"Bearing this in mind, you will not in the next few minutes say to yourselves, 'Our minister has ill chosen his time--now, with the enemy at our gates--to be preaching to us that we should be confirming what little hold we have on the divine purpose, to advance upon it; to counsel our striving to pierce further into the mind of God; when all the newspapers tell us that, for success in war, we should enter into the minds of our enemies.' "For, let me tell you, all knowledge is one under God; and the way of theology--which should be the head and crown of the sciences--not different from the way of what we call the 'natural' sciences, such as chemistry, or geology, or medicine. Of wisdom we may say with Ecclesiasticus: _The first man knew her not perfectly, neither shall the last man find her out_. But that does not matter. What matters for us, in our generation, is that we improve our knowledge and use it to make ourselves _comparatively_ wiser--comparatively, that is, with our old selves as well as with our enemies. 'Knowledge,' they say, 'is power'; which, if it mean anything, must mean that A, by knowing a little more than B, has made himself, to that extent, more powerful than B. "Now by saying that the way of all the sciences is one, I mean just this: that the true process of each is to refer effects to their real causes, not to false ones, and in the search to separate what is relevant from what is irrelevant and--so far as we can discover-- quite accidental. For example, when a pestilence such as typhoid fever broke out in Polpier five or six hundred years ago, your forefathers attributed it to the wrath of God visiting them for their sins: and to be sure it is good that men, under calamity, should reflect on their sins, but only because it is good for them to reflect on their sins at all times and under any circumstance. Nowadays you would have your well-water analysed and ask what the Sanitary Inspector had been about. Or, again, if a fire were to devastate our little town, we should not smite our breasts in the manner of those same forefathers, and attribute it to what there is amongst us of sloth and self-indulgence, to God's wrath upon our drinking habits or our neglect of Sunday observance: we should trace it to a foul chimney and translate our discovery into a Bye-law, maybe into a local Fire Brigade. That is how men improve their knowledge, and, through their knowledge, their wellbeing--by sifting out what is relevant.