unclean
hands.

Look only at this one thing, as I said just now, that by all these
wonderful discoveries and improvements, England is able to support four
times as many Englishmen as it used of old, and that, if we feared God,
and sought His kingdom better, I believe, England would support many more
people yet--and see if _that_ be not a thing to thank Almighty God for
every day of our lives.

Now how did this wonderful change and improvement take place--suddenly,
and, as it were, in the course of the last hundred years? Simply by
mankind understanding the text (Prov. iii. 19), and by obeying it. I
tell you a real truth, my friends, and it happened thus.

For more than sixteen hundred years after our Lord's time, mankind seem
to have become hardly any wiser about earthly things, nay, even to have
gone back. The land was no better tilled; goods were no more easily
made; diseases were no better cured, than they had been sixteen hundred
years before. And if any learned men longed to become very wise and
cunning, and to get power over this world and the things in it, they flew
off to witchcraft, charms, and magic, deceived by the devil's old lie,
that the kingdom and the power and the glory of this world belonged to
him and not to God.

But about two hundred and fifty years ago, it pleased God to open the
eyes of one of the wisest men who ever lived, who was called Francis
Bacon, Lord Verulam, Lord Chancellor of England, and to show him the real
and right way of learning by which men can fulfil God's command to
replenish the earth and subdue it. And Francis Bacon told all the
learned men boldly that they had all been wrong together, and that their
wisdom was no better than a sort of madness, as it is written, "The
wisdom of man is foolishness with God;" that the only way for man to be
wise was to get God's wisdom, the wisdom with which He had founded the
earth, and find out God's laws by which He had made this world.

"And then," he said, "if you can do that, you will be able to imitate God
in your own small way. If you learn the laws by which God made all
things, you will be able to invent new things for yourselves. _For you
can only subdue nature by obeying her_." That was one of his greatest
sayings, and by it he meant, that you can only subdue a thing and make it
useful to you, by finding out the rules by which God made that thing, and
by obeying them.

For instance, you cannot subdue and till a barren fi