"In the vain and foolish exultation of the heart," said John Quincy Adams,
at the close of his final lecture on resigning his chair at Boston, "which
the brighter prospects of life will sometimes excite, the pensive portress
of Science shall call you to the sober pleasures of her holy cell. In the
mortification of disappointment, her soothing voice shall whisper serenity
and peace. In social converse with the mighty dead of ancient days, you
will never smart under the galling sense of dependence upon the mighty
living of the present age. And in your struggles with the world, should a
crisis ever occur, when even friendship may deem it prudent to desert you,
when priest and Levite shall come and look on you and pass by on the other
side, seek refuge, my unfailing friends, and be assured you shall find it,
in the friendship of Laelius and Scipio, in the patriotism of Cicero,
Demosthenes, and Burke, as well as in the precepts and example of Him
whose law is love, and who taught us to remember injuries only to forgive
them."
Let me in conclusion quote the glowing description of our debt to science
given by Archdeacon Farrar in his address at Liverpool College--testimony,
moreover, all the more valuable, considering the source from which it
comes.
"In this great commercial city," he said, "where you are surrounded by the
triumphs of science and of mechanism--you, whose river is ploughed by the
great steamships whose white wake has been called the fittest avenue to
the palace front of a mercantile people--you know well that in the
achievements of science there is not only beauty and wonder, but also
beneficence and power. It is not only that she has revealed to us infinite
space crowded with unnumbered worlds; infinite time peopled by unnumbered
existences; infinite organisms hitherto invisible but full of delicate and
iridescent loveliness; but also that she has been, as a great Archangel of
Mercy, devoting herself to the service of man. She has labored, her
votaries have labored, not to increase the power of despots or to add to
the magnificence of courts, but to extend human happiness, to economize
human effort, to extinguish human pain. Where of old, men toiled, half
blinded and half naked, in the mouth of the glowing furnace to mix the
white-hot iron, she now substitutes the mechanical action of the viewless
air. She has enlisted the sunbeam in her service to limn for us, with
absolute fidelity, the faces of the friends we love. She has shown the
poor miner how he may work in safety, even amid the explosive fire-damp of
the mine. She hits, by her anaesthetics, enabled the sufferer to be hushed
and unconscious while the delicate hand of some skilled operator cuts a
fragment from the nervous circle of the unquivering eye. She points not to
pyramids built during weary centuries by the sweat of miserable nations,
but to the lighthouse and the steamship, to the railroad and the
telegraph. She has restored eyes to the blind and hearing to the deaf.
Public-domain text, read in full here on John Shaqi.
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