[176] I quote from memory but am sure of the purport of the sentence, though not of its expression.
[177] "And be it death proclaimëd through our host to boast of this."—Henry V.
AN OXFORD LECTURE.
(Nineteenth Century, January 1878.)
AN OXFORD LECTURE.[178]
278. I am sure that all in this audience who were present yesterday at Dr. Acland's earnest and impressive lecture must have felt how deeply I should be moved by his closing reference to the friendship begun in our undergraduate days;—of which I will but say that, if it alone were all I owed to Oxford, the most gracious kindness of the Alma Mater would in that gift have been fulfilled to me.
But his affectionate words, in their very modesty, as if even standing on the defense of his profession, the noblest of human occupations! and of his science—the most wonderful and awful of human intelligences! showed me that I had yet not wholly made clear to you the exactly limited measure in which I have ventured to dispute the fitness of method of study now assigned to you in this University.
279. Of the dignity of physical science, and of the happiness of those who are devoted to it for the healing and the help of mankind, I never have meant to utter, and I do not think I have uttered, one irreverent word. But against the curiosity of science, leading us to call virtually nothing gained but what is new discovery, and to despise every use of our knowledge in its acquisition; of the insolence of science, in claiming for itself a separate function of that human mind which in its perfection is one and indivisible, in the image of its Creator; and of the perversion of science, in hoping to discover by the analysis of death, what can only be discovered by the worship of life,—of these I have spoken, not only with sorrow, but with a fear which every day I perceive to be more surely grounded, that such labor, in effacing from within you the sense of the presence of God in the garden of the earth, may awaken within you the prevailing echo of the first voice of its Destroyer, "Ye shall be as gods."