to fancy that they honour God by limiting as much as possible His
teaching, His providence, His wisdom, His love, and His kingdom, and to
pretend that they are defending the creeds of the Catholic Church, by
denying to them any practical or real influence on the economic,
political, and physical welfare of mankind. But in proportion as we hold
to the old faith of our forefathers concerning science and civilisation,
we shall feel it not only a duty, but a glory and a delight, to make all
men sharers in them; to go out into the streets and lanes of the city and
call in the maimed, and the halt, and the blind, that they may sit down
and take their share of the good things which God has provided in His
kingdom for those who obey Him. Every new discovery will be hailed by us
as a fresh boon from God to be bestowed by the rain and the sunshine
freely upon us all. The sight of every sufferer will make us ready to
suspect and to examine ourselves lest we should be in some indirect way
the victim of some neglect or selfishness of our own. Every disease will
be a sign to us that in some respect or other, the physical or moral laws
of human nature have been overlooked or broken. The existence of an
unhealthy locality, the recurrence of an epidemic, will be to us a
subject of public shame and self-reproach. Men of science will no longer
go up and down entreating mankind in vain to make use of their
discoveries; the sanitary reformer will be no longer like Wisdom crying
in the streets and no man regarding her; and in every ill to which flesh
is heir we shall see an enemy of our King and Lord, and an intruder into
His Kingdom, against which we swore at our baptism to fight with an
inspiring and delicious certainty that God will prosper the right; that
His laws cannot change; that nature, and the disturbances and poisons,
and brute powers thereof, were meant to be the slaves, and not the
tyrants of a race whose head has conquered the grave itself.
Public-domain text, read in full here on John Shaqi.
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