LECTURE III.

THE SLOWNESS OF MORAL PROGRESS.

ISAIAH XI. 9; 2 PETER III. 8.

They shall not hurt nor destroy in all my holy mountain: for the earth shall be full of the knowledge of the Lord, as the waters cover the sea.

But, beloved, be not ignorant of this one thing, that one day is, with the Lord, as a thousand years, and a thousand years as one day.

THUS far we have established the analogy between the stately processes of the material creation and the progress of the knowledge of the Creator, derived through the contemplation of His works by the intellect of man. By creation you will all along have understood that I mean, not that solemn exercise of the Divine power by which the Creator evoked into being matter and force;-though whatever else matter and force may be, they are at least the exhibitions of God's will;-nor am I, in the term creation, in any degree referring to the grand speculations or guesses of the elder Herschel or of his great cotemporary, who endeavoured, it may be with little success, to reduce those thoughts to the domain

of his own subtle geometry; but I am speaking of those successive stages in the divine plan of the earth's development whereby there was at every stage a fitting existence of beauty and life and happiness, each stage forming only the necessary platform for the next, until the whole beneficent arrangement culminated in this fair earth of ours, compacted and fitted for a being endued with latent vast capacities, who by the contemplation of what he beheld, and the subjugation of the earth to his own necessities or convenience, was ordained gradually to raise his intellectual being to a higher and a nobler life. Man, the first creature upon that earth conscious of his own existence, and carrying within him the credentials of his affinity to God.

But this accumulation of the knowledge of God in His works, this development of the plenitude of intellectual life we have seen was ordained to be slow, so that the fable of Minerva starting into being armed in all the maturity of her beauty, was the conception rather of a childish than a sagacious philosophy. Nevertheless I know it has occasioned perplexity, not to say pain, to some minds, to feel that men so gifted, so earnest, so loyally industrious as Plato and Aristotle for instance, were not permitted to share in at least some small portion of that insight of the mechanism of nature which we moderns enjoy. The true reply seems to be that the possibility of such an anticipation of physical knowledge, implies the build

III.]

ancients, but a necessity to ourselves.

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ing up of an imaginary world wholly different from what the world is, or perhaps could be. To have placed gravitation, for instance, before the mind of Plato or his cotemporaries, would have been not very far different from placing a delicate balance in the lap of an infant, or a chronometer in the hands of a company of children. We must be content to regard the present state of things as a scheme, or even as part of a scheme still going on and imperfectly comprehended, and our wisdom is to abstain from the bootless task of building up imaginary worlds. Those ancient sages in their own day were true to their own calling, and that calling came from God; had they failed to obey the call, our modern vantage ground would have been on a far lower level; and, on the other hand, I for one believe the days will come when our knowledge and our appliances and our inventions will seem to our successors worthy of that pity which sometimes we complacently bestow on the men of old.

If an illustration were needed of this providential concomitancy of invention and discovery with the rise of new necessities in man, I know not where a happier one could be found than in a circumstance now passing before our eyes and in which there are some points of peculiar interest to ourselves. When Captain Cook, about a century ago, first visited the wild shores and the wilder Maoris of New Zealand, very many months had been required to

complete the tedious voyage, and yet that slowness of transit occasioned no complaint as disproportioned to the exigences of the day. But now that many thousands of our countrymen have colonized those islands of the Antipodes, carrying with them our language, our literature, and our Bible-and where these are, there is liberty and there the knowledge of God-in this day of the spread of population and the extension of commerce, associated with many a concomitant development of science, a brief passage of seren short weeks will suffice for our own Augustine of the South to reach the scenes of his distant mission; and the same incredibly rapid voyage will restore him (we trust) to the Church of his native land, here to continue at the call of his countrymen, a work not less laborious, nor less important, and as we pray, not less apostolic.

(a) I now pass to a brief consideration of those lesser and subsidiary analogies of which I spoke last Sunday. They come to us naturally and like undertones or harmonics to the fundamental note of the greater thought. And herein what first impresses my own mind at this moment is the creative power of the human intellect; creative in the sense I explained at the commencement of the discourse; a power divinely implanted, a heavenly gift involving responsibility to the Giver. I say then every truth evolved by the intellect, every fresh accession of the knowledge of God in His works or His ways,

partakes far more of the nature of a permanent creation than do those massive hills which the corals or the molluscs or the diatoms elaborated in their tissues, and filtered from the ancient seas. The hills shall one day be dissolved, but the truth shall remain ; the sun may grow dark and this earth and all that is therein may be burnt up and exhale into a vapour, but the knowledge of what God is, and of what God has done, must shine and exist for ever.

It might indeed have pleased the Divine Creator, as great poets and great artists and great theologians, true to the light of their day, once supposed,— it might have pleased the Divine Creator, by the fiat of His will, to call the mountains into sudden being, and with that one irresistible word 'Hitherto' he might have bidden the waters, in the tide of one vast wave, retire to their destined bounds. The thought of a magnificent embodiment of instantaneous obedience such as this may impress ourselves, and very properly did impress the men before us, with a sense of the awful majesty, the irresistible might of Him who issued the command ; but I think I discern much more of the true lineaments of the Eternal Father, such as the Divine Son in lowly form manifested Him in the streets of Nazareth, in the homes of Bethany, and on the slopes of Olivet, when I observe His benign will has been to construct so much of this fair earth not by the fiat of His irresistible word, but through the gentler