
 
 10 INTELLECTUAL AND MORAL DEVELOPMENT 
 
 I shall glance first at our LITERATURE* the 
 current coin, so to speak, of the realm Intellectual 
 the circulating medium of thought, by which 
 Intellect communicates with Intellect, in both the 
 present and past ages. And it is one pre-eminent 
 characteristic of the present age, that though the 
 issue of this coin is infinitely greater than the world 
 has ever seen before, it yet scarcely equals our 
 requirements. The mint is kept in incessant action, 
 though its capabilities have been immensely aug- 
 mented ! Let me now, however, advert, for a 
 moment, to the metal out of which this coin is 
 made our language. Is gold pouring into our 
 cellars as it is into those of the Bank of England '? 
 
 Our English language is a noble one, worthy of 
 the most jealous guardianship ; and the slightest 
 tendency to deteriorate it, by writing or speaking 
 it in a slovenly way, or introducing, from any sort 
 
 * The etymology of this word is not by any means determined. 
 It is traced clearly through the French, Italian, and Spanish lan- 
 guages, to the Latin litera ; which may perhaps, as suggested by 
 Mr Richardson, be taken from litum, the past participle of liner e, 
 to smear ; as one of the earliest modes of writing was by graving 
 the characters upon tablets, which were smeared over or covered 
 with wax. (Pliny, lib. xiii. c. 11.) These wax tablets were written 
 on with an instrument of iron or brass, (stilus or stylus,) resembling 
 a pencil in size and shape, sharpened at one end, the other extre- 
 mity of it being flat and circular, for the purpose of obliterating 
 what had been written, and rendering the waxen surface smooth 
 again. A picture found in Herculaneum, and of which an en- 
 graving is given in Dr Smith's Dictionary of Grecian and Roman 
 Antiquities, represents a Roman with his tablet and " stilus; " 
 whence the English word "style."
 
 OP THE PRESENT AGE. 11 
 
 of conceit, and to catch a momentary notoriety, 
 vulgar novelties, ought to be treated as attempts 
 at defilement and disfigurement ; and should entail 
 instant critical censure and contempt, on the part 
 of those who are interested in handing down our 
 language, in all its purity, beauty, strength, and 
 dignity, to posterity, as it were a sacred heir-loom. 
 That language we ought to be every day more and 
 more solicitous thus to cherish and protect ; for it is 
 daily and hourly spreading over the whole habitable 
 globe, and seems destined to gain a complete ascen- 
 dancy over all others now spoken and written. 
 Look into the New World, and see there, in the Far 
 West, the mighty daughter of a mighty mother, 
 of whom she is, and ought to be, proud ! She can, 
 when she pleases, speak the language of that mother 
 with as much elegance and force as her parent, 
 towards whom she must often turn with yearning 
 fondness and pride. Ah, what are the feelings 
 with which, as I have several times been assured 
 by themselves, our gifted brethren from the West 
 first catch sight of the white cliffs of Albion ! They 
 often watch, for that purpose, through the live- 
 long night ; and when Old England becomes visible, 
 even as a dim speck beyond the waters, a thousand 
 and a thousand times have their tears gushed 
 forth, while they gazed, in silent tenderness, on the 
 little island from which came their own ancestors 
 in which its own their own SHAKSPEARE was
 
 12 INTELLECTUAL AND MORAL DEVELOPMENT 
 
 born ; that island which he so dearly loved, and has 
 rendered immortal ; of which he spoke in very 
 moving words, that make an Englishman's heart 
 thrill when he hears them as " this sceptred isle" 
 " this little world " 
 
 This precious stone, set in the silver sea 
 
 This blessed plot, this earth, this realm, this England ! 
 
 This land of such dear souls this dear, dear land ! * 
 
 So wrote Shakspeare, with quivering pen, in Queen 
 Elizabeth's day ; and so, nearly three centuries 
 afterwards, read we, with quivering hearts, in 
 Queen Victoria's day the Sovereign Lady of this 
 same dear sceptred isle we, who are able, and 
 resolved, that, with God's blessing on our stout 
 hearts and strong arms, it shall pass down for cen- 
 turies hence to her descendants, and to our descend- 
 ants aye shall that " precious stone, set in the 
 silver sea" its guardians knowing neither fear nor 
 foe or, knowing, only to defy ! Could I call up 
 Shakspeare before you, how would you tremble 
 with emotion as you heard that noble spirit speak 
 his own words : 
 
 This England never did, nor never shall, 
 
 Lie at the proud foot of a conqueror, 
 
 But when it first did help to wound itself. 
 
 Come the three corners of the world in arras, 
 
 And we shall shock them ! Naught shall make us rue, 
 
 If England to itself do rest but true ! f 
 
 Who can listen to this, and not feel pride on re- 
 
 * Richard II. act ii. scene 1. f King John, conclusion.
 
 OF THE PRESENT AGE. 13 
 
 fleeting, that perhaps at this very moment our 
 brethren and sisters at the antipodes may be recit- 
 ing it, and thinking, with swelling hearts, of their 
 little island home, and of us whom they have left 
 behind in it ? Let me sum up all that an English- 
 man can say, in a line a little varied, it is true - 
 of our great Poet himself 
 
 One touch of Shalspeare makes the whole world kin i 
 
 And shall not the descendants and countrymen 
 of Shakspeare and Milton, and so many other illus- 
 trious writers of our glorious Saxon language, alike 
 in prose and in verse, strive to protect that lan- 
 guage from pollution, and hand it down pure as we 
 received it ? Or shall they calmly contemplate its 
 being rapidly deteriorated by those who were never 
 able to appreciate that purity, and are consequently 
 indifferent about preserving it? I repeat it, that 
 our fast-quitting brethren and sisters God go 
 with them ! are carrying, in increasing numbers, 
 our language into every region of the globe ; a 
 fact which of itself should suffice to quicken our 
 vigilance to keep the source of that language pure. 
 " The treasures of our tongue," says one who has 
 conferred inestimable service on that tongue,* "are 
 spread over continents, scattered among islands in 
 
 * Dr Richardson, by his " New Dictionary of the English Lan- 
 guage ; combining Explanation with Etymology, and illustrated by 
 Quotations from the best Authors, arranged chronologically from 
 the earliest period to the beginning of the present century." 
 2 vols. 4to. This admirable work constitutes almost a library of
 
 14 INTELLECTUAL AND MORAL DEVELOPMENT 
 
 the northern and the southern hemisphere, from 
 ' the unformed Occident to the strange shores of 
 unknowing nations in the East.' The sun, indeed, 
 now never sets upon the empire of Great Britain. 
 Not one hour of the twenty-four, in which the 
 earth completes her diurnal revolution not one 
 round of the minute-hand of the dial, is allowed to 
 pass, in which, on some portion of the surface of the 
 globe, the air is not filled ' with accents that are 
 ours.' They are heard in the ordinary transactions 
 of life, or in the administration of law, or in the 
 deliberations of the senate house or council-chamber, 
 in the offices of private devotion, or in the public 
 observance of the rites and duties of a common 
 faith." 
 
 This noble language, finally, enshrines reveren- 
 tially the Holy volume, the oracles of God, which 
 His pious servants in this island are disseminating, 
 in countless millions of copies, among mankind in 
 every quarter of the globe. Should not that of itself 
 be a grand incentive to us, both speakers and writers, 
 to do our best to preserve the identity of that lan- 
 guage, by keeping its choice treasures, as models 
 of simplicity, strength, and beauty, constantly 
 before our eyes, and in our thoughts ? Oh ! let us 
 imitate the Greeks and Romans in the noble and 
 
 English books in itself ; and its learned and indefatigable compiler 
 has recently received a fitting recognition of his merits, by a pen- 
 sion, conferred through the Earl of Derby, then Prime Minister, by 
 her Majesty, (A.D. 1852.)
 
 OF THE PRESENT AGE. 15 
 
 emulous care with which they developed and pre- 
 served their renowned languages, which have con- 
 sequently come down to us in unimpaired fresh- 
 ness, beauty, and splendour, amidst 
 
 " The waves and weathers of time" 
 
 come down to us in such guise, as to leave us al- 
 most in doubt which to admire more their thought, 
 or the exquisite language which conveys it ! 
 
 I say these things only for the advantage of the 
 younger portions of this large audience, and of 
 those who may hereafter think it worth while to 
 read what I am now uttering ; and to them, would 
 that I could speak trumpet-tongued on this subject, 
 which has always lain near my heart. Let them 
 (I mean the younger folk) believe the assertion, 
 which will be readily supported by the greatest 
 masters of our language, that to write English 
 with vigour and purity is really a high, and also a 
 rare, accomplishment : much rarer, indeed, than it 
 ought to be, and would be, if youthful aspirants 
 would only conceive rightly, and bear ever in mind, 
 the importance of the object, and the efforts indis- 
 pensable to secure it. This accomplishment in- 
 volves, in my opinion, early and careful culture, 
 continued attention, and sedulous practice, fami- 
 liarity with the choicest models, and no incon- 
 siderable degree of natural taste and refinement. 
 One thus endowed and accomplished must some-
 
 16 INTELLECTUAL AND MORAL DEVELOPMENT 
 
 times shudder at the extent to which he may see 
 our language vitiated by needless and injurious 
 incorporations of foreign words and idioms, and 
 vulgar, fleeting colloquialities, of our own viler 
 growth,* which are utterly inconsistent with the 
 dignity of high and enduring literature. Any 
 man of talent, or more especially of genius, (a dis- 
 tinction difficult to put into words, but real and 
 great, and not in degree, but kind,) who disregards 
 these considerations, offends the genius of English 
 letters ; and indeed, let him rest assured, commits 
 a sort of literary suicide. He may be unconsciously 
 disgusting thousands nay, tens of thousands, of 
 persons competent to detect, at an indignant 
 glance, these impertinent and vulgar departures 
 from propriety : familiar with the finest models of 
 ancient and modern literature ; persons, in short, 
 whose estimation constitutes the true and only path- 
 way to posterity. If their fiat, or imprimatur, be 
 withheld, (and it is given only after a stern scru- 
 tiny,) the eager ambitious traveller will by and by 
 find out, to his mortification, that he has started 
 loithout his passport. I am not now speaking 
 simply of the numerous professed and habitual 
 critics of the present day, who constitute, as they 
 
 * It is one feature of Richardson's Dictionary, that he never 
 gives words of this description, but those only which are supported 
 by the carefully-selected writers, whom he cites in every instance, 
 commencing with the close of the thirteenth, and ending with the 
 commencement of the present century.
 
 OF THE PRESENT AGE. 17 
 
 ought to do, a vigilant and expert literary police, 
 doubtlessly restraining many an intruding offender; 
 but also of the great body of readers, ay, of 
 either sex who feel no inclination to express 
 their refined criticisms in print, or become mem- 
 bers of what are called " literary circles," which 
 too often contain only second, third, or fourth- 
 rate aspirants to literary reputation, none of whom 
 experience the promptings of conscious and inde- 
 pendent strength, and cannot stand alone, but 
 combine, in little efforts, too often only to dis- 
 parage those who can, and do. The higher class, 
 to which I am alluding, exercise, nevertheless, 
 an influence which may, in one respect, be com- 
 pared to Gravitation, which is unseen, unheard, 
 but irresistible ; and all young writers should 
 consider this, before they rush into a presence 
 so formidable. I hope it may not be deemed 
 presumptuous, if one venture to express a fear 
 whether the number of writers in the present day 
 may not bear too great a proportion to readers ; 
 and whether, again, many of those writers do not 
 become such, without adequate reflection and pre- 
 paration. No event, no incident of any kind, of 
 the least interest or importance, now occurs in any 
 branch of literature, science, politics, or in the 
 ordinary course even of domestic life, but ten thou- 
 sand pens are instantly set in motion simultaneously 
 for the press, whose swarthy unseen battalions are
 
 18 INTELLECTUAL AND MORAL DEVELOPMENT 
 
 forthwith at work to submit these hasty lucubra- 
 tions to the public. Yet it cannot be denied that 
 the current of our periodical literature, running 
 alike through daily, weekly, monthly, or quarterly 
 channels, must appear, upon the whole, to even a 
 captious, if a competent, censor, highly creditable 
 to an accomplished age. I can most conscientiously 
 express my belief, that for a long time no periodical 
 of note has been established in this country which 
 has not disclosed the desire of its conductors to fit 
 it, for the purpose of innocent recreation and infor- 
 mation, to readers of both sexes, and of all ages 
 and classes. It is a fact, however, stated with 
 concern and reluctance, that there is a poisonous 
 growth of libertine literature* if the last word be 
 not indeed libelled by such a use of it designed 
 for the lowest classes of society ; supplied, more- 
 over, to an extent scarcely equal to the demand 
 for it, and which exists to an extent unfortunately 
 little suspected. I know not how this dreadful 
 evil is to be encountered, except by affording 
 every possible encouragement, from every quarter, 
 to the dissemination, in the cheapest practical form, 
 
 * Some years ago, a notorious writer of this class, when far ad- 
 vanced in life, called upon me, and in the course of conversation, 
 with tears in his eyes, deplored having prostituted his powers to 
 corrupt the minds, and unsettle the religious opinions, of his 
 readers ; and with anguished energy added, " What would I not 
 give at this moment to annihilate everything that bears my name, 
 and to be able to say on my death-bed, that I had left ' no line 
 which, dying, I coAild wish to blot.' "
 
 OF THE PRESENT AGE. 19 
 
 of wholesome and engaging literature. If poison 
 be cheap, let its antidote be cheaper. 
 
 In this great and free country, public opinion 
 must express itself promptly on current political 
 events, which are from day to day treated with a 
 degree of ability indicating the very masterly 
 hands that are at work. In fact, I personally know 
 several instances of contributions to the current 
 political literature of the day, by persons whose 
 high social rank, position, and pretensions whose 
 proved knowledge, ability, and celebrity, are little 
 suspected by their readers, and whose names would 
 insure almost universal attention and deference. 
 
 Rapidity and power largely characterise our 
 POLITICAL LITERATURE ; and let me also add, in a 
 spirit of honest pride and truth, that it is very 
 rarely defaced by personality, invasion of the sanc- 
 tities of private life, or the slightest trace of immo- 
 rality or licentiousness. Exceptions may possibly 
 exist ; but I defy any one to adduce instances of 
 successful and prolonged indecorums of this de- 
 scription. The spirit of the age will not tolerate 
 them ; and our writers dare not, nor do they wish, 
 to offend that just and dignified spirit. 
 
 Thus the freedom of the Press an enormous 
 engine in a highly civilised community, and where 
 its action is not oppressed by the heavy hand of 
 tyranny is worthily used by a free, a great, and 
 a good people, if one of the humblest may be per-
 
 20 INTELLECTUAL AND MORAL DEVELOPMENT 
 
 initted so to characterise his fellow-countrymen ; 
 and long may it so continue ! And yet no nation 
 is more subject than our own, from the very neces- 
 sities of its social condition, to vivid political and 
 polemical excitement, calling forth, or having a 
 tendency to call forth, all the most fierce and 
 violent passions of our nature. 
 
 Passing with this honest and unbiassed expres- 
 sion of opinion, from that portion of our literature 
 which is professedly devoted to the treatment of 
 ephemeral topics and objects, I wish to say a few 
 words on the writers of separate and independent 
 works speaking again, as in the presence of youth- 
 ful aspirants to literary distinction. Let them ask 
 themselves whether they wish that which they 
 purpose writing, to live ? If they do, it is really 
 properly considered a bold aspiration : it is to 
 elevate themselves above innumerable millions of 
 mankind who never were, nor can, nor will, be so 
 distinguished from their fellows. Ought not, then, 
 the pains and effort, both in duration and intensity, 
 to be commensurate ? Rely upon it that Horace 
 is right 
 
 Qui studet optatam cursu contingere metarn, 
 Multa tulit, fecitque puer, sudavit, et alsit. 
 
 Provided the aspirant believe himself intellectu- 
 ally fit to attempt attaining so resplendent a posi- 
 tion, let him consider as he will, if moved by 
 superior impulses, which are powerless to inferior
 
 OF THE PRESENT AGE. 21 
 
 minds how to select subjects of enduring interest 
 to mankind, and then to treat them in a high and 
 catholic spirit, so as to attract the human heart 
 and intellect, which, let him ever bear in mind, are 
 one and the same in all times and places, and un- 
 affected by fleeting topics and associations, how- 
 ever powerfully intense for the moment. Those 
 who were swayed by them pass away quickly and 
 for ever. A month, a year, a generation, a cen- 
 tury, and all trace of them, their sayings and their 
 doings, has perished, as completely as disappears 
 breath from the polished surface of the mirror. 
 
 Having selected a fitting subject, let him imitate 
 the glorious devotion of those great ones of past 
 time, whose works still glitter vividly before our 
 eyes, even as they did before charmed contempo- 
 rary eyes. The writers of Greece and Rome un- 
 derwent a degree of heroic self-denial and labour, 
 which, in our day, we can hardly realise ; but we 
 behold with admiration the realised and imperish- 
 able results: their transcendent performances in 
 poetry, philosophy, history, and oratory, such as 
 it now requires great effort and high attainments 
 even only moderately to understand and appre- 
 ciate. Let me mention, in passing, an incident 
 relating to Thucydides. 
 
 When only sixteen yeai's of age, he heard Hero- 
 dotus, then not more than twenty-nine years old, 
 recite his charming History, as was the custom, in
 
 22 INTELLECTUAL AND MORAL DEVELOPMENT 
 
 public; and wept with the intensity of his emotions. 
 From that moment he conceived and cherished the 
 high ambition of becoming himself an historian ; 
 and how he ultimately acquitted himself, his noble 
 history of the Peloponnesian war is extant to tell 
 us ; and, in doing so, to exhibit a model of history 
 for all time to come. Such was the admiration of 
 this great performance by Demosthenes, that he 
 transcribed it eight times ! and became so familiar 
 with it, that he could repeat almost the whole of it ! 
 There may, for aught any of us know, be pre- 
 sent in this great assembly, some gifted spirit re- 
 solved on silently preparing to face posterity, to 
 secure a literary immortality : self-denying and 
 self-reliant, fixing an eagle eye on remote and 
 applauding ages ; calmly content to make every 
 sacrifice, even that of contemporaneous approbation 
 and enthusiasm. Let him not, however, despair of 
 even this latter; for there are acute and watchful 
 eyes ever open to scan the pretensions of real great- 
 ness persons generously eager, for the honour 
 and reputation of the age, to bring that greatness 
 forward and do it homage wherever it presents 
 itself. I would say to such a one, Hail, young 
 candidate for future and undying renown ! Be- 
 think you, that you are treading in the steps of 
 immortal predecessors, who, could they but speak 
 to you, might say, Remember ! Persevere ! 
 But, alas ! in the special circumstances of the pre-
 
 OF THE PRESENT AGE. 23 
 
 sent age, when mental power is so early and 
 universally stimulated into action, Power may be 
 great, but inseparably linked to Poverty, which 
 compels it to relinquish, with a swelling heart, its 
 proud aspiration to delight and instruct future ages, 
 in order simply to live to exist, in its own day. 
 Well, in that case, O fettered, harassed, and noble 
 spirit ! look proudly inward ! Consider how the 
 Deity has distinguished you by His endowments ; 
 and bow with cheerful reverence and submission 
 to Him and to His will, which is guided by in- 
 scrutable wisdom, in this, to you, apparently hard 
 dispensation. Your present position is perfectly 
 known to Him who could change it in the twink- 
 ling of an eye, and may do so. In the mean time, 
 regard Him steadfastly as the Father of Lights, 
 from whom descends every good and perfect gift; and 
 persuade your heart that the Father will not forget 
 his Son. 
 
 Before quitting this topic, suffer me to say one 
 word most earnestly to deprecate undervaluing the 
 inestimable advantages of a classical education. 
 Those in the present day most keenly and bitterly 
 appreciate this remark, who are experiencing the 
 practical consequences of a want of classical educa- 
 tion. What are they to do, in either public or pri- 
 vate society, when allusions and quotations are 
 made, which, however erroneous and absurd, they 
 cannot detect or rectify however apposite and
 
 24 INTELLECTUAL AND MORAL DEVELOPMENT 
 
 beautiful, they cannot appreciate? They appear, 
 necessarily, vulgar, inglorious mutes. And further 
 than this, how can they really master a language, 
 which, like our own, is so largely indebted to 
 those of Greece and Rome? The finest writers 
 and speakers in the present and former times, 
 have been those most richly imbued with classi- 
 cal literature, which had at once chastened and 
 elevated their taste, and made it impossible for 
 them to stumble into coarseness or vulgarity. 
 Great natural powers, aided by much practice, 
 may undoubtedly enable their possessor to make 
 right eloquent use of his mother tongue ; but he is 
 never safe from disclosing the absence of early clas- 
 sical culture; and were his time to come over again, 
 would strain every nerve to acquire such precious 
 advantages. From the moment that such notions be- 
 come in the ascendant, that early classical education 
 is a superfluity, the links which bind the intellect 
 of age after age to those of Greece and Rome are 
 snapped asunder. From that moment refined taste 
 will disappear ; and, moreover, the best school for 
 training the youthful intellect to early and exact 
 habits of thought and expression, will be irrecover- 
 ably lost.- A fox was once advised to get rid of 
 
 his tail, by a friend, who gave him many convinc- 
 ing reasons for dispensing with so troublesome, 
 ungraceful, and useless an appendage ; but all of a 
 sudden, the first-mentioned fox discovered that his
 
 OP THE PRESENT AGE. 25 
 
 astute and eloquent companion had, somehow or 
 another, contrived to lose his own tail. I thought 
 of this some years ago, when listening to a well- 
 known orator of the day, volubly declaiming against 
 the folly of a classical education, of which almost 
 every word he was uttering showed himself to he 
 totally destitute. 
 
 Another feature of the literature of the age, is the 
 immense and incessant multiplication of ELEMEN- 
 TARY works in every department of knowledge. 
 On this, two remarks may he offered : First, the 
 best often indicate a great advance on those of 
 former days, and a high appreciation of the princi- 
 ples which ought to regulate the communication of 
 knowledge to learners. Secondly, the common run 
 seem sometimes to show, in the authors or com- 
 pilers, teachers who have scarcely finished being 
 learners; and not unnaturally imagine that that 
 which so recently seemed novel and difficult to 
 themselves, must needs be so to all other learners, 
 and yet have missed the notice of all other teachers. 
 Such an incessant supply, however, must, in some 
 degree, indicate a corresponding demand; and that 
 is of itself a cheering sign of the times. Whoever 
 has made an honest and creditable effort to dis- 
 seminate pleasing and useful information, has so far 
 deserved well of the age in which he lives, and has 
 contributed, however humbly, his share in its ad- 
 vancement. How can he tell how many persons
 
 26 INTELLECTUAL AND MORAL DEVELOPMENT 
 
 he may have delighted and instructed, and be- 
 guiled away from ruinous intemperance and profli- 
 gacy ? 
 
 Some persons complacently call the present a 
 superficial age ; but I, for one, am not presump- 
 tuous enough thus to characterise, if not slander, 
 the times in which we live. Such observations 
 often proceed from a shallow flippancy, unworthy 
 of serious attention. Those, however, who may 
 properly be charged with pluming themselves un- 
 duly on the possession of mere elementary know- 
 ledge, perhaps too hastily acquired, it may be well 
 to apprise of an observation of Locke, worthy to be 
 written in letters of gold, and to be ever before the 
 eyes of those now alluded to. " In the sciences, 
 every one has so much as he really knows and com- 
 prehends. What he believes only, and takes upon 
 trust, are but shreds, which, however well in the 
 whole piece, make no considerable addition to his 
 stock who gathers them. Such borrowed wealth, 
 like fairy money, though it icere gold in the hand 
 from ichich he received it, will be but leaves and dust 
 when it comes to wse." * 
 
 Knowledge of various kinds is now diffused over 
 
 * Essay on the Human Understanding, book i. c. 4, 23. " So 
 much," says this great man, " as we ourselves consider and compre- 
 hend of truth and reason, so much we possess of real and true 
 knowledge. The floating of other men's opinions in our brains, 
 makes us not one jot the more knowing, though they happen, to le 
 true." Id. ib.
 
 OF THE PRESENT AGE. 27 
 
 a vast surface; and through indolence, or inability 
 from various causes, great multitudes are content 
 with the glittering surface. They may be com- 
 pared to tourists, crowding eagerly and gaily to 
 the frontiers, but never even dreaming of pene- 
 trating into the interior, of Science. 
 
 I shall say nothing of the great number of SEK- 
 MONS AND RELIGIOUS publications, which make their 
 almost daily appearance, and presumably indicate, 
 by their continuance, a proportionate demand for 
 them. For my own part, I rejoice to see religious 
 truth set forth in every imaginable form and 
 variety in which it may present itself to devout 
 and discreet minds ; especially by those who are 
 trained as our religious teachers, and evince, by 
 what they write, a due sense of their high and 
 holy mission, by candour, moderation, sincerity, 
 and piety. I read, and always did read, largely in 
 this direction both our old writers of divinity, and 
 those of our own day *, than whom, I am sure that 
 none will be readier than themselves to say of their 
 great predecessors, there were giants in those days. 
 And of our living divines it may be said with 
 truth, that they address themselves with great 
 ability and learning, especially to theological exi- 
 gencies which did not exist, at least in their pre- 
 sent form, in the times of their foregoers. 
 
 Amiable feelings, and a facility of publishing, 
 precipitate upon us a sort of deluge of BIOGRAPHY.
 
 28 INTELLECTUAL AND MORAL DEVELOPMENT 
 
 People's " Lives " are now, it is to be feared, writ- 
 ten too often without the slightest regard to their 
 pretensions to be distinguished by such posthu- 
 mous notice ; and I doubt whether this may not 
 be a secret source of some little that is affected 
 and factitious in modern individual character. I 
 mean, whether men, women, and even children, do 
 not sometimes act and speak with a view to their 
 little sayings and doings being chronicled in flat- 
 tering terms after their decease. In truth, there 
 are very few people indeed, with whose lives and 
 character any reasonable person can feel the faintest 
 desire to be made acquainted. When a great 
 man dies, let his life be written, but let it also be 
 written greatly. If not at all, or imperfectly, the 
 age, or the biographer, suffers, and is disgraced ; 
 for a great memory has been slighted, or degraded. 
 Take, for instance, the resplendent character of 
 him whom the nation, with the eyes of all other 
 nations upon it, so lately buried with reverent 
 affection. 
 
 I witnessed that great burial : and methinks 
 the scene of solemnity and grandeur rises again 
 before my eyes. I can conceive nothing more 
 calculated than was that transcendent spectacle 
 profoundly to affect the heart and the imagina- 
 tion of a philosophical beholder. There was to 
 be seen the chivalry of the world, shedding tears 
 round a mighty fellow-warrior's coffin, which was
 
 OF THE PRESENT AGE. 29 
 
 descending gently for ever from their eyes, amidst 
 melting melody, into the grave where the worm 
 is now feeding sweetly* upon all that was mortal, 
 of Arthur Duke of Wellington. While my tears 
 fell, in common with all present, including royalty 
 itself; while music pealed mournfully, dissolving 
 the very soul, and the gorgeous coroneted coffin 
 finally disappeared ,f there arose before my mind's 
 eye a kindred yet different scene the vision 
 of some pauper burial, simple and rude, occur- 
 ring perhaps at that very moment : the burial 
 of some aged" forlorn being, \ whose poverty- 
 stricken spirit was at length safely housed where 
 the weary are at rest: the poor dust unattended, 
 save by those whose duty was to bury it with- 
 out a sigh, without a tear: ^with no sound but 
 a reverend voice, and the' gusty air; and no pro- 
 longed ceremonial. In the world of spirits, both 
 these might already have met the warrior-states- 
 man and the pauper, each aware of the different 
 disposal of the dust he had left behind ! Thus are 
 we equally unable to evade death, to conceal or 
 disguise its true and awful character. One event 
 
 * Job xxiv. 20. 
 
 f- It was very affecting to see the present Duke of Wellington 
 quietly extend his hand to touch his illustrious father's descending 
 coffin. 
 
 J At the remote village in which Lord Byron lies buried, a friend 
 of mine recently saw, on a page of the Register, near that which 
 contained an entry of the noble poet's burial, another thus : "An 
 old man : a stranger : name unkiwcn."
 
 30 INTELLECTUAL AND MORAL DEVELOPMENT 
 
 happeneth to all.* The word spoken on high, and 
 great and mean are beside each other in the same 
 darkness, with the same event before them. 
 
 Pardon this digression, for a moment, concern- 
 ing so great, and so recent an event : one to be wit- 
 nessed once only not in a lifetime only, but per- 
 haps in many ages. 
 
 To write the life of our immortal Wellington, 
 to produce a KT^a ael, would worthily occupy 
 ten, ay, or even twenty years of the life of a 
 highly-qualified biographer ; to preserve a mighty 
 individuality, and not lose it amidst glittering 
 multifariousness of detail. To present Wellington 
 to posterity, as alone posterity is likely, or 
 concerned, to look at him, a great effort must 
 be made to disengage him from, and indeed obli- 
 terate, all traces of mere circumstance, except 
 where essentially indicative of idiosyncrasy, how- 
 ever interesting to contemporaries. His bio- 
 grapher ought to feel that he is really at present, 
 and for some time to come, too near the greatness 
 which has gone from us ; and should, therefore, 
 strive to place himself at least half a century, or a 
 century, in advance of the age in which he lives. 
 But, who now has the patient self-denial, shall I 
 also say, the leisure to do this ? Is there, indeed, 
 any encouragement to make the effort? Or does 
 an indolent and prurient love of gossip vitiate the 
 
 * Eccles. ii. 14.
 
 OF THE PRESENT AGE. 31 
 
 taste of both readers and writers of biography 
 encouraging the latter to trifle with the memory 
 of the dead, and the intellect of the living ? 
 
 I would recommend any young aspirant to bio- 
 graphical distinction to read, and meditate upon, 
 the chief existing models of that delightful and 
 instructive class of writings models in respect of 
 the fitting subject, and the strength and beauty 
 with which that subject is invested by their 
 writers. Let him then ask himself, Is my subject 
 worthy of occupying the public attention, likely to 
 interest posterity ; and, if it be, am I capable of 
 doing justice to his character and memory ? And 
 have I the requisite means and opportunity ? I 
 cannot quit this topic without expressing a thought 
 which has often occurred to me, that the dead of 
 our days, could they reappear among us for a mo- 
 ment, have grievous cause to complain against their 
 survivors. The instant that those dead have dis- 
 appeared, almost every act of their life, even of a 
 private and confidential nature, is formally sub- 
 mitted to the scrutiny of often a harsh-judging 
 public, not acquainted with the precise circum- 
 stances under which those acts were done those 
 letters, for instance, written which become thence- 
 forth the subjects of unsparing comment and some- 
 times injurious speculation ! I have heard an 
 eminent person say, when conversing on this sub- 
 ject, "For my part, I now take care to write
 
 32 INTELLECTUAL AND MORAL DEVELOPMENT 
 
 no letters that may not be proclaimed on the 
 housetops and am very cautious whom I take 
 into my confidence." Is this unreasonable, or 
 unnatural ? 
 
 Perhaps, however, the most conspicuous feature 
 of the literature of the age, is to be seen in the 
 department of PKOSE FICTION. There can be no 
 difficulty in pointing to the great name of Sir 
 Walter Scott as one destined, in all probability, to 
 attract the admiring eyes of distant ages, unless, 
 indeed, our language fail, or the taste and genius 
 of future times altogether alter. He was a won- 
 derful person ; and has left in our imaginative lite- 
 rature the traces of giant footprints, such as none 
 dare even attempt to fill. All his contemporaries 
 and successors, down to the present time, he " doth 
 bestride, like a Colossus." Of this gre^t genius it 
 may be proudly said, that he never wrote- a iine 
 which had the slightest tendency to licentiousness : 
 and, moreover, that there is not a trace of vulgarity 
 in any of his often dazzling and enthralling, but not 
 equal compositions, all of which emanated from the 
 pen of the highly-finished scholar and gentleman. 
 This class of writing, for certain reasons of my 
 own, unimportant to any one else, I feel extreme 
 delicacy and difficulty in touching, or even glan- 
 cing at. To criticise contemporaries, and by way 
 of either censure or praise, is an impertinence of 
 which, for those reasons, I cannot be guilty ; but I
 
 OF THE PRESENT AGE. 33 
 
 may be allowed to express my opinion, that during 
 the last quarter of a century, undoubted, and high, 
 and very peculiar genius has been displayed in this 
 fascinating department of literature. It may, at 
 the same time, be admissible to express, most re- 
 spectfully, a suspicion whether, in the opinion of 
 future competent judges, it would be held that suf- 
 ficient pains have been taken, in the present day, 
 to construct a Fiction on a durable basis ; and 
 whether there are, consequently, many that have 
 sufficient vitality to bloom in the atmosphere shall 
 I say it '? of the next succeeding century. It has 
 always appeared to me, that to construct a durable 
 Fiction is really a more difficult task, and requires 
 much more original power, and far greater know- 
 ledge and taste, time, and consideration, than 
 seems to be sometimes supposed. Let any one 
 carefully consider the conception, plan, and execu- 
 tion, of those three imperishable masterpieces, Don 
 Quixote, Gil Bias, and Tom Jones ; and I shall be 
 much mistaken if he will not concur in the obser- 
 vation which I have ventured to make. 
 
 The continuous and even increasing demand for 
 this class of writings, both in our own country, on 
 the Continent, and in America, is truly astonishing. 
 I doubt whether anything of the kind is written, 
 however humble its pretensions, which is not read 
 by hundreds ; while those of a higher, and the 
 highest order, and the productions of persons of
 
 34 INTELLECTUAL AND MORAL DEVELOPMENT 
 
 established reputation, are eagerly read by many 
 hundreds of thousands of persons, perhaps ulti- 
 mately by even millions, in almost every class of 
 society. If this be so, how great is the responsi- 
 bility cast upon those possessing the power of writ- 
 ing such works ! What incalculable evil, what 
 incalculable good, may they not do ! 
 
 And I do believe that many of the most distin- 
 guished and successful labourers in this gay crowded 
 quarter of the literary vineyard, sincerely strive to 
 make their writings the vehicles of high moral 
 teaching. 
 
 It is, in fact, a class of writing which must always 
 have charms for mankind : and it may be remarked, 
 with humble reverence, that the sublime teachings 
 of Him who spake as never man spake, were largely 
 conveyed in parables. 
 
 The writing of HISTORY finds great favour, and 
 enjoys unprecedented facilities, in the present age. 
 Generally speaking, it is in the hands of very able, 
 learned, and faithful men ; and I doubt whether 
 history ever spoke so fully and so truthfully as in 
 the present age. To some extent this is easily to 
 be accounted for, even independently of the per- 
 sonal character of our historians ; and principally 
 by the fact that so many persons now have ample 
 opportunities for quickly detecting erroneous state- 
 ments. Authentic political information of every 
 kind is accessible to almost everybody; and a
 
 OF THE PRESENT AGE. 35 
 
 consciousness of this fact naturally quickens the 
 vigilance of historical writers, especially those 
 dealing with modern and recent times. The his- 
 torians of three or four centuries hence will have 
 immense advantages over their predecessors of the 
 present and previous ages. There is one history 
 of the present day, which will present in all future 
 time a great storehouse of authentic facts, consti- 
 tuting the record of one of the most critical periods 
 in the history of civilised mankind. 
 
 POETRY is not dead, in the present busy practical 
 age ; but her voice is heard only faintly and fit- 
 fully, like the sounds of an jEolian harp in a 
 crowded thoroughfare. The hurrying passengers 
 do not hear it, nor would care about it if they did ; 
 but now and then the sounds from that harp fall 
 deliciously on a sensitive ear, and awake fine sym- 
 pathies. The poetry of the present age is principally 
 and elegantly conversant with sentiment, of which it 
 is often a very delicate and beautiful utterance. It is 
 questionable, however, whether flights of imagina- 
 tion are as bold ; whether it be, or at all events 
 show itself, as strong and original as in times gone 
 by. Yet there are grand regions which I have often 
 greatly wondered to see apparently continuing un- 
 tried. Oh, transcendent and most glorious faculty, 
 there are yet boundless scenes into which thou 
 mayest soar as on angel wing ! 
 
 There is a fine spirit of CRITICISM abroad; subtle.
 
 36 INTELLECTUAL AND MORAL DEVELOPMENT 
 
 piercing, and discriminating. Specimens of this 
 species of literature may be seen in our weekly and 
 even daily journals, as well as in those appearing at 
 longer intervals compositions which may take their 
 place beside any extant in the language; and he who 
 expresses this opinion, has himself been occasionally 
 the subject of rather rough criticism, which, never- 
 theless, cannot bias an honest judgment. On the 
 other hand, there is a very great deal of this class 
 of writing that is hasty and flimsy, and amounting, 
 in fact, to a mere caricature of criticism. 
 
 Our PHILOSOPHICAL literature is of a very high 
 order speaking at present as far as regards style 
 of composition ; and I believe that the most distin- 
 guished foreigners, acquainted with our language, 
 express the same opinion. Mr Dugald Stewart, a 
 very competent judge, and one who himself wrote 
 English with purity and force, has declared that " as 
 an instrument of thought, and a medium of scientific 
 communication, the English language appears to 
 me, in its present state, to be far superior to the 
 French." This was said nearly fifty years ago. 
 Since then, no one can have been familiar with phi- 
 losophical compositions, especially those of the pre- 
 sent day, without having occasion to admire the 
 simplicity, vigour, and precision with which Eng- 
 lish is written by those communicating the pro- 
 foundest researches in science. If I may be allowed 
 to express an opinion, I should select the style of
 
 OF THE PRESEXT AGE. 37 
 
 Sir John Herschel as affording a model of elegance, 
 exactness, and strength. Some of his delineations 
 of difficult and abstruse matters are exquisitely 
 delicate and felicitous. 
 
 Having thus glanced at the more prominent feat- 
 ures of the literature of the age, it may be excus- 
 able to suggest the question, whether, upon the 
 whole, the present age is, in this respect, inferior, 
 equal, or superior to any that has preceded it ? 
 This is a question, indeed, equally applicable to 
 all the other branches of a subject directly or in- 
 directly involving the intellectual development 
 of the age ; but it may nevertheless not be out of 
 place here for an over-confident observer to cast 
 his eye on the long roll of splendid names in every 
 department of science and literature, prose and 
 poetical, of days preceding our own, and in other 
 countries as well as our own, and then modestly 
 to ask, dare we say that we have any to set beside 
 them? Or is the present age to be regarded as 
 under peculiar conditions, unfavourable to the de- 
 velopment of individual eminence and greatness? 
 Voltaire, an author whose name one can never 
 mention but with mingled feelings of contempt, 
 anger, and admiration, once made this remark : 
 " Original genius occurs but seldom in a nation 
 where the literary taste is formed. The number of 
 cultivated minds which there abound, like the trees 
 in a thick and flourishing forest, prevent any single
 
 38 INTELLECTUAL AND MORAL DEVELOPMENT 
 
 individual from raising his head far above the rest." 
 But is this so ? And why should it be so ? Would 
 a Plato, an Aristotle, a Newton, a Bacon, a Locke, 
 a Liebnitz,* a Shakspeare or a Milton, a Scaliger 
 or a Bentley, a Cervantes or a Le Sage, a Barrow 
 or a Butler, a Chatham, a Pitt, a Fox or Burke, fail 
 to tower above the men of the nineteenth century? 
 The question may give rise to interesting specula- 
 tions ; but I shall pass them by with the observa- 
 tion, that one may, without presumption, venture 
 to question the soundness of this confident dictum 
 of Voltaire, who doubtless secretly hoped that he 
 himself would be regarded as a transcendent ex- 
 ception to the rule which, possibly for that purpose 
 alone, he modestly laid down. 
 
 Thus much for what may be termed the vehicle 
 or circulating medium of thought; in discussing 
 which, it was almost necessary to touch, however 
 slightly, several of the multifarious subjects with 
 which it is connected. May I recur to the ques- 
 tion, Are we of the present day pigmies or giants, 
 as compared with those who have gone before us? 
 or whether, taking a large average, we may be 
 considered as below, or on a level with them V 
 Let us reserve the matter for a future stage of our 
 speculations ; and in the mean time try to avoid 
 a tendency to become, as Horace has expressed it, 
 
 * It Wcis the fond object of this great philosophical genius to 
 subvert the Newtonian system !
 
 OF THE PRESENT AGE. 
 
 praisers of the past on the one hand, and, on the 
 other, confident and vainglorious as to the posi- 
 tion of intellect in the present age. It may be 
 that there were giants in those days intellectual 
 giants in the times before us ; it may be that so 
 there have always been, and that there are now. 
 But here may be started an important and inte- 
 resting question: Is the human intellect now really 
 different from, or greater than, that which it ever 
 was, since we have authentically known of its 
 existence and action ? The stature of mankind is 
 just what it was three thousand years ago, as is 
 proved by the examination of mummies : why 
 should it be different with their minds? The in- 
 tellect of Newton, La Place, or La Grange, may 
 stand, says Sir John Herschel,* in fair competi- 
 tion with that of Archimedes, Aristotle, or Plato. 
 But is it not also possible, and the question is a 
 very great one, that the Almighty may have pre- 
 scribed limits to the human intellect, which it 
 never could, and never can pass, however it may 
 have the advantage of dealing with the accumu- 
 lated riches and experience of all the past intellec- 
 tual action of our species, as far as its results exist, 
 for our contemplation and guidance? Or may 
 there exist dormant energies of the intellect, be- 
 yond all past, but not incapable of future and pro- 
 digious, development ? 
 
 Disc, on Xat. Phil., p. 40.
 
 40 INTELLECTUAL AND MORAL DEVELOPMENT 
 
 The INTELLECT!' But what is intellect? and 
 in merely asking the question, we seem suddenly 
 sinking into a sort of abyss ! Is intellect an un- 
 known power, like Gravitation, whose existence is 
 evidenced only by its action, while of the nature 
 of that power we are utterly in the dark ? Seven 
 years ago I ventured, in a work incidentally deal- 
 ing with such topics, to ask the following question : 
 <{ Metaphysics, or mental philosophy : what shall 
 be said upon this subject? What do we now 
 really know of that strange mysterious thing, the 
 Human Mmd, after thousands of years' ingenious 
 and profound speculations of philosophers? Has 
 the Almighty willed that it should be so? that the 
 nature and operations of the MIND of man, shall 
 for ever be shrouded in mystery impenetrable, and 
 that we shall continue at once pleasing, puzzling, 
 and harassing ourselves, and exercising our highest 
 faculties to the end of time, with contradictory 
 speculations and hypotheses?" In this present 
 month of December, I submitted this passage, for 
 the purposes of this evening, to two eminent acade- 
 mical teachers in England and in Scotland, dis- 
 ciples of different schools, of that which passes 
 under the name of metaphysics.* One wrote to 
 me thus : " I can subscribe to the perplexity ex- 
 
 * This word is a barbarous compound by the Schoolmen of the 
 words [T] iMrx. T (fuffiaa., which were used by the editors of tho 
 extant works of Aristotle, to designate his abstract reasonings and
 
 OF THE PRESENT AGE. 41 
 
 pressed about metaphysics, in the separate para- 
 graph of your letter." The other told me, that he 
 thought I had indicated the true state of metaphy- 
 sical science in the present day. Then I asked 
 him whether he considered that we were really 
 any further advanced or whether, at least, it was 
 generally agreed that we were further advanced, 
 in admitted knowledge of the nature and functions 
 of the mind, than Aristotle was that is, upwards 
 of twenty-two centuries ago '? He considered for 
 a moment, and replied in the negative ! adding, 
 " We may think that we are, but that is not my 
 opinion." I then asked the same question of my 
 other friend, and he wrote as follows : " I am 
 afraid that very few substantial advances have 
 been made in psychology, since the days of Aris- 
 totle. Perhaps more people know something of 
 the human mind than knew anything about it 
 in his time; but I doubt whether any man of 
 the present day knows more about it than he 
 knew!" 
 
 What opinion would Plato and Aristotle form, 
 of the existing state of metaphysical science in this 
 country and Germany, if they could rise from their 
 long sleep to scrutinise it "? On how many great 
 
 speculations concerning the original causes of existence, without 
 relation to matter, and which, they were of opinion, should be 
 studied " after his Physics," /ar* ?'<*. p.nxit, or treatises on Natural 
 Philosophy.
 
 42 INTELLECTUAL AND MORAL DEVELOPMENT 
 
 points would they find their philosophical successors 
 of let us say the last two centuries, agreed? And 
 on which of them would either Plato or Aristotle 
 be forced to acknowledge that their own specula- 
 tions had been subverted by demonstrative strength ? 
 What new facts and phenomena would be presented 
 to them in mental science ? Who shall be our 
 spokesman, of dead or living metaphysicians, from 
 Descartes, Locke, Malebranche, and Liebnitz, down 
 to Kant, Fichte, Schelling, and Hegel ? What a 
 ghostly wrangling might we expect to hear ! What 
 would be the result ? Would the elder disputants 
 claim the later as disciples; or these prove that 
 their predecessors had been altogether and ab- 
 surdly in the wrong? 
 
 But, you will reasonably ask, is it, then, really 
 so ? A few minutes' conversation with the first 
 professed or acknowledged metaphysician whom 
 you meet, however he may at first dispute it s will 
 prove the existence of the fact, that the very 
 elements of the science at this moment are floating 
 about in extreme uncertainty. Ask him what he 
 means by mind? is it material, or immaterial? 
 What does he understand by matter? does it 
 exist, or not? Is thought the functional result 
 of physical organisation, or the action of a sepa- 
 rate spiritual existence? If so, how is it united 
 with, or what are its relations to, matter? How 
 does it stand with relation to the external world ?
 
 OP THE PRESENT AGE. 43 
 
 Nay is there any external world at all?* What 
 is the nature of the mind's internal action ? What 
 is consciousness? What is perception, and what 
 are its media? What are ideas? are they, or 
 are they not, innate ? for this grand question is, 
 and even in our own country, still the subject of 
 dispute ! f What constitutes personal identity ? 
 And so forth : everything proving the more un- 
 settled the further you push your way into the 
 darkness and confusion worse confounded than 
 that out of which you had gone. The distinguished 
 metaphysician to whom I last alluded, a subtle, 
 original, and learned thinker, wrote to me thus, 
 the other day : " The science of the human mind, 
 as hitherto cultivated, is a poor, unedifying pur- 
 suit: we seek to isolate the mind from the thinjrs 
 
 * Bishop Berkeley, an exquisite metaphysical genius, brought 
 profound reasonings in support of his opinion, that our belief in the 
 reality of an external world is totally unfounded ! 
 
 f- "Innate ideas" signify those'notions, or impressions, supposed 
 to have been stamped upon the mind from the first instant of its 
 existence, as contradistinguished to those which it afterwards gra- 
 dually acquires from without. Locke undertook to demonstrate 
 that ideas are not innate : and the dispute has the greatest names 
 arrayed on each side. There is one remark on the subject, made 
 by Bishop Law, the patron of Dr Paley, and a zealous partisan 
 of Locke, which has always appeared to me worthy of attention : 
 " It will really come to the same thing with regard to the usual 
 attributes of God, and the nature of virtue and vice, whether the 
 Deity has implanted these instincts and affections in us, or has 
 framed and disposed us in such a manner has given us such power, 
 and placed us in such circumstances, that we must necessarily 
 acquire them." LAW'S Translation of Archbishop King on the 
 Origin of Evil. P. 79 (note.)
 
 44 INTELLECTUAL AND MORAL DEVELOPMENT 
 
 with which it is occupied the external world, and 
 to study that mind in its isolation. But that is im- 
 practicable. We instantly lose our footing. We get 
 among abstractions, darkness, and nonentity. How 
 do you know, begins to ask the puzzled inquirer, 
 that we have a mind at all ? Why cannot a body be 
 so constituted, as to think, and feel, and love, and 
 hate? He is perhaps answered, that the opinion 
 in favour of a MIND (you know that I am a zealous 
 anti-materialist) is at any rate more probable. 
 The science of the human mind, then, according to 
 this, is the science of something which only 2)robably 
 exists ! A fine science that must be, which deals 
 with something which perhaps does not exist ! " 
 
 Here is a picture of existing metaphysical 
 science ! It is, in truth, only a reflexion of some 
 of the myriad dark shadows of all past speculation ; 
 and shall it be said that it bears a similar relation 
 to the future ? Metaphysics are called a science ; 
 and yet its main questions are " What are the 
 questions!" It deals with being, and its condi- 
 tions, and yet cannot say what being is : and, in- 
 deed, I doubt whether it can be truly given credit 
 for possessing one single grand truth, universally 
 recognised as such. In short, metaphysics are to 
 each particular mind what it chooses to make 
 them ; though undoubtedly these exercitations have 
 a tendency to sharpen its faculties. A whole life 
 of an ingenious rational being may be occupied in
 
 OF THE PRESENT AGE. 45 
 
 these pursuits however irritating it may be to fond 
 metaphysicians to be told so without the acknow- 
 ledged acquisition of a single fact, of one solitary, 
 practical, substantial result. He has been doing, all 
 the while, little else than amusing himself with a sort 
 of mental kaleidoscope, or gazing at a series of dis- 
 solving views. He has been floundering on from 
 beginnings in which nothing is begun, to conclu- 
 sions in which nothing is concluded ! 
 
 It would seem, however, that new forces are 
 now being brought into the field, and magnetism 
 and electricity, whether one and the same force, 
 or different, are destined to dissolve our diffi- 
 culties. According to one quasi philosopher, man's 
 body is a magnet, * mysteriously communicating 
 
 * " Mesmer," says Tennemann, in his Manual of the History 
 of Philosophy, " discovered, or rather re-discovered, the exis- 
 tence of a new force a universally diffused power, similar to 
 attraction and electricity, permeating and acting on all organised 
 and unorganised bodies." Some view it simply as " a nervous 
 fluid ;" while others resolve certain recent alleged phenomena 
 of natural and artificial somnambulism, to " the power of the 
 mind acting directly on the organisation : " whence we have lately 
 heard of "two new sciences Neuro-Hypnology, and Electro- 
 Biology." Professor Eschenmayer admits the existence of "an 
 organic ether," spread everywhere, and subtler than light ; and 
 with this view "connects his mystical and spiritual metaphysics." 
 Dr Passavant " shows the intimate and important relation be- 
 tween the science and the subliinest sentiments of religion!" and 
 Dr Ennemoser can trace " the connection and distinction of the 
 highest degree of Mesmerism, and Miracles !" What will be 
 said of these things, a few centuries hence '{ Shall we be laughed at 
 for laughing at them if our age do laugh at them ? Or does a dis- 
 criminating philosophy detect in action, amidst a mass of absurdity, 
 and even fraud, startling indications of physical truth ?
 
 46 INTELLECTUAL AND MORAL DEVELOPMENT 
 
 with other bodies, and external objects, without 
 any visible medium ; and this discovery is destined, 
 say the professors of the new science, to cast a 
 new light on the nature of being, of life, death, 
 sleep, spirit, matter and theology ! Apparently 
 one of our own countrymen has anonymously 
 announced the exhilarating discovery, that man is 
 a mere electro-chemical machine, in common with 
 all the lower animals, of what sort or size whatso- 
 ever !* " The mental action," quoth this sage, " is 
 identical, except in degree : it may be imponderable 
 and intangible the result of the action of an appara- 
 tus of an electric nature " I am quoting his words 
 " a modification of that surprising agent which 
 takes magnetism, heat, and light, as other subordi- 
 nate forms: electricity being almost as metaphysical 
 as ever mind was supposed to be. ... Mental action 
 passes at once into the category of natural things ; 
 its old metaphysical character vanishes in a moment, 
 and the distinction between physical and moral is 
 annulled." There is a stride indeed ! the stride, 
 to be sure, of an impudent child. According to him, 
 my friends, we in this room may behold in our- 
 
 * " If mental action be electric," says the anonymous and very 
 quaint writer alluded to the author of The Vestiges of the Natural 
 History of Creation, "the proverbial quickness of thought that is, 
 the quickness of the transmission of sensation and will may be 
 presumed to have been brought to an exact admeasurement ! . . . 
 Mental action may accordingly be presumed to have a rapidity 
 equal to 192,000 miles in the second ! i. e., the quickness with 
 which the electric agent, light, travels ! "
 
 OF THE PRESENT AGE. 47 
 
 selves a choice assortment of electrical machines 
 quaintly conceiving themselves responsible beings ! 
 I, giving out the sparks, chemically or mechani- 
 cally I do not exactly know or care which and 
 you looking on and listening to their crackling 
 sound, with electrical sympathy and complacency ! 
 What will be the next stage of this wondrous de- 
 velopment? It is hard to treat these things gravely ; 
 yet they have been, and are, widely and sedulously 
 disseminated in the present day, in this country 
 in this, the nineteenth century ! With what object? 
 And what measure must have been taken, by those 
 who do so, of the intellect of the age ? 
 
 How refreshing is it, to recollect, amidst all 
 these results of never-ending, and often impious 
 trifling with the grandest subjects with which man 
 can concern himself, the sublime and authoritative 
 declaration of Holy Scripture, There is a SPIRIT 
 in man; and the inspiration of the Almighty giveth 
 them understanding ! * 
 
 What, therefore, shall we conclude? That MIND 
 remains, at present, whatever revelations may be 
 in store for future times, the great insoluble mys- 
 tery it ever was, so far as relates to its constitution 
 and mode of action ? That we have no evidence 
 of its faculties being greater, or less, now, than 
 they ever were; and that, judging merely from the 
 past, we have no grounds for expecting alteration 
 
 * Job xxxii. 8.
 
 43 INTELLECTUAL AND MORAL DEVELOPMENT 
 
 for the future? It may be, that such knowledge is 
 too high for us, and that for wise purposes we can- 
 not attain to it, and that the absence of it does not 
 affect the object .with which man was placed upon 
 the earth. I am myself strongly disposed to think 
 that every person who has meditated upon the 
 operations of his own mind, has occasionally, and 
 suddenly, been startled with a notion that his mind 
 possesses qualities and attributes of which he has 
 nowhere seen any account. I do not know how 
 to express it, but I have several times had a tran- 
 sient consciousness of mere ordinary incidents 
 then occurring, having somehow or other hap- 
 pened before, accompanied by a vanishing idea 
 of being able even to predict the sequence. I 
 once mentioned this to a man of powerful intel- 
 lect, and he said, " So have I/" Again it may 
 be that there is more of truth than one suspects, 
 in the assertion which I met with in a work of 
 Mr de Quincey's, that forgetting absolute forget- 
 ting is a thing not possible to the human mind. 
 Some evidence of this may be derived from the 
 fact of long-missed incidents and states of feel- 
 ing suddenly being reproduced, and without any 
 perceptible train of association. Were this to be 
 so, the idea is very awful ; and it has been sug- 
 gested by a great thinker, that merely perfect 
 memory of everything, may constitute the great 
 book which shall be opened in the last day, on which
 
 OF THE PRESENT AGE. 49 
 
 mail lias been distinctly told that the secrets of all 
 hearts shall be made known ; for all things are 
 naked and opened unto the eyes of Him with whom 
 ice have to do* 
 
 Man's mind, I must take the liberty of repeat- 
 ing, is indeed a mystery to him. In the mean 
 time, let restless metaphysical speculators go on, if 
 they please, amusing and puzzling each other with 
 theories and hypotheses to the end of time ; only, 
 my friends, let not ourselves be drawn within their 
 meshes, but consider whether life, thought, and the 
 sense of responsibility, have not been given to us 
 for infinitely wiser and greater purposes, however 
 awfully mysterious, than to exhaust our faculties in 
 endless and nugatory inquiries. Investigations of 
 this kind, nevertheless, are not in all points of view 
 to be deprecated, but may possibly be attended with 
 morally beneficial results. "It is of great use to the 
 sailor," says Locke, " to know the length of his line, 
 though he cannot, with it, fathom all the depths of 
 the ocean. It is well he knows that it is long enough 
 to reach the bottom, at such places as are necessary 
 to direct his voyage, and caution him against run- 
 ning upon shoals, that may ruin him. Our business 
 here is to know, not all things, but those which 
 concern our conduct. If we can find out those 
 measures whereby a rational creature, put in that 
 state in which man is in this world, may, and 
 
 Heb. iv. 13. 
 D
 
 50 INTELLECTUAL AND MORAL DEVELOPMENT 
 
 ought, to govern his opinions and actions depend- 
 ing thereon, we need not be troubled that some 
 other things escape our knowledge."* And, 
 finally, be it observed, that we have no authority 
 from revealed religion, for repressing what are 
 called metaphysical speculations, however little 
 direct encouragement it may afford them; and 
 even if their result be only to prove their futility, 
 that, of itself, constitutes a signal fact. 
 
 It will be observed that I have been hitherto 
 dealing with the so-called science of the mind, 
 simply as the subject of human speculation. How 
 REVELATION deals with man, physically, mentally, 
 and morally, remains to be seen. Contenting our- 
 selves for the present, with the undoubted existence 
 of intellect, and its action, somehow or other ; and 
 postponing the consideration of the cognate subject 
 of ethics, or moral science, it may not possibly be 
 
 * Essay on the Human Understanding, book i. chap. i. 6. A 
 little further on, this profound thinker thus admirably proceeds : 
 " Men extending their inquiries beyond their capacities, and letting 
 their thoughts wander into those depths where they can find no 
 sure footing, it is no wonder that they raise questions, and multiply 
 disputes ; which never coming to any clear resolution, are proper 
 only to continue and increase their doubts, and to confirm them at 
 last in perfect scepticism. Whereas, were the capacities of our 
 understandings well considered, the extent of our knowledge once 
 discovered, and the horizon found which sets the bounds between 
 the enlightened and dark parts of things ; between what is, and 
 what is not, comprehensible by us, men would perhaps, with less 
 scruple, acquiesce in the avowed ignorance of the one, and employ 
 their thoughts and discourse with more advantage and satisfaction 
 in the other.
 
 OF THE PRESENT AGE. 51 
 
 deemed presumptuous if one venture to express an 
 opinion, that the intellect of the present age appears, 
 cceteris paribus, in as high a state of general deve- 
 lopment as has been known on the earth ; and that 
 it may even be doubted whether there be not now 
 among us I speak of ourselves and other civilised 
 nations men of an intellectual strength approach- 
 ing that of the most illustrious of our recorded 
 species. But in saying this, I rely only on the 
 evidence afforded by the recent progress and the 
 present state of physical science. If we have made, 
 as I feel compelled to think is the case, no real 
 advance in psychological science for ages, how vast 
 has been that of physical science, within the last 
 half, or even quarter of a century ! 
 
 Go back for a moment, in imagination, to the 
 times when this earth was thought the fixed centre 
 of the universe and an extended plain,* the 
 heavenly bodies mere glittering specks revolving 
 round it ! when Thales, a great philosopher, one 
 of the seven wise men of Greece, conceived amber 
 to have an inherent soul or essence, which, awakened 
 by friction, went forth and brought back the light 
 particles floating around (such were his ideas of 
 
 * This notion is not yet apparently banished from among our- 
 selves even. " I remember," says the present Astronomer-Royal, 
 " a man in my youth my friend was in his inquiries an ingenious 
 man, a sort of philosopher who used to say he should like to go to 
 the edge of the earth and look over 1" Aireift Lectures on Astro- 
 nomy, p. 46, 2d edit., 1848.
 
 52 INTELLECTUAL AND MORAL DEVELOPMENT 
 
 its electrical qualities!) when the great Aristotle 
 taught that the heavenly bodies were bound fast in 
 spheres which revolved with them round our earth 
 the bodies themselves being motionless the first 
 sphere being that in which the fixed stars are placed ; 
 then the five planets ; the sun ; and, next to the 
 earth, the moon : the earth itself being at rest, and 
 the centre of the universe ! But time would fail 
 me to recapitulate these marks of what we call pri- 
 mitive simplicity ; and your memories will quickly 
 suggest them, far lower down than to the times of 
 astrology and alchemy. How stand we now V 
 Little though we know, by our own research and 
 reasonings, concerning our own inner man, what 
 have we not come to know of the world in which we 
 live, and our physical relations to it 5 of the wonder- 
 ful structures of ourselves, animals, and vegetables ; 
 of the glorious heavens around and about us ? Man 
 is indeed a wonder to himself, and lives amidst an 
 incomprehensible and ever-increasing wonder. Let 
 us merely glance, for a moment, at one or two of 
 the leading features of modern physiology, of che- 
 mistry, mechanics, astronomy, and geology. 
 
 The whole earth has been converted into man's 
 observatory ; in every part of which he is inces- 
 santly, simultaneously, and systematically at work, 
 aud communicating, and comparing, each with the 
 other, their results. What would Aristotle say, 
 Lord Bacon standing by with gladdened heart,
 
 OF THE PRESENT AGE. 53 
 
 were he to be told of the astronomical, geological, 
 magnetic, and physiological observations, researches, 
 and experiments at this moment going on in every 
 quarter of the globe to which adventurous man can 
 penetrate ; observations and experiments conducted 
 by those who act strictly in concert, and in rigorous 
 adherence to universally recognised rules and prin- 
 ciples of inquiry and experiment? That the greatest 
 intellects of the age are ever at work, patiently 
 methodising, combining, and comparing, the results 
 thus obtained, and deducing from them inferences 
 of the last importance '? What relation do ages of 
 our past history bear to a single year thus spent ? 
 
 We have thoroughly dissected, for instance, the 
 human and almost all known animal structures 
 those of the present tenants of every element ; cor- 
 recting innumerable errors, and developing exten- 
 sive and important relations and analogies. The 
 result is, to overwhelm, and almost crush our small 
 faculties with the evidences of transcendent wisdom 
 and beneficence. The subdued soul can only mur- 
 mur, Marvellous are Thy worlcSj and that my soul 
 knoweth right well ! 
 
 A word about anatomy, human and compara- 
 tive, with reference to some recently promulgated 
 conclusions of deep significance and interest. 
 
 The human structure seems to have been nearly 
 exhausted anatomically, even as far as relates to 
 the nerves, except, perhaps, as to microscopical
 
 54 INTELLECTUAL AND MORAL DEVELOPMENT 
 
 researches, now being actively prosecuted, and 
 with very important results. This remark, how- 
 ever, applies only to the facts of human anatomy : 
 on the significance or meaning of those facts, quite 
 a new light seems dawning. Man now, by his 
 own researches, finds that he is indeed, as God had 
 ages before told him, fearfully and wonderfully 
 made; and the enlightened and pious philosophy 
 of the present day recognises as a fact, on the 
 authority of revelation, which has recorded it in 
 language of ineffable awe and sublimity, that the 
 human species came upon this planet solely in virtue 
 of a direct act of creation by the Almighty. God 
 created man in His own image in the image of 
 God created he him. And the Lord God formed 
 man of the dust of the ground, and breathed into his 
 nostrils the breath of life ; and man became a living 
 soul. " He did not merely possess it," observes 
 Mr Coleridge ; " he became it. It was his proper 
 being; his truest self; the man in the man. All 
 organised beings have life, in common, each after 
 its kind. This, therefore, all animals possess, 
 and man as an animal. But in addition to this, 
 God transfused into man a higher gift, and spe- 
 cially imbreathed even a living that is, self-sub- 
 sisting soul; a soul having its life in itself."* 
 
 Philosophy reverently owns that it knows of no 
 other clue to beginnings, than that thus vouchsafed 
 
 * A ids to Reflection. Introd. Aphorisms, ix.
 
 OF THE PRESENT AGE. 55 
 
 exclusively and positively by revelation. In ex- 
 amining the human structure, however, and com- 
 paring it with that of animals in general, a new 
 and grand evidence has lately been afforded of the 
 unity of the divine action ; supplying the last argu- 
 ment required, and left untouched by the famous 
 Cudworth, to refute the old atheistic doctrine of 
 Democritus and his followers who, it will be re- 
 membered, resolved the existence of men and ani- 
 mals into the fortuitous concourse of atoms by 
 demonstrating the existence, in the Divine Mind, of 
 a pattern, or plan, prior to its manifestation in the 
 creation of man. " The evidence," says the great 
 physiologist, to whom we are indebted * for this 
 noble contribution to science and natural theology 
 I mean Professor Owen, who I believe has carried 
 comparative anatomy much beyond the point at 
 which it had been left by his illustrious predecessor 
 Cuvier "the evidence of unity of plan in the struc- 
 ture of animals, testifies to the oneness of their 
 Creator, as the modifications of the plan for differ- 
 ent. modes of life, illustrate the beneficence of the 
 designer." Human anatomy has thus acquired a 
 new interest and significance. Man is no longer 
 regarded as though he were distinct in his anatomy 
 from all the rest of the animal creation ; but his 
 structure is perceived to be an exquisite modifica- 
 
 * See The Archetype and Homologies of the Vertebrate Skeleton, 
 and On the Nature of Limit. By Richard Owen, F.R.S. 8vo.
 
 56 INTELLECTUAL AND MORAL DEVELOPMENT 
 
 tion of many other structures, the whole of which 
 have now been recognised as modifications of one 
 and the same general pattern. Every one of the 
 two hundred and sixty bones which may be enu- 
 merated in the human skeleton, can be unerringly 
 traced in the skeletons of many hundred inferior 
 animals ; and the human anatomist of our day be- 
 gins to comprehend the nature of his own structure, 
 in a way never dreamed of by his predecessors. 
 Thus, as it appears to me, is supplied a splendid 
 addition to the treasures of natural theology. 
 
 " Of the unity of the Deity," says Paley,* " the 
 proof is the uniformity of plan observable in the 
 system." And let me interpose the remark, that 
 every day is accumulating upon us proofs of this 
 sublime doctrine. 
 
 " "We never get amongst such original, or 
 totally different modes of existence, as to indicate 
 that we are come into the province of a different 
 creator, or under the direction of a different will. 
 . . . The inspection and comparison of living 
 forms add to the argument without number." And 
 that, in some respects, incomparable writer pro- 
 ceeds to instance a series of similitudes between all 
 animals, which " surely bespeak the same creation 
 and the same creator." Thus wrote Paley just 
 half a century ago in 1802 : had he been now 
 living, how he would have hailed this discovery of 
 
 * Natural Theology, chap, xxv. '' Of the Unity of the Deity."
 
 OF THE PRESENT ACE. 57 
 
 Owen, in this our own day ! I am aware that, 
 when it was first announced, suspicions were for a 
 moment entertained, in one or two quarters, that 
 it tended to afford a colour to what had been called 
 the " Theory of Development"* of which I have 
 reason to know that there is no more determined 
 opponent than Professor Owen himself that is, 
 that during an endless succession of ages, one class 
 of animals was " developed" from another. I have 
 thought much, as far as I am able, about this 
 matter, and own that I see not the slightest 
 grounds for connecting a real and great discovery 
 with a preposterous theory such as I believe no 
 living philosopher of the slightest note would ven- 
 ture to stamp with the sanction of his authority ; 
 and even he or they, if there be more than one 
 concerned, who have vamped up " The Vestiges 
 of Creation," have never ventured to affix their 
 names to the performance. There is not, indeed, 
 a tittle of evidence to support the derogatory 
 
 * In Mr Hugh Miller's Old Red Sandstone, a charming little 
 record of his own interesting and valuable contributions to geolo- 
 gical science, will be found some just and contemptuous observa- 
 tions on the Theory of Development, chap. iii. In speaking of 
 Lamarck, the whimsical author, if so he may be regarded, of this 
 same theory, Mr Miller drolly observes " Lamarck himself, when 
 bringing home in triumph the skeleton of some huge salamander 
 or crocodile of the lias, might indulge consistently with his theory 
 in the pleasing belief that he had possessed himself of the bones of 
 his grandfather a grandfather removed, of course, to a remote 
 degree of consanguinity, by the intervention of a few hundred 
 thousand ' great-greats.' "
 
 58 INTELLECTUAL AND MORAL DEVELOPMENT 
 
 notion that man is the result of a change gradu- 
 ally brought about in any inferior animal. It 
 is simply a gratuitous absurdity a repetition of 
 one' long exploded that animals, when placed in 
 new circumstances, alter, and are then capable of 
 propagating such alteration ; that if new circum- 
 stances be only given time enough to operate, the 
 changes may be such as to constitute a new series ! 
 This old nonsense has been recently revived and 
 spuriously decked out with the spoils of modern 
 science, so as to arrest the attention of the simple 
 for a moment ; only, however, to be quickly re- 
 pudiated by even them, and then again forgotten, 
 but doubtless to be again reproduced out of the 
 
 " Limbo large and broad, since called, 
 The Paradise of Fools," * 
 
 when the exposure of its absurdity has been for- 
 gotten reproduced as one of the persevering but 
 abortive efforts of infidelity, to subvert the founda- 
 tions of morality, social order, a future state, and 
 the belief of a personal superintending Deity go- 
 verning his creatures with reference to it. 
 
 I cannot quit this branch of the subject without 
 bringing before you a recent, and a most interest- 
 ing and splendid illustration of the pitch to which 
 comparative anatomy has reached in this country 
 one which renders its conclusions absolutely inevi- 
 table. The incident which I am about to mention 
 
 * Paradise Lost, book iii.
 
 OF THE PRESENT AGE. 
 
 exhibits the result of an immense induction of par- 
 ticulars in this noble science, and bears no faint 
 analogy to the magnificent astronomical calcula- 
 tion, or prediction, whichever one may call it, 
 presently to be laid before you. 
 
 Let it be premised, that Cuvier, the late illus- 
 trious French physiologist and comparative anato- 
 mist, had said, that in order to deduce from a single 
 fragment of its structure, the entire animal, it was 
 necessary to have a tooth, or an entire articulated 
 extremity. In his time, the comparison was limited 
 to the external configuration of bone. The study 
 of the internal structure had not proceeded so far. 
 
 In the year 1839, Professor Owen was sitting 
 alone in his study, when a shabbily-dressed man 
 made his appearance, announcing that he had got 
 a great curiosity which he had brought from New 
 Zealand, and wished to dispose of it to him. Any 
 one in London can now see the article in question, 
 for it is deposited in the Museum of the College 
 of Surgeons in Lincoln's Inn Fields. It has the 
 appearance of an old marrow-bone, about six inches 
 in length, and rather more than two inches in 
 thickness, with loth extremities broken off ; and 
 Professor Owen considered, that to whatever ani- 
 mal it might have belonged, the fragment must 
 have lain in the earth for centuries. At first he 
 considered this same marrow-bone to have be- 
 longed to an ox at all events to a quadruped ;
 
 60 INTELLECTUAL AND MORAL DEVELOPMENT 
 
 for the wall or rim of the bone was six times as 
 thick as the bone of any bird, even the ostrich. 
 He compared it with the bones in the skeleton of 
 an ox, a horse, a camel, a tapir and every quad- 
 ruped apparently possessing a bone of that size and 
 configuration ; but it corresponded with none. On 
 this he very narrowly examined the surface of the 
 bony rim, and at length became satisfied that 
 this monstrous fragment must have belonged to 
 a bird ! to one at least as large as an ostrich, 
 but of a totally different species ; and consequently 
 one never before heard of, as an ostrich was by far 
 the biggest bird known. From the difference in 
 the strength of the bone, the ostrich being unable 
 to fly, so must have been unable this unknown 
 bird : and so our anatomist came to the conclusion 
 that this old shapeless bone indicated the former 
 existence, in New Zealand, of some huge bird, at 
 least as great as an ostrich, but of a far heavier 
 and more sluggish kind. Professor Owen was 
 confident* of the validity of his conclusions, but 
 could communicate that confidence to no one else ; 
 and notwithstanding attempts to dissuade him from 
 committing his views to the public, he printed his 
 deductions in the Transactions of the Zoological 
 Society for the year 1839, where fortunately they 
 
 * The paper on which he even sketched the outline of the un- 
 known bird, is now in the hands of an accomplished naturalist in 
 London Mr Broderip.
 
 OF THE PRESENT AGE. 61 
 
 remain on record as conclusive evidence of the fact 
 of his having then made this guess, so to speak, 
 in the dark. He caused the bone, however, to be 
 engraved ; and having sent a hundred copies of 
 the engraving to New Zealand, in the hopes of 
 their being distributed and leading to interesting 
 results, he patiently waited for three years viz., 
 till the year 1842 when he received intelligence 
 from Dr Buckland, at Oxford, that a great box, 
 just arrived from New Zealand, consigned to him- 
 self, was on its way, unopened, to Professor Owen ; 
 who found it filled with bones, palpably of a bird, 
 one of which was three feet in length, and much 
 more than double the size of any bone in the 
 ostrich ! And out of the contents of this box the 
 Professor was positively enabled to articulate almost 
 the entire skeleton of a huge wingless bird, between 
 TEN AND ELEVEN FEET in height, its bony struc- 
 ture in strict conformity with the fragment in 
 question ; and that skeleton may be at any time 
 seen at the Museum of the College of Surgeons, 
 towering over, and nearly twice the height of the 
 skeleton of an ostrich ; and at its feet is lying the 
 old bone from which alone consummate anatomical 
 science had deduced such an astounding reality : the 
 existence of an enormous extinct creature of the 
 bird kind, in an island where previously no bird 
 had been known to exist larger than a pheasant or 
 a common fowl !
 
 C2 INTELLECTUAL AND MORAL DEVELOPMENT 
 
 In the vast and deeply interesting department 
 of human knowledge, however, of which I am 
 speaking, the eager inquirer is sternly stopped, as 
 by a voice saying, " Hitherto shalt thou come, and 
 no further;" and he is fain to obey. As the meta- 
 physician is unable to tell us what constitutes the 
 mind, so it is with the physiologist, with reference 
 to LIFE. His most rigorous analyses have totally 
 failed to detect what is the precise nature of that 
 mysterious force, if one may use the word, which 
 we designate by the word " Life ! " He sees its 
 infinitely varied modes of existence and action ; 
 but what it is that so exists and acts, is now as 
 completely hidden from the highly-trained eye of 
 the modern physiologist, as it was from the keen 
 and eager eye of Aristotle. We cannot even con- 
 jecture its nature; except, perhaps, by vaguely sug- 
 gesting electricity, magnetism, galvanism, or some 
 such modification of ethereal force ; while the high 
 philosophy of this age regards all these as being 
 only agents used as subtler media for manifesting 
 the phenomena of life than flesh and bone, but 
 not a whit more life than they. Language has 
 been exhausted in attempting to express the vari- 
 ous notions of it which have occurred to the pro- 
 foundest of mankind. Thus Newton knew nothing 
 of what constituted gravitation, but could tell only 
 the laws which regulated its action. Nor, to recur 
 for a moment to a topic already touched, do we
 
 OF THE PRESENT AGE. 63 
 
 know, nor are we able to conjecture, how the soul 
 of man exists in conjunction with his body. That 
 it has, however, a separate, independent, imma- 
 terial existence, being as distinct from the body 
 as is the house from its inhabitant, and is not the 
 mere result of physical functions or forces, but 
 endued with the precious and glorious gift of im- 
 mortality, I suppose no one doubts, who wishes to 
 be considered a believer in the Christian religion, 
 or to rank as a Christian philosopher. The doc- 
 trine of materialism is not now that of the philoso- 
 phical world ; and I think that the number of vota- 
 ries of that doctrine, never great, is fast declining. 
 The philosophy of the present age does not pretend 
 to see anything impossible, or unreasonable, in the 
 soul's absolute independence of the body, with 
 which it is so incomprehensibly united, and from 
 which it so mysteriously takes its departure. I 
 again repeat, that at present I am dealing with the 
 matter as one of only human speculation. And as 
 man has hitherto been baffled in all his attempts to 
 discover the nature of life, so has it been with him 
 in respect of death. The awful question of the 
 Almighty himself to Job remains unanswered 
 Have the gates of death been opened unto thee ? or 
 hast thou seen the doors of the shadoic of death ? 
 
 Is it, however, permissible to imagine some fu- 
 ture NEWTON of physiology or chemistry, or both 
 united, consciously on the verge of solving the tre-
 
 64 INTELLECTUAL AM) MORAL DEVELOPMENT 
 
 mendous problem, what constitutes LIFE ? agi- 
 tated as Newton was w T ben approaching the disco- 
 very of gravitation, but persevering, till at length 
 the awful mystery lies exposed to his trembling 
 eye ! The vitality of all human, animal, and vege- 
 table existence, in all its modes and conditions, as 
 absolutely demonstrable as any physical fact at 
 present cognisable by the sense and understanding 
 of man ! One's mind falters at the contemplation. 
 And what might be the effect, on the being of 
 mankind, of so stupendous a discovery? With 
 what powers would they become thenceforth in- 
 vested? And is the other great question the 
 mind, its real nature and relations to the body 
 also to be in like manner settled? and man's 
 relations to the dread future in some measure per- 
 ceptible even while in this life ? It is easy to ask ; 
 but what mortal shall answer? even centuries upon 
 centuries hence, if so long last the state of things 
 with which man is concerned ! Let us, then, 
 humbly return to the point from which we started. 
 And we may hear the profound comparative 
 anatomist of this our enlightened day, in surveying 
 constantly accumulating proofs each indicating, 
 in every direction, the endlessness of omnipotent 
 resources, and of the wisdom and goodness of the 
 ever-blessed Creator exclaim, in the sublime lan- 
 guage of Scripture, placed on record more than 
 four thousand years ago : Ask now (he BEASTS, and
 
 OF THE PRESENT AGE. 65 
 
 they shall teach thee ; and the FOWLS of the air, and 
 they shall tell thee. Or speak to the EARTH, and it 
 shall teach thee ; and the FISHES of the sea shall de- 
 clare unto thee : Who knoweth not in all these, that 
 the hand of the Lord hath wrought this, in whose 
 hand is the soul of every living thing, and the breath 
 of all mankind.* 
 
 The generation and use of mechanical power will 
 ever distinguish the age in which we live, not only 
 when tested by its astonishing practical and daily- 
 developing results, but when referred to the mental 
 energy which has led the way to them. " Almost 
 all the great combinations of modern mechanism," 
 says Sir John Herschel, " and many of its refine- 
 ments and nicer improvements, are creations of 
 pure intellect, grounding its exertions upon a mode- 
 rate number of very elementary propositions in 
 theoretical mechanics and geometry." " On this 
 head," he justly adds, u not volumes merely, but 
 libraries, are requisite to enumerate and describe 
 the prodigies of ingenuity which have been lavished 
 on everything connected with machinery and engi- 
 neering.'^ Which of us that saw that true wonder 
 of our time, that visible and profoundly sugges- 
 tive epitome and sum of man's doings since he was 
 placed on this planet, the Great Exhibition of 
 1851 a spectacle, however, apparently passing 
 
 * Job x. 7-10. 
 
 \ Discourse on the Study of Natural Philosophy, pp. C3, 64.
 
 66 INTELLECTUAL AND MORAL DEVELOPMENT 
 
 out of the public mind without having had its true 
 significance adequately appreciated would not re- 
 cognise as one, but still only one, and a minor, yet 
 resplendent feature, its rich array of evidences of the 
 truth of these remarks ? There, mechanical power 
 was seen in every known form of manifestation and 
 application, as it is in action at this moment, " dif- 
 fusing over the whole earth," to quote again this 
 distinguished philosopher, " the productions of any 
 part of it ; to fill every corner of it with miracles 
 of art and labour, in exchange for its peculiar com- 
 modities ; and to concentrate around us, in our 
 dwellings, apparel, and utensils, the skill of all who 
 in the present and past generations have contri- 
 buted their improvements to the processes of our 
 manufacture. 11 * 
 
 Who is not, so to speak, dumb with wonder 
 when he contemplates the agency of STEAM and 
 ELECTRICITY ? which may really be said to have 
 altered, within a very few years, and to be every 
 hour altering, the relations of man to his fellow- 
 creatures and towards external nature giving him 
 a power over the elements, such as no human intel- 
 lect in any age, in its boldest flights of specu- 
 lation, ever even dreamed of his being able to 
 acquire ? Whatever may be the nature of that 
 subtle, inscrutable, all -pervading force, which 
 presents many of its effects to us under the various 
 
 * Discourse on the Study of Natural Philosophy, p. 64.
 
 OF THE PRESENT AGE. 67 
 
 names of Electricity, Magnetism, Galvanism 
 Electro-magnetism, and Magneto-electricity ; and 
 whatever its hidden, or at all events indeterminate 
 relations to light, heat, motion, and chemical affi- 
 nity or whether these, or any of them, are dis- 
 tinct affections of matter, correlative, and having a 
 reciprocal dependence* it is certain that our great 
 chemists, both at home and abroad, with Fara- 
 day at their head, are patiently prosecuting pro- 
 found researches, which have already been at- 
 tended with splendid results, and justify us in 
 believing that we are almost on the threshold of 
 some immense discovery, affecting not only our 
 whole system of physical science, but the social 
 interests of mankind. " The agents of nature," 
 said Sir John Herschel, some twenty years ago, 
 " elude direct observation, and become known to 
 us only by their effects. It is in vain, therefore, 
 that we desire to become witnesses to the processes 
 carried on with such means, and to be admitted 
 into the secret recesses and laboratories where they 
 are effected."! How far God may permit the keen 
 eye of man now to penetrate into these arcana of 
 creation, who shall say? 
 
 Look at the beautiful and practical uses to which 
 we are already able to put these mystic forces or 
 
 * GROVE On the Correlations of Physical Forces ; and AXSTED'S 
 Elementary Course of Otology . 
 f Disc. Nat. Phil., p. 191.
 
 68 INTELLECTUAL AND MORAL DEVELOPMENT 
 
 elements Light, and Electricity. By the assist- 
 ance of the latter, we may be said to have vastly 
 altered our relation to both Time and Space. Let 
 us look for a moment to the past, and then to the 
 future. To the past, when mankind could com- 
 municate together orally only, and no further than 
 voices could carry ; then, as far and as fast as writ- 
 ing and mechanical means of transit could convey ; 
 but now, how is it ? Our converse with each other 
 is literally with lightning swiftness 5 under ocean,* 
 through the air; from one person unseen to an- 
 other unseen ; in different latitudes and longi- 
 tudes ; and, ere long, in different hemispheres ! 
 The land is rapidly being covered with a network 
 of electric apparatus for the transmission of thought. 
 We already communicate with ease, under the sea, 
 with Ireland and France ! The whole Continent is 
 now nearly connected thus together. I myself, in 
 September last, saw the electric telegraph in process 
 of traversing the Alpine altitudes and solitudes, and 
 could not help often pausing to think how soon 
 those filmy conductors might be transmitting words 
 pregnant with the fate of nations ! Then I thought 
 of one of the earliest uses to which the electric tele- 
 
 * Messages can now be interchanged by the submarine telegraph, 
 between London and Paris, in thirty or forty minutes : why need it 
 require a fourth of the time ? I am told, on high authority, that it 
 is hoped shortly to have the observatories of Paris and Greenwich 
 in absolutely simultaneous action ! Arago has recently stated that 
 the only hindrances at present existing are of a temporary and 
 local nature, in this countiy.
 
 OF THE PRESENT AGE. 69 
 
 graph was put in this country ; when the murderer's 
 flight from the still- quivering victim of his fiendish 
 passion, was long anticipated by the dread conduc- 
 tors along the line by which he was swiftly travel- 
 ling in fancied impunity, but only to drop, affright- 
 ed, into the arms of sternly expectant justice.* 
 
 What, again, may not by and by be the fruits 
 of our present extensive and unremitting researches 
 on the grand subject of terrestrial magnetism,t and 
 
 * The murderer Tawell. 
 
 f- It was, I believe, our countryman, Roger Bacon, who nearly 
 six centuries ago first discovered the property of the magnet in 
 pointing to the North Pole. Mr Faraday, our illustrious living 
 countryman, has recently made a discovery in magnetism which 
 has been pronounced " beyond doubt the most important contribu- 
 tion physical science has received since the discoveries of Newton 
 concerning the law of force in gravitation, and the usual action of 
 that force." It is, that those substances which the magnet cannot 
 attract it repels: and whilst those which it does attract arrange 
 themselves parallel to the magnetic axis, those which it repels ar- 
 range themselves exactly across it that is, at right angles in an 
 equatorial direction. This is the great governing law above referred 
 to by Mr Ansted, and in terms by no means exaggerated. Since 
 this paper was read, Mr Faraday announced, in his deeply interest- 
 ing Lecture at the Royal Institution, on the 21st January 1853, the 
 results of a long series of recent nice magnetic experiments by him- 
 self, establishing that the doctrine hitherto received, as to the action 
 of the magnetic force, cannot be true. These results prove in only 
 apparent inconsistence with those obtained by the eminent German 
 chemist, Plucker that, of two or more different bodies, the most 
 diamagnetic is more so, in relation to the others, at increasing dis- 
 tances from the magnet. The observations of both Faraday and 
 Plucker disprove the law of magnetic actions being inversely as the 
 square of the distance. That there is a magnetic relation between 
 the Earth and the Sun, Mr Faraday demonstrated by the remark- 
 able fact, that there is an exact coincidence between the variation 
 of the Sun's spots, and that of the Earth's magnetism a decennial 
 change, the existence of which had been established by Colonel
 
 70 INTELLECTUAL AND MORAL DEVELOPMENT 
 
 its connection with the influence of the sun? Is it 
 impossible, is it unreasonable, is it in any way un- 
 philosophical, to conceive that in time there may 
 be established new relations, of an amazing charac- 
 ter, between our own planet and the starry system 
 around it ? I asked this question, the other day, 
 of a distinguished philosopher, and he answered that 
 such speculations were by no means visionary. 
 
 Let us pause for a moment only, to contemplate 
 man with his two wondrous instruments the 
 microscope and the telescope of which he has 
 been in possession but two centuries, yet what has 
 he not discovered by them ? By their aid he stands 
 trembling, astounded, between TWO INFINITUDES ! 
 beholding, in the language of a gifted French- 
 woman, a world in every atom, a system in every 
 star ! * His soul is dissolved in awe, as though he 
 had been admitted for a moment near the presence 
 of the Almighty Maker of the universe. His 
 faculties are confounded, alike by contemplating 
 the vast and the minute. Distributed everywhere 
 throughout the world, in every element, in the 
 internal moisture of living plants and animal bodies, 
 carried about in the vapour and dust of the whole 
 
 Sabine, in conformity with the results of careful observation made 
 by MM. Schwabe and Lamart, on the corresponding variations of 
 the Sun's spots and the magnetic needle. 
 
 * Madame de Stael. " Chaque rnonde peut-etre n'est qu'une 
 atome, et chaque atome est une moude." See also HEESCHEL'S 
 Disc, on Nat. Phil. 315.
 
 OF THE PRESENT AGE. 71 
 
 atmosphere of the earth, exists a mysterious and 
 infinite kingdom * of living creatures, of whose 
 existence man had never dreamed till within the last 
 two centuries, when his senses were so prodigiously 
 assisted by the microscope ! He now beholds, as I 
 and many of us have beheld, a single drop of water 
 instinct with visible, moving, active ay, and evi- 
 dently happy life, myriad-formed every individual 
 consummately organised by our own omniscient 
 Maker ! Within the space of a single grain of 
 mustard-seed may be witnessed eight millions of 
 living beings, each richly endowed with the organs 
 and faculties of animal life ! Many of them, more- 
 over, are beautiful exceedingly, and of perfect 
 symmetry and proportion. " Who can behold," 
 says an eminent living microscopist, (Mr Prichard,) 
 " these hollow living globes, revolving and dis- 
 porting themselves in their native elements with as 
 much liberty and pleasure as the mightiest monster 
 in the deep nay, a series of such globes, one 
 within the other, alike inhabited, and their inhabi- 
 tants alike participating in the same enjoyment 
 and not exclaim with the Psalmist : ' How won- 
 derful are thy works, O Lord ! sought out by all 
 them that have pleasure therein ! ' " t When we 
 attempt to fix our faculties on such objects as these, 
 we are apt to lose the control over them, and to 
 become powerless amidst conflicting conditions of 
 
 * PBICHARD on Infusoria, pp. 1, 2 ; edit. 1852. f Hid, p. 2.
 
 72 INTELLECTUAL AND MORAL DEVELOPMENT 
 
 wonder and perplexity. What are the purposes 
 of all these stupendous acts of creation, preserva- 
 tion, and incessant reproduction? And why is 
 man permitted, and thus late in his history, these 
 tremulous glances into infinity? The more he 
 sees, the more assured he becomes, that what he 
 sees must be absolutely as nothing to what he might 
 see, were his faculties only a very little increased in 
 strength. " Every secret which is disclosed, every 
 discovery which is made, every new effect which is 
 brought to view, serves to convince us of number- 
 less more which remain concealed, and which we had 
 before no suspicion of." * What has now become 
 of our former notions of the minute? I cannot 
 answer for others ; but the states of mind into which 
 the contemplation of these subjects has often thrown 
 me, is beyond the power of description. " In 
 wonder," finely observes Mr Coleridge, " all philo- 
 sophy began ; in wonder it ends ; and admiration 
 fills up the interspace. But the first wonder is 
 the offspring of ignorance ; the last is the parent 
 of adoration. The first is the birth-throe of our 
 knowledge ; the last is its euthanasy and apo- 
 theosis" f 
 
 But what language is brilliant or strong enough 
 
 * Bishop BUTLER, Sermon xv. Upon tie Ignorance of Man. 
 
 t Aids to Reflection, Aphorism ix. p. 178, edit. 1843. The apho- 
 rism is followed by a brief series of profound and instructive reflec- 
 tions, headed Sequelae, or Thoughts suggested l>y the preceding Apho- 
 rism,
 
 OF THE PRESENT AGE. 73 
 
 to afford the faintest conception of man's discoveries 
 in the heavens by means of his telescope, and the 
 transcendent exertions of his intellect which it has 
 called forth ? Let us see if we can indicate a few 
 results, and a very very few only, in these radiant 
 regions. 
 
 To our naked eye are displayed, 1 believe, about 
 three thousand stars, down to the sixth magnitude; 
 and of these, only twenty are of the first, and seventy 
 of the second magnitude. Thus far, the Heavens 
 were the same to the ancients as they are to our- 
 selves. But within the last two centuries our tele- 
 scopes have revealed to us countless millions of stars, 
 more and more astonishingly numerous, the farther 
 we are enabled to penetrate into space ! Every in- 
 crease, says Sir John Herschel, in the dimensions 
 and power of instruments, which successive improve- 
 ments in optical science have attained, has brought 
 into view multitudes innumerable of objects invisible 
 before ; so that, for anything experience has hither- 
 to taught us, the number of the stars may be really 
 infinite, in the only sense in which we can assign 
 a meaning to the word. Those most recently ren- 
 dered visible, for instance, by the great powers of 
 Lord Rosse's telescope, are at such an inconceivable 
 distance, that their light, travelling at the rate of 
 200,000 miles a second, cannot arrive at our little 
 planet in less time than fourteen thousand years ! 
 Of this I am assured by one of our greatest living
 
 74 INTELLECTUAL AND MORAL DEVELOPMENT 
 
 astronomers. Fourteen thousand years of the his- 
 tory of the inhabitants of these systems, if in- 
 habitants there be, had passed away, during the 
 time that a ray of their light was travelling to 
 this tiny residence of curious little man ! Con- 
 sider, for a moment, that that ray of light must 
 have quitted its dazzling source eight thousand 
 years before the creation of Adam ! We have no 
 faculties to appreciate such ideas; yet are these 
 realities, or there are none, and our fancied know- 
 ledge is illusory. 
 
 Let us here pause for one moment in our breath- 
 less flight through the starry infinitude, and ask 
 our souls to reflect on the Almighty Maker of all ! 
 Let us fall prostrate before Him, and ask with 
 trembling awe, What real idea have we of His 
 OMNIPRESENCE? He is present everywhere, for 
 everywhere he unceasingly acts ; but how this is, 
 we feel to be beyond our limited faculties. Such 
 knowledge is, indeed, too high for us we cannot 
 attain to it; but He has vouchsafed to tell us that 
 His throne is in heaven. Let us learn the impious 
 absurdity of attempting to judge of the Deity by 
 our own notions of great or small, or possible or 
 impossible. What were the thoughts and feel- 
 ings that led La Place to atheism, we do not 
 know ; but how different was the effect of these 
 visions of glory upon the mind of our own immortal 
 Newton ! How they expanded and elevated his
 
 OF THE PRESENT AGE. 75 
 
 conception of Almighty power and wisdom ! Let 
 his own sublime words speak for themselves : " GOD 
 is eternal and infinite, omnipotent and omniscient ; 
 that is, HE endures from everlasting to everlasting, 
 and is present from infinity to infinity. He is not 
 eternity or infinity, but eternal and infinite. He 
 IS not duration or space, but HE endures, and is 
 present. HE endures always, and is present every- 
 where ; and by existing always, and everywhere, 
 constitutes duration and space." * 
 
 Returning, for a moment, to the subject which 
 we have quitted, let us ask, with Sir John Her- 
 schel For what purposes are we to suppose such 
 magnificent bodies scattered through the abyss of 
 space? Again, we can now detect binary, physi- 
 cally binary, stars ; that is to say, a primary, 
 with a companion actually revolving round it. 
 " This," says Captain Smyth,f " is the wonderful 
 truth opened to view, that two suns, each self- 
 luminous, and probably with an attendant train of 
 planets, are gyrating round their common centre 
 of gravity under the same dynamical laics which 
 govern the solar system ; that is, not precisely like 
 our planets round one great luminary, but where 
 each constituent, with its accompanying orbs, re- 
 volves round an intermediate point or fixed centre ! 
 
 * From the Scholium, annexed to the PRINCIPIA. 
 f P. 285. Printed for private circulation only, but presented by 
 the eminent author to the writer, for the purposes of this paper.
 
 76 INTELLECTUAL AND MORAL DEVELOPMENT 
 
 This is a great fact, and one which, in all proba- 
 bility, Newton himself never contemplated." 
 
 What, again, are we to say to the splendid 
 spectacle, and what can be the conceivable con- 
 dition of existence which it indicates, of richly 
 vari-coloured double stars of ruddy purple, yel- 
 low, white, orange, red, and blue! The larger 
 star is usually of a ruddy or orange hue the 
 smaller, blue or green ! " What illumination," 
 says Sir John Herschel, " two suns a red and a 
 green, or a yellow and a blue one must afford a 
 planet, circulating about either ! And what charm- 
 ing .contrasts and grateful vicissitudes a red and 
 a green day, for instance, alternating with a white 
 one, and with darkness might arise from the 
 presence or absence of one or both above the 
 horizon ! " * What gorgeous scenes are these for 
 the imagination of man to revel in ! 
 
 Again, we have at length accomplished the 
 feat, deemed by the greatest astronomers, till 
 within even the last few years, absolutely impos- 
 sible, of measuring the distance of a fixed star. 
 We have accomplished this in two instances : 
 The nearest,t one of the brightest stars in the 
 Southern Hemisphere, is at twenty-one millions of 
 millions of miles' distance ; that is, its light would 
 require three years and a quarter to reach us. The 
 second^ is not nearer to us than sixty-three billions 
 * HERSCHEL'S Astronomy, p. 395. f <*, Centauri. J 61, Cygni.
 
 OF THE PRESENT AGE. 77 
 
 of miles off, and its light requires upwards of ten 
 yeai-s to reach us. These inconceivable distances 
 have been measured to the utmost nicety, and, as 
 the Astronomer Royal recently explained to a 
 popular audience, really by means of a common 
 yard-measure ! But what proportion is there be- 
 tween even these enormous distances, and those of 
 the newly-discovered stars above spoken of, whose 
 light requires fourteen thousand years, travelling 
 at the rate of two hundred thousand miles a second, 
 to reach us ? It is absurd to suppose that either 
 figures, or, indeed, any other mode of communi- 
 cating ideas to the mind of man, can enable him 
 to appreciate such distances. 
 
 Again, man, little man, can positively ascertain 
 the weight of the Sun and his planets, including 
 even the remotest Neptune of which I have 
 more to say presently ; and, as a matter of detail, 
 can express that weight in pounds avoirdupois, 
 and down even to grains ! Think of man weigh- 
 ing the masses of these wondrous, enormous, and 
 immensely distant orbs ! 
 
 Again, are we really aware of the rate at which 
 we, on our little planet, are at this moment travel- 
 ling in space, in our orbit round the sun ? I have, 
 within the last few days, put one of our best prac- 
 tical astronomers to the trouble, which he most 
 courteously undertook, of computing our rate of 
 transit through space in our journey round our cen-
 
 78 INTELLECTUAL AND MORAL DEVELOPMENT 
 
 tral luminary ; and here I give you his results. 
 While I was journeying yesterday from London 
 to Hull some 200 miles the planet, on which we 
 were creeping by steam-power, had travelled some 
 410,000 miles through space ! So that we are, 
 while I am speaking, whirling along, without being 
 in the least physically sensible of it, at the rate of 
 upwards of 68,000 miles an hour* more than a 
 thousand miles a minute and nineteen miles be- 
 tween two beats of a pendulum, or in a second of 
 time. I ask again Do you ever attempt to realise 
 such bewildering facts ? 
 
 Nor is this all I may surprise some present by 
 assuring them that the earth is believed, by all our 
 great astronomers, to have at this moment, not two 
 motions only, but three ! one round its axis, 
 which we can make evident to the very eye ; 
 another round the sun ; but what of the third? 
 A most remarkable, and equally mysterious fact: 
 that the sun and all his planets are moving with 
 prodigious velocity, through space, at the rate of 
 a hundred and fifty millions of miles a-year, to- 
 wards a particular point in the heavens, a star [X] 
 in the constellation Hercules ! " Every astro- 
 
 * While the earth moves 68,305 miles an hour, Mercury moves 
 more than 100,000 miles ; whence chemists use his symbol to denote 
 quick- silver. While we are disposed to regard this as a rapid mo- 
 tion round the sun, what must the inhabitants of Neptune, who 
 travels only three and a half miles a second, think of us, who are 
 whirling round the sun at six times the speed of Neptune ?
 
 OF THE PRESENT AGE. 79 
 
 nomer who has examined the matter carefully," 
 says the present Astronomer Royal, " has come to 
 the conclusion of Sir William Herschel, that the 
 whole solar system is moving bodily towards a 
 point in the constellation Hercules !"* 
 
 What means this ? and how can we sufficiently 
 estimate the critical and refined observations and 
 calculations by which the fact is established ? If 
 we be thus sweeping through the heavens, the con- 
 stellations must be altogether altered to the eyes 
 of our remote posterity. And dare one dream for 
 a moment of our little globe being ordained to 
 encounter obstruction in its pathway, and being 
 suddenly split into fragments by some huge orb, 
 or inflicting a similar fate on one as small as, or 
 smaller than, itself? Splendid stars have suddenly 
 appeared, and as suddenly disappeared from the 
 heavens, leaving us no means whatever of conjec- 
 turing the cause of these phenomena.! 
 
 Again, the sun,J which we feel, which we see, 
 
 * Lectures on Astronomy, 2d edit. 1849. 
 
 f On the evening of the llth November 1572, Tycho Brahe, the 
 great Danish astronomer, on returning from his laboratory to his 
 dwelling-house, was surprised to find a group of country folk staring 
 at a star, which he was certain had not existed half an hour before. 
 It was so bright as to cast a perceptible shadow. It surpassed 
 Jupiter at his brightest ! and was visible at mid-day. In March, 
 1574, it disappeared totally and for ever. Is there not here an in- 
 finite field for conjecture ? And this is by no means the only similar 
 instance of the kind. 
 
 I am informed by an astronomical friend, that the most recent 
 observations confirm the supposition that the sun is a black opaque
 
 80 INTELLECTUAL AND MORAL DEVELOPMENT 
 
 and observe ; which dazzles us every day ; which 
 rises and sets, as we say, magnificently every 
 morning and evening remains a profound mystery 
 with reference to its nature, and how its supply of 
 light and heat is maintained. " How so enormous 
 a conflagration," says Sir J. Herschel, " is kept up, 
 is a great mystery, which every discovery in either 
 chemistry or optics, so far from elucidating, seems 
 only to render more profound, and to remove far- 
 ther the prospect of probable explanation."* 
 
 Yet once more. We are making latterly, almost 
 monthly, discoveries in the heavens, of a most re- 
 markable character, with reference to certain small 
 bodies known by the name of Ultra-Zodiacal planets. 
 I have paid close attention to them, and received 
 constant information on the subject from that able 
 and vigilant astronomer, Mr Hind.| Listen, now, 
 to a true tale of wonder : Between the orbit of 
 Mars and Jupiter, there is, according to an 
 undoubted and remarkable law of progress of pla- 
 
 body, with a luminous and incandescent atmosphere, through which 
 the solar body is often seen in black spots, frequently of enormous 
 dimensions. A single spot seen with the naked eye, in the year 
 1843, was 77,000 miles in diameter. Sir John Herschel, in 1837, 
 witnessed a cluster of spots, including an area of 3,780,000 miles ! 
 The connection between these spots, and the earth's magnetism, 
 has been already alluded to. Ante, p. 69, Note II. 
 
 * HEKSCHEL'S Disc, on Nat. Phil., p. 313. Astron. 212. 
 
 f This gentleman's recent publication, entitled The Solar System ; 
 a Descriptive Treatise upon the Sun, Moon, and Planets, including 
 all the Recent Discoveries, (Orr & Co., London,) 1852, is by far the 
 best extant, for its accurate and comprehensive treatment of the sub- 
 ject in its most recent aspect. The price is almost nominal.
 
 OF THE PRESENT AGE. 81 
 
 netary distance in our system, a space of three 
 hundred and fifty millions of miles ; and this im- 
 mense interval had no known tenants up to the 
 commencement of the present century. But so 
 great an unoccupied space was long ago found to be 
 an interruption of this order of planetary progres- 
 sion of the magnitudes of the planetary orbits : 
 a curious discovery of the Prussian astronomer 
 Bode. After long and deep revolving of the sub- 
 ject, he conjectured that a planet, now wanting, 
 must have existed in this vast interval of space ; 
 and that one might, in time, be discovered there. 
 Imagine, therefore, the astonishment with which, 
 during the first seven years of the present century, 
 four little planets Ceres, Juno, Pallas, and Vesta 
 were discovered, within this very interval^ revolv- 
 ing in most eccentric orbits ! " It has been con- 
 jectured," said Sir John Herschel, writing about 
 twenty years ago, " that these planets are frag- 
 ments of some greater planet, formerly circulating in 
 that interval, but which has been blown to atoms 
 by an explosion 5 and that more such fragments 
 exist, and may be hereafter discovered. These 
 may serve as a specimen of the dreams in which 
 astronomers, like other speculators, occasionally and 
 harmlessly indulge."* A dream ? Will it be be- 
 lieved, that within this last seven years, no fewer 
 than TWENTY more of these mysterious tenants of 
 * Astron. p. 277. 
 F
 
 62 INTELLECTUAL AND MORAL DEVELOPMENT 
 
 that identical interval of space have been dis- 
 covered ! NINE of them within this very year, 
 1852 the last of them by Mr Hind, on the 18th 
 of this present month of December ! Are not 
 these, as it were, the elements of an astronomical 
 romance? The orbits and motions of these little 
 planets are all of the same character, and may be 
 truly said to exhibit excessively complicated vaga- 
 ries, such as are very likely to bring them into 
 collision with each other ! And in the opinion of 
 astronomers, the most reasonable explanation of 
 these astonishing phenomena is, that this zone of 
 planets really consists of the fragments of some 
 great one shattered by an internal convulsion ! 
 
 To what reflections does not such a possibility 
 (and no one is entitled, as I believe few are now 
 disposed, to call it chimerical) give rise ! If the 
 supposition be true that these bodies are planetary 
 fragments, was the globe of which they once 
 formed part destroyed by an internal explosion, 
 or by external collision, or in any other way, 
 under the fiat of the Deity? Was it inhabited 
 at the time, and by beings like ourselves? And 
 was it their destruction ? And as we cannot 
 entertain the impious supposition that this pos- 
 sible result was occasioned by accident or negli- 
 gence, dare we indulge in speculation as to the 
 hidden economy of the heavens, administered by 
 the Omniscient?
 
 OF THE PRESENT AGE. 83 
 
 But let us now descend for a moment to our own 
 tiny planet, to ask one or two questions concerning 
 it. Its polar and equatorial diameters differ by only 
 twenty-six and a half miles ; and the greater of the 
 two the equatorial is 7925 miles. When we 
 talk of " descending into the bowels of the earth," 
 therefore, we had better use less ambitious phraseo- 
 logy, and consider our excavations as being, in 
 Sir John Herschel's language, mere scratches of the 
 exterior only; for our deepest mines have never 
 penetrated lower than to the ten-thousandth part 
 of the distance between the earth's surface and its 
 centre.* As far as scientific researches enable 
 us to conjecture, we should conclude that when our 
 earth was first set in motion,t it must have been 
 
 * HERSCHEL'S Discourse, 288. 
 
 f In one of Sir Isaac Newton's Four Letters to Dr Bentley, and 
 which are worth their weight in gold to every inquiring mind, 
 occurs the following memorable passage. To the second question 
 of Dr Bentley, Sir Isaac replied, that the present planetary mo- 
 tions could not have sprung from any natural cause alone, but 
 were impressed by an intelligent agent. " To make such a sys- 
 tem, with all its motions, required a Cause which understood and 
 compared together the quantities of matter in the several bodies of 
 the Sun and planets, and the gravitating powers resulting thence ; 
 the several distances of the primary planets from the Sun, and of 
 the secondary ones from Saturn, Jupiter, and the Earth, and the 
 velocities with which these planets could revolve about those quan- 
 tities of matter in the central bodies ; and to compare and adjust 
 all these things together, in so great a variety of bodies, argues 
 that Cause to be not blind and fortuitous, but very well skilled in 
 mechanics and geometry." In his Optici (Query 28) this great man 
 asks "How came the bodies of animals to be contrived with so 
 much art, and for what ends were their several parts ? Was the 
 eye contrived without skill in optics, and the ear without know-
 
 84 INTELLECTUAL AND MORAL DEVELOPMENT 
 
 somewhat soft, in order to have produced its pre- 
 sent undoubted spheroidal form.* But what is the 
 real nature of the earth's interior ? Transcendental 
 mathematics fully recognise the principle of inter- 
 nal fluidity or fusion ; while all our actual observa- 
 tions point to the existence of heat in a greater 
 degree the lower we go. M. Humboldt, indeed, 
 tells us that, at only thirty-five miles' distance from 
 the earth's surface, " the central heat is everywhere 
 so great, that, granite itself is held in fusion / "f 
 Our internal fires seem to find a vent by means of 
 earthquakes and volcanoes. 
 
 Is this planet of ours destined, then, to share the 
 conjectured fate of that whose fragments are still 
 circulating in space around us, and being in such 
 rapid succession discovered by our vigilant watchers 
 of the heavens ? 
 
 Once more, however, let us ascend into the 
 resplendent regions which we have so suddenly 
 quitted, in order to alight upon, and scrutinise a 
 mere speck among them to advert to an astrono- 
 mical discovery that will for ever signalise our age, 
 us the result of a vast stretch of human intellect, 
 one that would have gladdened the heart of NEAV- 
 
 ledge of sounds ?" Doubtless his mind had present to it the sub- 
 lime question of the Psalmist : He that planted the ear, shall he not 
 heart He that formed the eye, shall he not see ? Psalm xciv. 9. 
 
 * And the earth was without form and void, and darkness was 
 upon the face of the deep ; and the Spirit of God moved upon the 
 face of the waters. Gen. i. 2. 
 
 f Kosmos, vol. i. p. 273.
 
 OP THE PRESEXT AGE. 85 
 
 TON himself. I allude to the discoveiy, six years 
 ago, of the planet Neptune. 
 
 In the year 1781, Sir William Herschel at once 
 almost doubled the boundaries of the solar system, 
 by his brilliant discovery of the planet Uranus,* at 
 the distance of eighteen hundred and twenty-two 
 millions of miles from the sun, and travelling in 
 his orbit in thirty thousand six hundred and 
 eighty-six days, or fifteen thousand five hundred 
 miles an hour. This dignified visitant has a dia- 
 meter of thirty-six thousand miles, and is attended 
 by six satellites during his eighty-four years' tour 
 round his and our central luminary. Thus much 
 for Uranus. 
 
 Many years afterwards, certain differences were 
 observed by French and English astronomers be- 
 tween this planet's true places, and those indicated 
 by theoretic calculation ; and at length it was sug- 
 gested that the cause might be attributed to the 
 perturbing influence of some unseen planet. They 
 thought, however, that if this were really the 
 solution of these differences between calculation 
 
 * Uranus was the father of Saturn ; and the Prussian astronomer, 
 Bode, suggested, that as the new planet was next to Saturn, it 
 should be called by the name of Uranus. M. La Place, however, 
 generously insisted on its bearing the name of its English discoverer. 
 It passed, however, by the name of the Georgium Sidus, in com- 
 pliment to Geo. III., the munificent patron of astronomical science, 
 until the year 1851, when, in the Nautical Almanac of that year, it 
 was called by the name of Uranus a change made with the disin- 
 terested concurrence of the present Sir J. Hersshel, the modest 
 con of the great discoverer. See Mr HIND'S Solar System, p. 119.
 
 86 INTELLECTUAL AND MORAL DEVELOPMENT 
 
 and observation, it would be almost an impos- 
 sibility to establish the fact, and ascertain the un- 
 seen planet's place in the heavens. This was the 
 deliberate opinion of M. Eugene Bouvard, one of 
 the greatest French geometers of the day. Never- 
 theless, Mr Adams, an English, and M. Le Verrier, 
 a French astronomer, unknown to, and entirely 
 independently of each other, commenced a series 
 of elaborate and profound mathematical calcula- 
 tions, proceeding on different methods, to solve the 
 great problem, which was thus stated by M. Le 
 Verrier : " ]s it possible that the inequalities of 
 Uranus are due to the action of a planet situated 
 in the ecliptic, at a mean distance double that of 
 Uranus ? If so, where is the planet actually situ- 
 ated, what is its mass, and what are the elements of 
 its orbit?" Our distinguished countryman, Mr 
 Adams, a Fellow of St John's College, Cambridge, 
 and whom I saw receive the gold medal of the 
 Royal Society, as some token entertained of his 
 transcendent merits as a mathematician, had di- 
 rected his attention to this matter in the year 1843 
 his object being to " ascertain the probable effect 
 of a more distant planet ;" and he succeeded in 
 obtaining an approximate solution of the inverse 
 problem of perturbations ; that is to say, given 
 certain observed disturbances ; to find the posi- 
 tions and paths of the body producing them. In 
 other words, the great planet Uranus was occasion-
 
 OF THE PRESENT AGE. 87 
 
 ally disturbed in his course by the attraction of an 
 unlcnown body ; and the object was to determine 
 the fact without waiting for the visible existence 
 of that body. 
 
 It would be vain to attempt to make the nature 
 of these grand calculations* popularly intelligible ; 
 nor am I mathematician enough to presume to 
 make the attempt. These twin sons of science 
 were supremely successful. On the 23d September 
 1846, the splendid stranger became visible, in dia- 
 meter about forty-two thousand milesf that is, 
 upwards of five times that of our earth, and 
 attended by at least one visible satellite. Neptune 
 performs his stately journey round the sun, from 
 which he is distant two thousand eight hundred 
 and fifty millions of miles, in one hundred and 
 sixty-six years, or sixty thousand six hundred and 
 twenty-four days ! 
 
 Thus not only did these two astronomers point 
 out where this huge distant orb would be found 
 in such immensely distant space, but weighed its 
 mass, numbered the years of its revolution, and 
 told the dimensions of its orbit ! 
 
 Would that France and England might never 
 
 * Till within the last thirty years, it was considered that our 
 English mathematicians were inferior to their Continental brethren 
 in the higher departments of mathematics ; but I believe it is 
 generally admitted that the former are now equal to any in tho 
 world. 
 
 f Mr Hind says about thirty-one thousand.
 
 88 INTELLECTUAL AND MORAL DEVELOPMENT 
 
 again be seen in any but such glorious rivalry as 
 they thus exhibited, in the persons of these their 
 highly-gifted sons ; who, by the way. must be 
 acknowledged by the unknown philosopher of 
 whom I spoke some time ago, to have been cer- 
 tainly a very superb pair of electrical calculating 
 machines ! 
 
 What, however, is the above, or what are any 
 other discoveries, when placed by the side of that 
 of Gravitation by the immortal Newton ? This, it 
 were hardly extravagant to regard as an exercise 
 of celestial genius, by which it seemed to have 
 gained the true key to the motions of the whole 
 universe. The whole material universe, says Sir 
 David Brewster, was spread before the discoverer 
 of this law : the Sun with all his attendant planets 
 the planets with all their satellites ; the comets 
 whirling about in every direction in their eccentric 
 orbits ; and the system of the Fixed Stars, stretch- 
 ing to the remotest limits of space !* 
 
 The minds of even ordinary men expand, but at 
 the same time droop, while contemplating such 
 amazing and unapproachable intellectual power as 
 this. Dr Thomas Brown, one of the most distin- 
 guished modern Scottish teachers of mental and 
 
 * Life of Newton, p. 153. When Newton began to find his calcu- 
 lations verifying the sublime discovery of the law of gravitation, he 
 became too agitated to pursue them, and intrusted the completion 
 of the details to a friend. When before has any other human breast 
 vibrated with anxieties such as these ?
 
 OF THE PRESENT AGE. 
 
 moral philosophy, thus speaks of Newton : " The 
 powers and attainments of this almost superhuman 
 genius, at once make us proud of our common 
 nature, and humble us with a sense of our disparity. 
 If," he continues, " the minds of all men, from the 
 creation of the world, had been similar to the mind of 
 Newton, is it possible to conceive that the state of 
 any science would have been at this moment what it 
 now is, or in any respect similar, though the laws 
 which regulate the physical changes in the material 
 universe had continued unaltered, and no change 
 occurred, but in the simple original susceptibilities 
 of the mind itself?" What a question for a specu- 
 lative mind ! 
 
 But it is time to ask, why are we thus wander- 
 ing amid the splendid solitudes of heaven ? Why, 
 to echo a question already hinted at, has man been 
 permitted, thus late too in his history, to make 
 himself so far, if one may so speak, familiar with 
 infinitude? He sinks from these dazzling regions 
 bewildered and overwhelmed; as though the 
 Finite had been paralysed by momentary contact 
 with the Infinite ; and is relieved to find himself 
 once again upon his little native earth his ap- 
 pointed home, and scene of pilgrimage and proba- 
 tion. Here again, however, he finds everything 
 unexhausted, inexhaustible, accumulating upon, and 
 overwhelming him, whichever way he turns. Yet 
 a new light gleams upon him, while he directs his
 
 90 INTELLECTUAL AND MORAL DEVELOPMENT 
 
 wandering eyes towards the inner portions of the 
 crust of that earth which he had trod for so many- 
 ages, without dreaming of what was lying beneath, 
 and destined one day to be exposed to his wonder- 
 ing eyes. What would have been the effect on 
 Aristotle's mind, of our geological discoveries ? 
 Man now perceives indubitable traces of past 
 scenes of existence, of which all his recorded 
 history has said nothing ; traces apparently re- 
 served, in the Providence of God, to be examined 
 and pondered in only these our own times, after 
 so many ages of concealment. Far beneath the 
 surface of the earth, we discover the fossilised re- 
 mains of its ancient tenants, who seem to have 
 occupied the globe at different periods probably, 
 too, at vast intervals, and under widely different, 
 but perfectly appropriate, circumstances and condi- 
 tions. They appear to have been placed upon it 
 at a given period, for a specified purpose, in a de- 
 termined order ; and having unconsciously accom- 
 plished that purpose, they mysteriously disappear, 
 but in a wonderful order, and leave behind them 
 the still visible and incontestable proofs of their 
 past existence. O, how eloquent, how deeply 
 suggestive are these mute vouchers of past eco- 
 nomies ! instituted and sustained by one and the 
 same Almighty Being, who, by the word of His 
 power," upholds present existence ! Many of 
 these remains appear to us huge and monstrous ;
 
 OF THE PRESENT AGE. 91 
 
 and huge and fearful they undoubtedly seein to 
 have been, beyond any creatures inhabiting the 
 earth within our time. Our time f What do I 
 mean? Who are WE? MAN : concerning whom 
 all geology is, with an awful significance, abso- 
 lutely silent, through all its centuries and ages, 
 how continuous and remote soever they may be, 
 since it owns that it has to deal only with times an- 
 terior to the appearance of Man upon the appointed 
 scene of his lordship a scene which geology shows 
 to have been carefully prepared for him. No, not 
 the faintest trace of his presence, his footsteps, or 
 his handiwork, can be detected in any of the pages 
 of this stony volume, wherever it has hitherto been 
 opened, though examined never so minutely; 
 he is as absolute a stranger as though he were not 
 at this moment, and never had been, a denizen of 
 the planet ! This negative eloquence of geology 
 has always appeared to me profoundly suggestive. 
 None of its researches in any part of the globe have 
 hitherto succeeded in bringing to light one single 
 fragment of the fossilised frame of man, in any un- 
 disturbed geological formation, by which is meant 
 those portions of the earth's crust to which, though 
 the most recent formations in geology, geologists 
 assign a much higher antiquity than any reached 
 by history. It is true that some petrified human 
 skeletons have been found, as, for instance, in that 
 part of the shores of the island of Guadaloupe where
 
 92 INTELLECTUAL AND MORAL DEVELOPMENT 
 
 the percolation of calcareous springs speedily petri- 
 fies everything subjected to their influence. There 
 is a solitary specimen of a petrified skeleton, found 
 at that island under such circumstances, now to be 
 seen in the British Museum ; and which a cele- 
 brated anatomical friend of mine regards, on ac- 
 count of certain peculiarities in the pelvis, as having 
 been the skeleton of a negro. If this be so, its date 
 must be, of course, subsequent to the discovery of 
 Guadaloupe by Europeans.* It is not, in other 
 words, the skeleton of one of the Caribs, the origi- 
 nal inhabitants ; and cannot be more than between 
 two and three hundred years old. One or two 
 other human skeletons have been found, which may 
 be similarly accounted for. 
 
 Thus, then, the new and brilliant science of geo- 
 logy attests that man was the last of created beings 
 in this planet. If her data be consistent and true, 
 and worthy of scientific consideration, she affords 
 conclusive evidence that, as we are told in Scrip- 
 ture, he cannot have occupied the earth longer than 
 six thousand years.^ 
 
 Sir Isaac Newton's sagacious intellect had arrived 
 at a similar conclusion from different premises, and 
 long before the geologist had made his researches 
 and discoveries. " He appeared," said one who 
 conversed with him not long before his death, and 
 has carefully recorded what he justly styles "a re- 
 * A.D. 1493. f HITCHCOCK, Religion of Geology, p. I;>7.
 
 OF THE PRESENT AGE. 93 
 
 markable and curious conversation," " to be very 
 clearly of opinion, that the inhabitants of this world 
 were of a short date 5 and alleged as one reason 
 for that opinion, that all arts as letters, ships, 
 printing, the needle, &c. were discovered within 
 the memory of history, which could not have 
 happened if the world had been eternal; and 
 that there were visible marks of ruin upon it, 
 which could not have been effected by a flood 
 only."* 
 
 Man cannot shut his eyes upon the actual reve- 
 lations of geology, any more than he can upon the 
 written revelations contained in the Scriptures. It 
 were foolish, nay dangerous, and even impious, to 
 do so. We may depend upon it that God designed 
 us, and permitted us, for wise purposes, to make 
 these astonishing discoveries, or He would have 
 kept them for ever hidden from our sight; and, 
 forsooth, shall we then turn round upon our Omni- 
 scient Maker, and venture to tell Him that He is 
 contradicting His written word ? What a spectacle 
 for men and angels ! The Creature and its Crea- 
 tor, the Finite and the Infinite, at issue ! For 
 indeed it would, and must needs be so. Infinite 
 Goodness and Wisdom have presented to us the 
 Scriptures as being the eternal truth of God, who 
 has so accredited it to the faculties which He him- 
 self has given us for discovering truth, that we 
 
 * BHEWSTEH'S Life of Newton, p. 365.
 
 94 INTELLECTUAL AND MORAL DEVELOPMENT 
 
 have reverently received it as such ; countless mil- 
 lions of His creatures have lived and died in that 
 belief, and among them the mightiest intellects 
 the best and greatest of our species ; and yet it is 
 to be imagined that they have all had only a strong 
 delusion sent them that they should believe a lie, and 
 in that lie should live and die ! Nay, but let us 
 not thus judge the Deity, who does not deceive his 
 creatures. Yea, let God be true, but every man a 
 liar. 
 
 If, then, the written word of God be true, His 
 works cannot contradict it, however our folly and 
 presumption may make it for a time so appear ; 
 and, on the opposite assumption, we are to sup- 
 pose that the Author of Nature has expressly 
 revealed to us, in this latter day, some of the for- 
 mer conditions of the earth, only in order to con- 
 tradict His own written Word previously given to us 
 for our guidance in this transitory scene of being ! 
 And is this, then, to be the sum and substance of 
 the good which geology has done mankind? It 
 is not so it cannot be so ; nothing but weakness 
 or wickedness can thus wrest geology from its 
 true tendency and purpose, and convert it from a 
 witness to the truth, into a proof of falsehood. 
 
 One who may perhaps be regarded as exhibiting 
 the highest condition of the intellect of this age, 
 and thoroughly imbued with the spirit of philo- 
 sophy of which he is its leading exponent and
 
 OP THE PRESENT AGE. 95 
 
 representative has placed on record his deliberate 
 conviction that " the study of natural philosophy, 
 so far from leading man to doubt the immortality 
 of the soul, and to scoff at revealed religion, has, 
 on every well-constituted mind, a natural effect 
 directly the contrary. The testimony of natural 
 reason," continues Sir John Herschel for it is he 
 of whom I speak " on whatever exercised, must 
 of necessity stop short of those truths which it is 
 the object of revelation to make known ; but while 
 it places the existence and principal attributes of a 
 Deity on such grounds as to render doubt absurd, 
 and atheism ridiculous, it unquestionably opposes 
 no natural or necessary obstacle to further progress. 
 . . . . The character of the true philosopher 
 is to hope all things not impossible, and to believe 
 all things not unreasonable." He proceeds, in an 
 admirable spirit, to say, that we must take care 
 that the testimony afforded by science to religion, 
 be its extent or value what it may, shall be at 
 least independent, unbiassed, and spontaneous ; 
 and he reprobates not only such vain attempts as 
 would make all nature bend to narrow interpreta- 
 tions of obscure and difficult passages in the sacred 
 writings, but the morbid sensibility of those who 
 exult and applaud when any facts start up expla- 
 natory, as they suppose, of some Scriptural allu- 
 sions, and feel pained and disappointed when the 
 general course of discovery in any department of
 
 96 INTELLECTUAL AND MORAL DEVELOPMENT 
 
 science runs wide of the notions with which parti- 
 cular passages in the Bible may have impressed 
 such persons themselves. By such it should be 
 remembered that, on the one hand, truth can never 
 be opposed to truth and, on the other, that error 
 is to be effectually confounded only by searching 
 deep and tracing it to its source.* 
 
 Thus far Philosophy, in a true and noble spirit ; 
 and it is specially applicable to the subject of Geo- 
 logy- 
 
 Geology is to be regarded as a science in gigan- 
 tic infancy, promising a truly marvellous manhood. 
 It is one so essentially adapted to excite the imagi- 
 nation, that professors of the science are required 
 to exercise a severe restraint upon that faculty ; and, 
 discarding all tendency to theorising, approach the 
 sufficiently astounding facts with which they have 
 to deal, in a cold and rigorous spirit of philosophical 
 investigation. It is hard to many to approach it 
 without disturbing prepossessions ; and those who 
 cannot get rid of them may, if diligent observers, 
 accumulate facts, but must be content to leave 
 greater intellects to deal with them. This import- 
 ant science has had to contend with great disad- 
 vantages some of them peculiar ; but it is over- 
 coming them, and will continue to do so. I shall 
 not indicate what I conceive these peculiar disad- 
 vantages to be, because they will occur to any one 
 * HEBSCHEL, Disc, on Nat. Phil. pp. 7-10.
 
 OF THE PRESENT AGE. 97 
 
 who has even only moderately directed his atten- 
 tion to this splendid subject. As long as the facts 
 of geology are carefully ascertained, and dealt 
 with simply as facts, as those of all other sciences, 
 and it be not attempted to put them together 
 prematurely, and announce confidently the parti- 
 cular tendency which they may really only seem 
 to indicate, while their true bearing is in quite an 
 opposite direction so long, but so long only, geo- 
 logists may depend upon it that they are contribut- 
 ing to the formation of a science destined, perhaps, 
 to eclipse all others except astronomy, and even rival 
 it. Geology depends on the continual accumulation 
 of observations carried on for ages> If the geologists 
 of the present day should forget this fact, and breath- 
 lessly begin to construct theories and systems on the 
 strength of a few coincident facts, they may here- 
 after be regarded as mere children, and not as 
 philosophers conscious of the grandeur of the in- 
 quiries in which they are privileged to take part. 
 The great hope, however, of geology is, the sobriety 
 and system with which great numbers of qualified 
 observers are simultaneously prosecuting their in- 
 quiries and experiments in so many quarters of the 
 earth at once. Its structure affords already conclu- 
 sive evidence not only of formations singularly in 
 unison with each other, though at immense distances, 
 but also of the operation of vast forces, in past ages, 
 of only a conjectural character and mode of opera-
 
 98 INTELLECTUAL AND MORAL DEVELOPMENT 
 
 tion. Let any one go through the Alps, as I did 
 lately, and the most hasty glance at the confused 
 position of the strata will satisfy him that geology 
 has to deal with facts dislocating all suggested 
 hypotheses. 
 
 It is, however, the organic remains, animal and 
 vegetable, which are found in these various strata, 
 where they have lain hidden for a long series of 
 ages, that present geology in its most attractive 
 aspect, and give the reins to the imagination. 
 What are we to say, for instance, to the visible 
 remnants of a monster, partaking of the nature of a 
 fish and a crocodile, the eyes of which are of such 
 magnitude that each requires a string five feet long 
 to surround it the diameter of the orbit being 
 eighteen inches ? How hideous must such an 
 object have appeared ! * There are few of our 
 leading museums that are not enriched with fossil 
 remains of these strange stupendous animals, point- 
 ing indubitably to a long succession of ages, when 
 creatures of this kind, with their appropriate ani- 
 mal and vegetable aliment, seem to have had this 
 earth of ours entirely to themselves. This is a state 
 of facts for which our minds were quite unprepared, 
 and with which we may not even yet be compe- 
 tent to deal soberly. I shall, however, quit this 
 deeply interesting subject, with the remark, that 
 
 * These dimensions exist in the fossil remains of an Icthyosaurus 
 to be seen in the Geological Museum, in King's College, London.
 
 OF THE PRESENT AGE. 99 
 
 as astronomy expands our conceptions of splen- 
 dour and space, so geology enlarges our ideas 
 of duration and time ; while both these magni- 
 ficent sciences, the farther they are prosecuted, 
 supply the more conclusive and awe-inspiring evi-. 
 dence of the unity of the Creator. And finally, we 
 may safely concur in the observation of an eloquent 
 American writer on these subjects,* that the 
 merest child in a Christian land, in the nineteenth 
 century, has a far wider and nobler conception of 
 the perfections of Jehovah, than the wisest philo- 
 sopher who lived before astronomy had gone forth 
 on her circumnavigation of the universe. He might 
 have added, and before geology had disclosed His 
 mysterious handiwork in our own inner earth. 
 
 Let me, however, now point out a recent 
 fact, which appears to me to have a marvellous 
 significance, and perhaps a designed coincidence. 
 While men were, and continue to be, busily 
 exploring the earth in search of traces of long 
 past existence, endeavouring to establish its vast 
 antiquity, and the changes which it has undergone, 
 we may suddenly behold, reverently be it said ! 
 the dread finger of the Deity silently pointing to 
 that same earth, as containing unerring evidence 
 of the truth of His WRITTEN WORD. Let us wend 
 our wondering way to Nineveh, and gaze at its 
 extraordinary excavations. There are indeed seen 
 
 * Dr HITCHCOCK, Religion of Geology, p. 416.
 
 100 INTELLECTUAL AND MORAL DEVELOPMENT 
 
 those traces of man which geology has never 
 found ; man as he existed near four thousand 
 years ago ; man as he acted and suffered ; man as 
 he became the subject of God's judgments ; man, 
 whose fate had been foretold by the messengers of 
 God ! Here behold an ancient and mighty capital, 
 and its cruel and idolatrous people, as it were 
 reproduced before our eyes, and disinterred from 
 the dust and gloom of ages ! 
 
 O ye men of Nineveh ! are you indeed already 
 rising up before us, to condemn us ? * 
 
 To my mind these contemplations are pregnant 
 with instruction, and invested with awe. I cannot 
 go to our national museum, and behold there the 
 recently-disinterred monuments of past Assyrian 
 existence, without regarding them by the light of 
 the Scriptures ; nor afterwards read the Scriptures, 
 without additional light reflected upon them from 
 these wondrous discoveries. May I, for instance, 
 be really looking upon the idol Nisroch,f of whom 
 I read in Holy Writ, and of the royal parricides 
 of whom it speaks ? So Sennacherib King of As- 
 syria departed, and went and returned, and dwelt at 
 
 * The men of Nineveh shall rise up in the judgment with this 
 generation, and shall condemn it : for they repented at the preach- 
 i' n ff f Jonas ; and, behold, a greater than Jonas is here. 
 Luke xi. 32. 
 
 "t* See Mr Layard's admirable and deeply interesting Nineveh 
 and its Remains, of which a cheap abridgment, with numerous 
 woodcuts, was published by himself in 1851, entitled, A Popular 
 Account of Discoveries at Nineveh, p. 47.
 
 OF THE PRESENT AGE. 101 
 
 Nineveh. And it came to pass, as he was wor- 
 shipping in the house of Nisroch his god-, that 
 Adrammelech and Sharezer his sons smote him with 
 the sword / * 
 
 Surely, surely, we live in an age of wonderful 
 discoveries and coincidences; and it must be our 
 fault if we do not profit by them, as it is our duty 
 to make the attempt. 
 
 It seems to me that no rightly-constituted mind 
 can ponder these subjects without being deeply and 
 beneficially affected. It is in vain, however, to 
 reason with one whose mind is insolently made up 
 to treat them with contempt, and to disregard 
 accumulating evidence a hundredfold stronger than 
 induces it to act confidently in the most important 
 concerns of life. A disposition of this kind may in 
 time be visited by a judicial blindness. Let those, 
 on the contrary, of a nobler character, but who 
 have been agitated by doubts from which perhaps 
 few are free, reflect on the benignant dispensation 
 which enables us, by new discoveries in science, to 
 comprehend much that was previously dark in 
 God's revelation through the Scriptures. The 
 book of nature having been thus opened to us for 
 so grand a purpose, may we not humbly hope that 
 that book will not be closed again, before every- 
 thing that forms still a stumbling-block to belief 
 be removed? There may have been scoffers in 
 
 * 2 Kings, six. 36, 37.
 
 102 INTELLECTUAL AND MORAL DEVELOPMENT 
 
 former days, whom the discovery to which I am 
 alluding would have startled, and silenced. Had 
 Lord Shaftesbury, and those who thought with 
 him, lived in this our time, let us express a hope 
 that they would be now proclaiming what they 
 once denied ; and we cannot be sufficiently thankful 
 to the Supreme Disposer of Events, that it has 
 pleased Him to reserve ourselves, on whom it may 
 be that the ends of the world are come, for a 
 season of greater light ! 
 
 Let, then, the geologist go on with his re- 
 searches, and double his discoveries; nay, inde- 
 finitely increase their number and significancy. 
 Let him, if he please, and think himself entitled to 
 do so and it has been sarcastically said that time 
 is a cheap commodity with geologists talk of his 
 millions and millions upon millions of ages, if he 
 think his eye really capable of piercing so far 
 back into eternity. If he be right, he shall never 
 satisfy me that my God is wrong ; for / know in 
 whom I have believed: 
 
 He is his own interpreter, 
 And He will make it plain ! 
 
 And now the current of our inquiries is bring- 
 ing us in view of objects and ends demanding our 
 most serious attention. 
 
 We have been hitherto inquiring into the INTEL- 
 LECTUAL development of the age in which we live; 
 and for that purpose have had to pass in rapid
 
 OF THE PRESENT AGE. 103 
 
 review the state of knowledge, and of consequent 
 power, to which the exertions of the human intel- 
 lect have brought us. We have endeavoured to 
 show that we have no sufficient reason for believ- 
 ing that the intellect of man has either increased 
 or diminished in absolute strength or capacity, as 
 far as we have any means of judging of its action, 
 when fitting occasions arose to develop its en- 
 ergies ; that all our researches into the nature of 
 intellectual existence and action have failed of 
 bringing us satisfactory results ; that we know 
 that we live, though not how we live ; we think, 
 but know not how we think ; and that it may per- 
 haps have been so ordained by Infinite Wisdom, 
 that impassable bounds should be placed to the 
 anxious and insatiable curiosity of man. I am 
 speaking, I repeat again, solely at present of 
 human means and sources of knowledge. One 
 observation, faintly alluded to at the commence- 
 ment of this paper, surely must, by this time, 
 have forced itself upon us : that while the retro- 
 spect of six thousand years from which I exclude 
 our first parent, whose intellect originally, and 
 before he had darkened the glorious image and 
 likeness in which he was made, may have been 
 endowed with powers transcending all conception 
 by his degenerate though still gifted successors 
 shows mental philosophy to have been, compara- 
 tively speaking, stationary, physical discovery has
 
 104 INTELLECTUAL AND MORAL DEVELOPMENT 
 
 made, and that latterly, advances so prodigious. 
 Let us attempt in imagination to realise the space 
 gone over, by supposing that greatest among the 
 ancient philosophers, Aristotle, placed in possession 
 of our microscope ; our telescope, and other astro- 
 nomical instruments ; our chemical and mechanical 
 instruments, and of their amazing results ; and the 
 present state of anatomical, physiological, and geo- 
 logical knowledge. How would he now look at 
 the earth ! and at the heavens ! at the elements ! 
 and at MAN ? And when the astounded philoso- 
 pher began at length to look for corresponding 
 advances in metaphysical or psychological know- 
 ledge, what should we say ? What would he 
 think? 
 
 Again, let us suppose ourselves to wake up 
 to-morrow morning in his day ! without steam, 
 without magnetism, without electricity, and all 
 the amazing results which they have effected ! 
 without the telescope ! without the microscope, 
 and all their mighty revelations ! Nay, even to 
 descend for a moment to particulars, without our 
 gas, without our newspapers, without, in other 
 words, our present physical and intellectual light ! 
 without the steamboat, the railroad, the electric 
 telegraph ! What a sudden and dreary eclipse ! 
 How confounding and intolerable to those recol- 
 lecting so different a state of social existence ! 
 How we should creep and grope our way about, as
 
 OF THE PRESENT AGE. 105 
 
 in a state of childhood ! And shall we continue 
 our course backwards, as far beyond Aristotle's 
 day as his beyond ours ? Let us suddenly return 
 to our present day, passing in our flight those 
 two great lights, at intervals of centuries, the two 
 Bacons, Roger and Francis, and Newton ; and let 
 us venture to anticipate the dim future, our phy- 
 sical knowledge and position twenty-two centuries 
 hence, if our species shall then, in God's good 
 pleasure, continue upon the earth, the fat not 
 having then gone forth, that Time shall be no 
 longer ! 
 
 Where may then be the seats of mankind V 
 their language ? their modes of communica- 
 tion ? of government ? their knowledge and 
 use of nature, and its powers ? of the Heavens, 
 and the Earth's relations to them ? Will the land 
 and the water have again changed places ? May 
 we imagine our posterity, some two or three 
 thousand years hence, exhuming the fossilised 
 remains of their ancestry in every quarter of the 
 globe accessible to the search ? Will they be 
 speculating upon our size so much greater, or 
 less than, or the same as their own ? upon our 
 tastes, and habits, and doings ? Will our history 
 have perished ? or, if it survive, will it tell of us 
 truly, or falsely V Will the period of our existence 
 be assigned to a date a million of ages anterior to 
 its actual one ? Will our ignorance of the laws of
 
 106 INTELLECTUAL AND MORAL DEVELOPMENT 
 
 nature, as then understood, of the constitution of 
 the human mind, be spoken of with pity and 
 wonder ? 
 
 Thus, indeed, may we dream and speculate, if 
 we please, as to the possible future, and its condi- 
 tions with reference to the present and the past. It 
 is with the present that man is practically concerned; 
 but of that present, though it may seem paradoxical 
 to say it, both the past and the future are inevitable 
 and essential elements and conditions. Our Now 
 reflects the lights and shadows of what has gone 
 before and is following, and has necessary relations 
 to man's special and limited intellectual faculties. 
 How different is the Now of man, and the NOW of 
 his Maker ! The difference involves the distinction 
 between Time and Eternity, between the Creator 
 and the creature, the Finite and the Infinite ; and 
 may, if pondered, afford a few trembling gleams 
 of light upon some of the possible conditions of 
 Omniscience. " The whole evolutions of time and 
 ages," said More, " from everlasting to everlast- 
 ing, is collectedly and presentifickly represented 
 to God at once ; as if all things and actions were, 
 at this very instant, really present and distinct 
 before him."* How can mortal man address his 
 faculties to such a subject ? They are as unfit to 
 deal with it, as the eye to hear, or the ear to see ; 
 and it is something even to persuade ourselves of 
 
 * Defence of the Philosophic Callala, c. 2.
 
 OK THE PRESENT AGE. 107 
 
 that fact and certainty. It may serve to save the 
 soul of man from endless trouble and perplexity, 
 and to reduce it to that condition which alone it is 
 fitted to enjoy. But we do not sufficiently exercise 
 ourselves in this matter. We soothe ourselves with 
 sounds ; talking as freely and unconcernedly about 
 omniscience, omnipotence, and omnipresence, as 
 though they really represented to our understand- 
 ings the comprehensible attributes of the incom- 
 prehensible Deity ; as if " by searching " we had 
 " found out the Almighty unto perfection ! " I am 
 speaking here of the mere unassisted exercise of 
 human reason, which appears to me incompetent to 
 deal fully with our " Now ;" and the more that we 
 endeavour to realise this fact, the better shall we 
 find it, for both speculation and practice, in the state 
 of things in which we are conscious that we have 
 been placed by our Maker, and to which our faculties 
 have been adjusted : and in which we are ordained 
 to see through a glass darkly, and to know in part. 
 So it is ; and the restless, and too often insolent, 
 spirit of man must accommodate itself to that fact ; 
 and if he do not, he will assuredly make mental and 
 moral shipwreck. The best thinkers of the present 
 age are those who rigorously act upon this prin- 
 ciple, and are most on their guard against urging 
 speculation into regions virtually forbidden to the 
 prying of hum'an faculties ; because they are, as I 
 have said, absolutely unfitted for them ; as is griev-
 
 108 INTELLECTUAL AND MORAL DEVELOPMENT 
 
 ously evidenced by the inconsistent and contradic- 
 tory character of such speculations as we have 
 several times alluded to, the absurdities to which 
 they lead legitimately, and their practical useless- 
 ness, and danger. 
 
 These observations may serve to connect our 
 present topics with those touched upon before we 
 started on our multifarious inquiries. 
 
 They remind us that our inquiry is not limited 
 to the intellectual, but extends to the MORAL de- 
 velopment of our species in the present age ; and 
 that again remits us to an early observation, that 
 there are profound relations between intellect and 
 morality, involving everything that concerns the 
 highest interests of humanity.* The truth is, 
 that intellect stands to morality in the relation 
 of means to an end ; that the culture and exer- 
 cise of the intellect are not, and cannot be, of 
 themselves, final objects or ends, but necessarily 
 presuppose and lead to ends. This is a doctrine 
 as old as the great Stagyrite ; who, to adopt the 
 eloquent language of the present occupant of the 
 pulpit of Hookeiyf "laid the foundation of his ethical 
 system in a recognition of the great truth, that the 
 end of man is not knowledge^ but practice. \ 
 
 * Ante, p. 8. 
 
 f* Archdeacon Robinson, the Master of the Temple. 
 
 To Is -riKtf eu yvZirt;, JUa {{. (Eth. i. 3.) The trvuufi'n and 
 
 Xtr,<riu*y of Aristotle express both of them non-finality; and all 
 "goods" coming under either designation, are only subordinate
 
 OP THE PRESENT AGE. 109 
 
 " A wiser than the Stagyrite has told us that the 
 whole of man his duty, his happiness, his immor- 
 tality, is comprised in this to fear God, and to 
 keep his commandments.* 
 
 " But an infinitely greater than Solomon has also 
 authoritatively told us, that the entire subjection of 
 the soul to the obedience of FAITH, is not only 
 itself demanded of us, but is also at the same time 
 constituted the only avenue to further knowledge. 
 If any man WiLLf do His will, he shall know of 
 the doctrine whether it be of God." 
 
 Thus, as it were, with one stride, we have reached 
 the goal the final end of man of his existence 
 and doings ; to which they all inevitably tend, and 
 the attaining of which contributes the true and 
 only business of life ! His intellect is given him 
 to aid in discerning that end, and to enable him 
 to regulate his conduct in this life, so as to 
 attain that which is beyond it the glorious frui- 
 tion of a happy Hereafter. But where are we 
 standing? On the shore of a vast deep sea 
 of ethical or moral philosophy ; by which I 
 mean simply, that system or theory of prin- 
 ciples regulating man as a moral and respon- 
 
 goods, implying the existence of something higher and better. 
 With Aristotle, that something was happiness ; with us, it should 
 be the happiness the only true and ultimate one secured by 
 salvation. 
 
 * Eccles. xii. 13. 
 
 t The Greek has a signal significance of expression 1* rit 6EAH 
 
 itvrtv VwciV.
 
 110 INTELLECTUAL AND MORAL DEVELOPMENT 
 
 sible agent, especially in respect of its motives 
 and sanctions. 
 
 This great subject I have approached suddenly, 
 and, right or wrong, in the decisive spirit of one 
 whose mind, after revolving it all his life as a 
 matter of personal concernment, is thoroughly 
 made up upon it. With such a subject, and with 
 such a feeling, it were idle, and even criminal, for 
 a moment, especially on such an occasion as this, to 
 dally or to palter ; and I shall speak humbly, and 
 without reserve, my sincere convictions. In an early 
 part of this paper, it is said that everything depends, 
 in these inquiries, on taking a right point of view 5 
 for that there is one, from which all presents to the 
 contemplative mind a lovely but awful order ; and 
 another, from which everything appears inextricable 
 and hopeless confusion and contradiction, involving 
 man himself, and all within and without him. 
 
 Nearly two centuries ago, Sir Isaac Newton con- 
 cluded his Optical Queries, by a memorable predic- 
 tion, as it was justly termed by Dugald Stewart, 
 " that if Natural Philosophy, in all its parts, by pur- 
 suing the inductive method, shall at length be per- 
 fected, the bounds of Moral Philosophy will be enlarged 
 also." We have not, during the splendid times which 
 have succeeded his own, perfected natural philo- 
 sophy, but have rigorously pursued the inductive 
 method, and thereby immensely enlarged the bounds 
 of natural philosophy. Have we also enlarged those
 
 OF THE PRESENT AGE. Ill 
 
 of moral philosophy ? In one respect we have 
 by incessantly accumulating proofs, each new one 
 on a sublimer scale, of our Almighty Maker's wis- 
 dom, power, beneficence, and unity of action, and 
 of His title to the love, adoration, and obedience 
 of His creatures. A living successor of Sir Isaac 
 Newton, Sir John Herschel, tells us that the steady 
 application of the inductive system to physics, ne- 
 cessarily tends to impress something of the well- 
 weighed and progressive character of science on 
 the more complicated conduct of our social and 
 moral relations ; that it is thus that legislation and 
 politics come gradually to be regarded as experi- 
 mental sciences, founded in the moral and physical 
 nature of man, and to be constantly accumulating 
 towards the solution of the grand problem how the 
 advantages of government are to be secured with 
 the least possible inconvenience to the governed.* 
 Perhaps it may be truly said, in passing, that while 
 the steadfast progress of experimental philosophy 
 is one of the grandest features of the age, it is not 
 unaccompanied with danger, in so far as the spirit 
 which it generates may be disposed to address 
 itself, flushed with triumph, to matters which are 
 not the subject of experimental treatment. 
 
 I have my own opinions concerning the science 
 of political economy, which I need not obtrude upon 
 you ; but that legislation and politics depend on 
 
 * Discourse, p. 73.
 
 112 INTELLECTUAL AND MORAL DEVELOPMENT 
 
 fixed principles, however difficult formally to define 
 and agree upon them ; and that those principles 
 have relation to the moral and physical nature of 
 man, can no more be douhted, than one can deny 
 the existence, as a distinguishing characteristic of 
 the present age, of a sincere desire to discern and 
 act upon those principles. Into those questions, so 
 unhappily intermingled with violent passions and 
 personal interests, I shall not enter for one mo- 
 ment, because I am satisfied with another and a 
 vast one it is what is the moral nature of man ? 
 for the determining that, and the rules of conduct 
 conformable to it, constitute what is called Moral 
 Philosophy. Before proceeding further, let me 
 say, that if you wish really to ascertain the facts 
 on which to reason with reference to man's moral 
 nature, do not go to the speculative moralist, sitting 
 in his library, spinning scheme after scheme of so- 
 called morality, often only fantastic variations of 
 those of long-forgotten predecessors ; but go to the 
 lawyer, the physician, the divine, who see human 
 nature from day to day in its practical aspects, 
 those which are hidden from the eyes of mere 
 talkers and writers, however eloquent and inge- 
 nious. The former can tell you of the actual phy- 
 sical and moral condition of our species, in every 
 class of life from the lowest to the highest even 
 in the highest conditions of modern civilisation. 
 Ask, again, those noble messengers of mercy, who,
 
 OF THE PRESENT AGE. 113 
 
 with only the eye of their heavenly Father upon 
 them, shedding around them a radiance unseen of 
 man, go about doing good visiting those hidden 
 scenes of suffering' 
 
 Where hopeless anguish pours her moan> 
 And lonely want retires to die ! 
 
 Ask them, I say, ask all these classes, to whom 
 human nature in every station, every degree of 
 development and form of manifestation, is exposed 
 what they think of human nature of man's 
 moral nature* and what are the conclusions which 
 their " experience " has forced upon them. They will 
 tell you of a terrible amount of physical and moral 
 EVIL in existence, and ichich must be dealt with! 
 
 Here, perhaps, steps in some philosophical moral- 
 ist first asking, how do you account for the exist- 
 ence of it ? and by and by another, complacently 
 affirming, by a process of his own, that that sup- 
 posed evil does not exist. Here we are deluged 
 by a tide of disputation, which too often carries 
 off and drowns those whom it overtakes. But 
 there is also a kindred question attended with 
 similar results: the human WILL or liberty of 
 action. Is there, asks another philosopher, such a 
 thing as the Will? Can it act freely? Or is 
 its action absolutely mechanical and necessary ? 
 What, then, are motives? And are men, in fact, 
 mere machines? And, if so, what becomes of re- 
 sponsibility ? On these questions the two mighty
 
 114 INTELLECTUAL AND MORAL DEVELOPMENT 
 
 problems of moral science has mere physical 
 science cast a single ray of light? In spite of 
 some dreams of the day, it may be answered, 
 peremptorily, No. And is it to be told to those 
 who come after us, that in England, in our sup- 
 posed noontide splendour of intellect, in this nine- 
 teenth century, there are some who, to solve these 
 questions, have at length nestled themselves in the 
 absurd and impious old notion of PANTHEISM, and 
 affect to believe that the universe itself constitutes 
 God ? That that awful word represents only the 
 aggregate of everything that exists that whatever 
 is, is God, a substance for ever the same, and 
 everything in existence only a necessary succession 
 of its modes of being ! Some of you will be sur- 
 prised, perhaps, to hear that there are certain so- 
 called philosophers of the present day, who seriously 
 avow these notions; and in doing so, unavoidably 
 remind us of some who, professing themselves to be 
 wise, became fools. 
 
 It would be a vain, disheartening, humiliating 
 attempt to exhibit the vagaries of the human in- 
 tellect, in both ancient and modern times, when 
 essaying to deal with these matters. I shall, for 
 my present purpose, divide all existing schools of 
 moral philosophy into two only : that which im- 
 plicitly or professedly rejects Revelation; and that 
 whose doctrines are implicitly based upon it, and 
 may be designated as constituting Christian moral--
 
 OP THE PRESENT AGE. 115 
 
 ity. The former offers a scheme of conduct, and 
 of motives and sanctions producing it, independently 
 of, and in contradistinction to, those disclosed by 
 the Holy Scriptures; the other, a system based 
 upon them exclusively. The one discards Revela- 
 tion ; the other necessarily discards that which 
 discards Revelation.* 
 
 Before proceeding further, in order to do justice 
 between the rival systems, let one give up to the 
 other all that it has derived from that other. Let 
 the Bible be supposed banished from among man- 
 kind, and be as though it had never existed ; but 
 with it must also disappear every ray of light which 
 it has ever emitted, and glistened never so faintly 
 through the mist of mythology not merely all that 
 is thought to have been derived, but all that has in 
 fact been derived from that radiant source. This 
 must be insisted upon rigorously, as the condition of 
 the argument. But then where are we ? To me it 
 seems as though a sun had suddenly fallen from 
 the moral firmament; and all is darkness indeed 
 all relating to the present, the past, and the future ; 
 and in that darkness we grope about hopelessly. 
 We know not how, or why, we were created, nor by 
 
 * To a revelation there must be two parties he who makes it, 
 and he to whom it is made. If there be a revelation, the discard- 
 ing it is surely a fearful matter. We have inspired authority for 
 holding that those whom Revelation has not reached, have the law 
 of human action written in their hearts their conscience also bear- 
 ing witness, and their thoughts the meanwhile accusing or else ex- 
 cusing one another.
 
 116 INTELLECTUAL AND MORAL DEVELOPMENT 
 
 whom ; we can account for nothing satisfactorily 
 only blindly guessing ; and as for the future, it is a 
 hideous blank to us. We may have vague and 
 perhaps torturing fears from it, but no hopes ; we 
 can look only at a puzzling present, in which no 
 man has a right to dictate to another; but might is 
 right, and right and wrong are notions of eternal 
 fluctuation with circumstances. We seem to be 
 unable to act otherwise than as we do ; we cannot 
 help ourselves ; we have passions and appetites to 
 gratify, and will do so whenever we can ; our only 
 motives are derived from the intensity of those pas- 
 sions and appetites, and we have no time to lose, as 
 life is short : so, let us eat and drink, for to-morrow 
 we die all dying alike, young, old, rich, poor, 
 good, bad; if, however, we annex any ideas to such 
 distinctions. What right, let me ask, have we to 
 slaughter the animals, apparently equally adapted 
 with ourselves to their respective elements, and 
 with equal means of enjoyment ? And what con- 
 ception could men form, under these circumstances, 
 of an Almighty Maker? 
 
 In this benighted and bewildered state, let the 
 Bible reappear, with all its teachings and revela- 
 tions, and a flood of holy light flows from it on 
 man and everything about him. It is absolutely 
 alone in its pretensions to AUTHORITY as having 
 come from the First Cause of all things, and con-
 
 OP THE PRESENT AGE. 117 
 
 demning every other relation as an imposture.* 
 It opens at once to our view our past and our 
 future our origin and our destiny ; that we con- 
 sist of an immortal soul joined to a mortal body : 
 tells us what are our present condition and rela- 
 tions, not only towards each other, but towards 
 God ; what are the rules of our conduct to be ob- 
 served on earth, as conditions of an after-existence; 
 how evil came into the world, and how its conse- 
 quences are to be dealt with and obviated ; that the 
 intellect and heart of man are not as originally 
 created, but the former is clouded, and the latter 
 corrupted ; but that God has not left himself 
 without witness, and has implanted in every man a 
 sense of right and wrong a conscience, however 
 its functions may be disturbed and vitiated by evil 
 habits ; that He himself once, in fulfilment of pre- 
 diction and promise, appeared upon earth for a 
 while, abolishing death, and bringing life and 
 immortality to light ; that, after death, man shall 
 
 * " There is one primary and capital mark of distinction," says 
 Bishop Warburton, " differing Judaism from all other forms of re- 
 ligion ; it professes to come from the First Cause of all things, and 
 it condemns every other religion for an imposture. There is nothing 
 more surprising in all Pagan antiquity, than that, amidst then- end- 
 less [alleged] revelations, not one of them ever made such pretensions 
 as these ; yet there is nothing which modern writers are more apt to 
 pass over without reflection. The ancient fathers, however, more 
 nearly acquainted with the state of paganism, regarded it with the 
 attention due to so extraordinary a circumstance." Divine Legation 
 of Moses, book iv. 1.
 
 118 INTELLECTUAL AND MORAL DEVELOPMENT 
 
 rise, and receive judgment for the deeds done in 
 the body a judgment finally determining an eter- 
 nal condition ; that our Maker benignantly regards 
 us as a father his children, with whom he deals 
 tenderly, but equitably ; that he desires the love of 
 our whole heart and soul that we should strive to 
 be pure and holy, as He is; and, finally, sums up 
 our duty in words which none but a debased heart 
 can disregard He hath shewed thee, man I 
 what is good; and what doth He require of thee, 
 but to do justly, and to love mercy, and to walk 
 humbly with thy God ? 
 
 This is essentially, but in brief, the sublime code 
 of Christian Ethics adapted to the nature of uni- 
 versal man, addressing itself authoritatively to his 
 moral nature, prescribing no rules for his conduct 
 the propriety of which that nature does not recog- 
 nise ; but, I repeat it again, speaking all this in 
 a voice of paramount awful Authority yet one 
 which man is at liberty to disobey, at his peril. 
 Now, with this code I, for one, as a poor unworthy 
 worm of the earth, am entirely satisfied. I feel 
 that, in proportion as I attempt and seriously strive 
 to come up to its requirements, my moral and 
 intellectual nature becomes dignified and happy ; 
 and that I exhibit the highest qualities of that 
 restored nature, exactly at the point where, unable 
 by searching to find Him out, I trust in Him, I 
 believe Him, implicitly.
 
 OF THE PRESENT AGE. 119 
 
 Stepping, for a moment, out of the sunlight of 
 this sublime system, I feel myself lowered, per- 
 plexed, disheartened, and in despair. The sum of 
 all its teaching is, at one time, that I am a mere 
 machine ; at another, that I am impelled by no 
 motives except those petty ones supplied by the 
 apparent expediencies of this transient life only, 
 and complicated calculations as to the tendency 
 of my actions to secure a moment's pleasure or 
 happiness, or contribute apparently to such in 
 others. I am wholly dissevered from a future 
 state ; the grave sees the last of me ; my inward 
 sense of right and wrong is extinguished ; consci- 
 ence, in its character of witness, accuser, judge, is 
 expelled from its seat, and its very existence alleged 
 to be a dream and a figment. Those, moreover, 
 who would thus denude rne of my moral dignity, 
 and annihilate those noble motives by which I 
 would fain regulate my conduct, treat the source 
 from which I derive them as a mere tissue of 
 fictions and delusions, unworthy of being for a 
 moment entertained by an enlightened intellect, 
 in an enlightened age. 
 
 A French gentleman, M. Proudhon, who aspires 
 to the character of a philosopher, has recently given 
 out, with what one cannot but regard as an impious 
 complacency, that the age has altogether outgrown 
 Christianity, which, it seems, has " culminated," 
 " hastes to her setting," and will soon " vanish
 
 120 INTELLECTUAL AND MORAL DEVELOPMENT 
 
 away."* Is, then, the intellectual and moral pro- 
 gress of mankind to achieve, as one of its earliest 
 trophies, the extinction of Christianity? of that 
 religion which is now supreme in its hold of the 
 intellect of all the most highly civilised nations of 
 the earth ? Where are to be found the proofs of 
 this assertion of a presumptuous infidelity ? Is not 
 the Christian religion being at this moment rapidly 
 propagated over the whole earth? And well it 
 may. If its divine pretensions are to be judged of 
 by tendencies and results, must not the bitterest 
 enemy of Christianity admit that, were its pure and 
 holy doctrines universally recognised and acted 
 upon, the earth would have become a moral para- 
 dise? Envy, hatred, malice, and all uncharitable- 
 ness, with every ill they induce all fraud, hypo- 
 crisy, falsehood, violence, and lust would they 
 not be extinguished ? Where would be cruelty, 
 oppression, murder, war? If we are to know the 
 tree ly its fruits, have we not here, indeed, as it 
 were, the tree of moral life, and regeneration of our 
 species ? Remove this tree, and what have we in 
 its place ? Are we to be left to the fluctuations and 
 contradictory theories and systems of so-called moral 
 philosophers, based on the imaginary fitness of 
 things, and the exclusive adjustment of man to his 
 present state of existence? Whatever I have read of 
 
 * See Reason and Faith an admirable little discourse, by Henry 
 Rogers.
 
 OF THE PRESENT AGE. 121 
 
 these theories, compels me to compare all anti or 
 /ion-Christian schemes of morality, to mere charnel- 
 houses of decayed and decaying opinions, exhibit- 
 ing, at long intervals, new forms of putrescent 
 vitality. As they repudiate conscience, so they 
 disregard the heart, with all its excellences, vices, 
 and susceptibilities ; and yet it is with the heart 
 man believeth unto righteousness ! It is this act of 
 belief, however, potent and glorious as it is, that 
 some schools of modern philosophy would treat 
 with contempt, and restrain every tendency to- 
 wards it ! 
 
 A writer of the present day, and an active up- 
 holder of what is called the philosophy of Utility 
 which, as I understand it, seems a dreary doctrine 
 truly, and palsying the noblest sentiments of our 
 nature in recently advocating its pretensions as the 
 only true system of ethics, spoke sarcastically of 
 all clerical academical teachers of morals, as having 
 an interest in propping up doctrines to which they 
 are pledged, and fitting their philosophy to them, 
 for that unworthy purpose. He proceeds to say, 
 that " the doctrines of the Established Church 
 are prodigiously in arrear of the general progress 
 of thought, and that the philosophy resulting, 
 will have a tendency not to promote, but to arrest 
 progress. 1 ' This is a confident assertion, levelled 
 virtually at all systems of Christian ethics, if based, 
 as are those of the Church of England, on the
 
 122 INTELLECTUAL AND MORAL DEVELOPMENT 
 
 fundamental doctrines of Christianity. Long may 
 those doctrines, the doctrines of all Christians, 
 continue " prodigiously in arrear of the general 
 progress of thought," if that progress be in the 
 direction of materialism, fatalism, pantheism, or 
 atheism, [I am far, however, from imputing such 
 tendencies to the writer in question, whoever 
 he may be,] in whatever guise it may present 
 itself. Were such to be, indeed, the tendencies 
 of the age, it would be in its dotage, its second 
 childhood. Of this, however, there is no fear ; 
 for I do believe the enlightened convictions of 
 the age to be Christian ; and that, if there were 
 now among us the giant spirits of a former day 
 as there assuredly are their giant disciples a 
 Bacon, a Newton, a Butler they would be, as 
 those were, reverent believers in Christianity. I can 
 conceive of no degree of intellectual advancement 
 going beyond Christianity. The very idea con- 
 tradicts all my views of its essential, its divine 
 character and original ; and I, for one, never can 
 help denouncing any attempt to insinuate notions 
 to the contrary, by constructing systems of morality 
 silently superseding the doctrines of that Chris- 
 tianity. I would have the test always to be, Does 
 your system recognise, or repudiate, Christianity ? 
 and if the latter, unhesitatingly discard the system. 
 No one pretends that revelation does not present 
 speculative difficulties to one disposed to look for
 
 OF THE PRESENT AGE. 123 
 
 them, especially in a spirit of supercilious inquisi- 
 tiveness, and a haughty reliance upon supposed in- 
 tellectual strength ; but they do not disturb him 
 who reflects, with Butler, that those difficulties may 
 have been ordained, and who possesses that univer- 
 sal solvent of doubt and difficulty, a submission and 
 resignation to the Divine will a faith in revela- 
 tion, and the Omnipotence from which it emanated. 
 The FAITH of the Christian is a potent reality ; as 
 much so in the spiritual, as attractive in the natu- 
 ral world. If the two things may be in any re- 
 spect compared, it may be said to be the force which 
 attracts the soul of man to the Deity, as to its 
 proper centre. One who possesses it says, that 
 revelation, whatever be its alleged difficulties 
 and it professes to contain things passing man's 
 understanding comes to him accredited by such an 
 accumulation of evidence as overpowers all rational 
 doubts, far transcending any amount of evidence on 
 which he would unhesitatingly act in the most im- 
 portant affairs of life. All evidence seems to me 
 nugatory, if that which supports revelation has 
 served only to deceive honestly exercised faculties, 
 having been permitted impious supposition ! by 
 a wise and gracious Providence to be arrayed in 
 support of falsehood ! But if one cannot entertain 
 the hideous supposition, what is one to do ? Yield 
 assent, and evidence it in his life. We have this 
 revelation a fact inconceivably momentous. What
 
 124 INTELLECTUAL ANT) MORAL DEVELOPMENT 
 
 amount of intellect will suffice to get rid of that 
 fact ? We must look for an absolute demonstra- 
 tion of the falsehood of its pretensions satisfying 
 the reason of all mankind, and compelling them to 
 surrender their faith in a cunningly-devised fable ; 
 whereas the discoveries constantly announced, serve 
 only to corroborate the validity of its external cre- 
 dentials, while the heart continues in all times and 
 places to acknowledge the strength of those which 
 are internal. The Old Testament and the Jews are 
 both existing among us to this day, as a sun with 
 its satellites, the one irradiated by the other, and 
 indicating the existence and character of that other. 
 That precious Book of books they are still guard- 
 ing with sleepless vigilance; while "Christianity has 
 diffused " to quote a distinguished living scholar 
 and philosopher " over the world, the idea of the 
 unity of the human race, once the solitary belief of 
 the Jews, and obscured by their national exclusive- 
 ness. The historical philosopher, starting from this 
 idea, has been enabled to view the development of 
 mankind in this light of Christianity : the noblest 
 minds of all Christian nations have recognised a 
 visible and traceable progress of the human race 
 towards truth, justice, and intelligence."* Such is 
 Christianity in its glorious mission of evangelisation 
 of civilising all the nations of the earth. AVith- 
 
 * Hippolytus and his Age. By Chev. Bunsen. Vol. ii. p. 4. 
 (1852.)
 
 OF THE PRESENT AGE. 125 
 
 out it, there is no civilisation : or that only which 
 is, to quote from the same learned person, " an 
 empty word, and may be, as China and Byzantium 
 show, a caput ruortuum of real life, a mummy dressed 
 up into a semblance of living reality." * It is to 
 Christianity alone that the world was first indebted 
 for those noble monuments of charity and mercy 
 which are to be found in our hospitals, infirmaries, 
 and other similar institutions. Not a trace of them 
 is to be found among the refined and highly 
 cultivated Greeks and Romans. The Christian 
 agencies, now at work to civilise mankind, are 
 fed direct from the twin founts of inspiration and 
 morality. They are gradually chasing away the 
 shadows of ignorance and sensuality, and melting 
 the manacles and fetters in which cruelty and 
 vice have bound mankind for ages. " The whole 
 world will be Japhetised which, in religious 
 matters, means, now pre-eminently, that it must 
 be Christianised by the agency of the Teutonic 
 element. Japhet holds the torch of light, to kindle 
 the heavenly fire in all the other families of 
 the one undivided and indivisible human race.f 
 
 * Hippolytus and his Age, p. 9. 
 
 f* " We think," says a masterly writer in the Quarterly Review, 
 " there are sufficient grounds, without reference to the sacred 
 writings, for arriving at the conclusion, that all races and diversi- 
 ties of mankind are really derived from a single pair ; placed on the 
 earth for the purpose of peopling its surface, in both the times be- 
 fore us, and during the ages which it may please the Creator yet to 
 assign to the present order of existence here." Quarterly Review,
 
 126 INTELLECTUAL AND MORAL DEVELOPMENT 
 
 Christianity enlightens, and only a small portion of 
 the globe ; but it cannot be stationary and it will 
 advance, and is already advancing, triumphantly 
 over the whole earth, in the name of Christ, and in 
 the light of the Spirit." * That Christianity has a 
 vital influence over individuals, and the nations 
 which they compose. The presence and the absence 
 of it are equally recognised, seen, and felt. 
 
 What will the most delicately-adjusted scheme 
 of ethics do for a man when the iron is entering his 
 soul ; when he sees long-cherished hopes blighted ; 
 when he is tortured by a sense of wrong and in- 
 justice inflicted upon him ; when some dreadful 
 incurable disease has settled upon him? Will it 
 enable him to say, Though He slay me, yet will I 
 trust in Him ? Will it sustain the sinking soul of 
 him on whose eyelids is settling the shadow of 
 death? When we stand with bleeding heart 
 around the grave, and hear the earth falling on 
 the coffin of the dear being who cannot hear it, 
 nor the dread words which accompany it earth 
 to earth, ashes to ashes, dust to dust whence 
 comes the sublime sound, I am the Resurrection, 
 and the Life, while immortality is glowing around 
 us, and a voice whispers, in accents of tender ma- 
 jesty, It is /, be not afraid ! 
 
 vol. Ixxxvi. pp. 6-7, art. " Natural History of Man." There are 
 also the strongest philological reasons for believing that all lan- 
 guages are derivable from one. 
 * B0NSEN, Hippolytns, ii. 116-17.
 
 OF THE PRESENT AGE. 127 
 
 Why am I so importunate on this point ? Be- 
 cause the Holy Volume, with the morality and 
 religion which spring from it, is everything or no- 
 thing to each and every one of us : take it away, 
 and high as may be the intellectual and moral 
 development of the present age, neither philoso- 
 pher nor peasant has anything to supply the place 
 of that Volume ! Man has lost the only link that 
 bound him to his Maker : he begins wildly to 
 doubt His very existence, and the rectitude of His 
 government : he has no clue through the labyrinth 
 of life, and sees no adequate purpose of his exis- 
 tence, nor for his being endowed with such powers, 
 and capable of such aspirations as are his; he is 
 drifting about on the vast ocean of being, without 
 a rudder and without a chart. But give him back 
 that volume let him hold fast by HIS BIBLE as 
 the only fixed point when all else is fluctuating 
 and all is lovely light and order. In that light 
 let me walk, till I in my appointed time am called 
 away. 
 
 Here we touch the culminating point of all our 
 inquiries. 
 
 Wherefore, friends, farewell. The light of a new 
 year is already beaming on our brows. May we 
 all enter, may we all leave it, in a happy and a 
 high spirit !
 
 PRINTED BY WILLIAM BLACK WOOD AND SOS.s. EDINBl'RGH.
 
 WORKS BY THE SAME AUTHOR. 
 
 \ 
 
 THE DIARY OF A LATE PHYSICIAN. 
 
 A NEW EDITION. 
 
 Complete in Two Volumes, price 12s. 
 
 " We know of no book in the English language so calculated to rivet the attention 
 and awaken the purest and deepest sympathies of the heart, as the Diary of a Late 
 l'lti/sician. The man who has not read these tales has yet to learn a lesson in the 
 mysteries of human nature ; and though Ten Thousand a-Ycar may, as a literary 
 composition, claim precedence, we think it lacks something a very little of that 
 truthful simplicity, that trusting and religious fervour, that refines every sentiment 
 and hallows every aspiration inspired by the elder work." Oxford and Cambridge 
 Review. 
 
 TEN THOUSAND A-Y E A R. 
 
 A NEW EDITION. 
 
 Three Volumes Foolscap 8vo, price 18s. 
 
 " Ten Thousand a-Year is perhaps destined, in British literature, to some such 
 rank as Don Quixote holds in that of Spain." American Journal. 
 
 " We consider Gammon the real hero in this mixed drama, which at once 
 resembles Othtllo and let Plaideurs ; the Satan of the Epopana, which brings to 
 one's memory Paradise Lost and the Lutrin. Consummate skill ; perfect hypo- 
 crisy ; indomitable energy ; unbounded ambition there is Gammon ! " Revue 
 det deux Mondes. 
 
 NOW AND THEN. 
 
 A NEW EDITION. 
 
 With the Author's last Corrections and a Preface. In One Volume 
 royal post 8vo, price 10s. 6d. 
 
 " Such is the outline of Mr Warren's present work a vindication, in 
 beautiful prose, of the ' ways of God to man." A grander moral is not to be found 
 than that which dwells upon the reader's mind when the book is closed ; conveyed, 
 too, as it is, in language as masculine and eloquent as any the English tongue can 
 furnish." Timts. 
 
 "It is sculpture, not painting, that we have here to deal with. The characters are 
 few, the events simple ; and both characters and events stand broadly and boldly 
 out, chiselled into big, massive, rigid proportions. It is a book displaying peculiar 
 and remarkable talents. In parts the narration is of breathless interest. There 
 is an utter and blessed absence of conventionalism about the tale ; and it is invested 
 with a species of severe epic grandeur, which, as it were, overshadows the mind." 
 Morning Chronicle. 
 
 THE LILY AND THE BEE: 
 
 AN APOLOGUE OF THE CRYSTAL PALACE. 
 
 Price 5s. 
 
 " It is a great theme treated by a masculine intellect enriched with all the re- 
 sources of varied knowledge, of profound thought, of a highly poetical temperament, 
 and of solemn religious convictions, and enhanced by the graces and the terrors of a 
 command of language absolutely inexhaustible, and in its combinations almost ma- 
 gical." Dublin Warder. 
 
 WILLIAM BLACKWOOD AND SONS, 
 
 EDINBURGH AND LONDON.
 
 TVORKS PUBLISHED BY 
 
 WILLIAM BLACKWOOD AND SONS. 
 MY NOVEL. BY PISISTRATUS CAXTON. 
 
 OR, 
 
 VARIETIES IN ENGLISH LIFE. 
 BY SIR E. BULWER LYTTON, BART. 
 
 4 vols. post 8vo. 42s. 
 
 POETICAL WORKS OF D. M. MOIR (DELTA) 
 
 With Portrait and Memoir. 2 vols. 14s. 
 
 " These are volumes to be placed on the favourite shelf, in the familiar nook that 
 holds the books we love, which we take up with pleasure and lay down with regret." 
 
 Edinburgh Couranl. 
 
 LAYS OF THE SCOTTISH CAVALIERS, 
 
 AND OTHER POEMS. 
 BY W. EDMONDSTOUNE AYTOUN. 
 
 5th Edition. 7s. 6d. 
 
 " A volume of verse which shows that Scotland has yet a poet." Quart. Kcvieui. 
 " Finer ballads than these, we are bold to say, are not to be found in the lan- 
 guage." The Times. 
 
 POEMS AND BALLADS OF SCHILLER. 
 
 TRANSLATED BY SIR E. B. LYTTON, BART. 
 
 Second Edition, 10s. 6d. 
 
 " The translations are executed with consummate ability." Morning Chronicle. 
 " The work of one poet who has perfectly seized the meaning of another poet." 
 
 The Times, 
 
 THE POEMS OF FELICIA HEMANS. 
 
 In One vol. large Svo, 21s. ; or in Six vols. small 8vo, 24s. 
 
 " Of no modern writer can it be affirmed with less hesitation, that she has become 
 an English classic, nor, until human nature becomes very different from what it now 
 is, can we imagine the least probability that the music of her lays will cease to soothe 
 the ear, or the beauty of her sentiment to charm the gentle heart." Blackicood's 
 Magazine.
 
 WILLIAM BLACKWOOD AND SONS PUBLICATIONS. 3 
 
 LIVES OF THE QUEENS OF SCOTLAND, &c. 
 
 BY AGNES STRICKLAND. 
 
 Six vols., uniform with " Lives of the Queens of England." Price 10s. 6d. each. 
 
 VoL IU., just published, contains the 
 LIFE OP MARY STUABT. 
 
 " Every step in Scotland is historical ; the shades of the dead arise on every side: 
 the very rocks breathe. Miss Strickland's talents as a writer, and turn of mind as 
 an individual, in a peculiar manner fit her for painting a historical gallery of the 
 most illustrious or dignified female characters in that land of chivalry and song." 
 Blackwood's ila<iazine. 
 
 MEMOIRS AND ADVENTURES OF 
 SIR WILLIAM KIRKALDY OF GRANGE, 
 
 Governor of the Castle of Edinburgh for Mary Queen of Scots. 
 Post 8vo. 10s. Cd. 
 
 " It is seldom indeed that we find history so written, in a style at once vigorous, 
 perspicuous, and picturesque. The author's heart is thoroughly with his subject." 
 Blackicood'i Mayazine. 
 
 MEMOIRS AND ADVENTURES OF 
 SIR JOHN HEPBURN, 
 
 Marshal of France under Louis XIII., &c. 
 
 BY JAMES GRANT, ESQ. 
 
 PostSvo. 8s. 
 
 " We cordially commend the book to the notice of our military readers." tf. S. 
 Gazette. 
 
 " The best book of its kind that it has been our good fortune to meet with." 
 Tail's Magazine. 
 
 MEMORIALS OF THE CASTLE OF EDINBURGH. 
 
 BY JAMES GRANT, ESQ. 
 
 "With Twelve Illustrations. Crown 8vo. 7s. 6d. 
 
 " We recommend it as an excellent specimen of local history." Athetuzum. 
 " A work equally distinguished by research, accuracy, and historical interest." 
 Sir A. Alison.
 
 4 WILLIAM BLACKWOOD AND SONS PUBLICATIONS. 
 
 THE HISTORY OF EUROPE. 
 
 From the French Revolution to the Battle of Waterloo. 
 BY SIR A. ALISON, BART. 
 
 14 vols. 8vo, Library Edition, (the Eighth,) with Portrait,. . 10 10 
 20 vols. Crown Octavo 6 
 
 THE HISTORY OF EUROPE, 
 
 From the Fall of Napoleon to the Accession of Louis Napoleon. 
 
 BY SIR A. ALISON, BART. 
 
 Vol. I., price 15s. 
 
 To be completed in 5 vols., uniform with the Library Edition of the Author 1 ! 
 " History of Europe, from the French Revolution to Battle of Waterloo." 
 
 LIFE OF JOHN DUKE OF MARLBOROUGH. 
 
 BY SIR ARCHIBALD ALISON, BART. 
 
 Second Edition. 2 vols. 30s. 
 
 " Unquestionably the best ' Life of Marlborough.'" Morning Post. 
 " Mr Alison's ' Life of Marlborough ' is an enchaining romance." Blackwood's 
 Magazine. 
 
 SIR ARCHIBALD ALISON'S ESSAYS, 
 
 Political, Historical, and Miscellaneous. 
 3 vols. 45s. 
 
 " They stamp him as one of the most learned, able, and accomplished writers of 
 
 the age His Essavs are a splendid supplement to his Historv ; and the 
 
 two combined exhibit his intellect in all its breadth and beauty." Dublin" University 
 Magazine. 
 
 EPITOME OF 
 ALISON'S HISTORY OF EUROPE. 
 
 4th Edition. 7s. 6d. bound. 
 
 " A masterly epitome of the noblest contribution which has been made to the 
 historic literature of the present day." Hull Packet. 
 
 " We recommend this book especially to parents and teachers as a most admirable 
 school-book." Dublin Mail.
 
 MO*.
 
 HHHHHHM