sacrifices either to obtain good blessings, or to avert heavy curses and calamities. Nay, methinks a man should sooner find a city built in the air without any plot of ground whereon it is seated than any commonwealth altogether void of religion.... This is that containeth and holdeth together all human society, this is the foundation prop and stay of all.”[71] Brethren of the Archæological Association, I venture to think that you will not fail to see the application of these remarks to your own researches, and to the consequences which are happily arising from these researches. Of course I speak of archæology in its widest sense. Your investigations of the records of antiquity, your examination of ancient remains, your discovery of the sites and foundations of temples, tombs, altars, and cromlechs, confirm the testimony of philologists, historians, and philosophers, nay the witness of the human heart; they all speak with more or less clearness of a belief in the Supreme Being, of a longing for a clearer revelation of His will, of a hope of immortality, of a sense of sin and desire for reconciliation with Him, obscured it may be, often perverted, debased by superstitious, cruel, and unholy rites, sometimes feebly held, but never totally lost. And the same observations apply to the attestation by archæology to the scriptural records. Nothing is more remarkable than the recovery of ancient monuments, unless it be the deductions of science which are marking the intellectual activity of the age. What a revelation was that finding of the famous Rosetta stone[72] which by its triple inscription in the Sacred, the popular Egyptian, and the Greek languages, gave the key to unlock the mysteries of figure writing, so that thanks to Egyptologists, who are but archæologists under a local name, we may picture to ourselves the Egypt of the Pyramids, of Abraham, of Joseph, and the Exodus, and see the Pharaohs in their colossal palaces, and learn something of that wisdom of the Egyptians in which we are told “Moses was learned.” Think, too, how the unshapely mounds on the banks of the Euphrates have given up their treasures, so that we may now know the history of those mighty empires which each in its day exercised its influence on the chosen people, and through that chosen people on the destinies of the Church. Think of the excavations of a Layard, the researches of a Rawlinson in Babylon and Assyria, and of the Palestine explorers, which bring before us not only the land of the Judges and the Kings, but the scenes of the earthly ministry of the Son of God Himself.