o far
from morals depending upon thought, thought, I believe, depends on
morals. In proportion as a nation is righteous,--in proportion as common
justice is done between man and man, will thought grow rapidly, securely,
triumphantly; will its discoveries be cheerfully accepted, and faithfully
obeyed, to the welfare of the whole commonweal. But where a nation is
corrupt, that is, where the majority of individuals in it are bad, and
justice is not done between man and man, there thought will wither, and
science will be either crushed by frivolity and sensuality, or abused to
the ends of tyranny, ambition, profligacy, till she herself perishes,
amid the general ruin of all good things; as she had done in Greece, in
Rome, in Spain, in China, and many other lands. Laws of economy, of
polity, of health, of all which makes human life endurable, may be
ignored and trampled under foot, and are too often, every day, for the
sake of present greed, of present passion; self-interest may become, and
will become, more and more blinded, just in proportion as it is not
enlightened by virtue; till a nation may arrive, though, thank God, but
seldom, at that state of frantic recklessness which Salvian describes
among his Roman countrymen in Gaul, when, while the Franks were
thundering at their gates, and starved and half-burnt corpses lay about
the unguarded streets, the remnant, like that in doomed Jerusalem of old,
were drinking, dicing, ravishing, robbing the orphan and the widow,
swindling the poor man out of his plot of ground, and sending meanwhile
to the tottering Caesar at Rome, to ask, not for armies, but for
Circensian games.

We cannot see how science could have bettered those poor Gauls. And we
can conceive, surely, a nation falling into the same madness, and crying
'Let us eat and drink, for to-morrow we die,' in the midst of railroads,
spinning-jennies, electric telegraphs, and crystal palaces, with infinite
blue-books and scientific treatises ready to prove to them, what they
knew perfectly well already, that they were making a very unprofitable
investment, both of money and of time.

For science indeed is great: but she is not the greatest. She is an
instrument, and not a power; beneficent or deadly, according as she is
wielded by the hand of virtue or of vice. But her lawful mistress, the
only one which can use her aright, the only one under whom she can truly
grow, and prosper, and prove her divine descent, is Virt