t man's humility will ever be endangered by too great attainments
in science. Presumption is, indeed, the natural offspring of ignorance,
and not of knowledge. Socrates, as we have already seen, endeavoured to
inculcate a lesson of humility, by reminding his contemporaries how far
the theory of the material heavens was beyond the reach of their
faculties. And to enforce this lesson, he assured them that it was
displeasing to the gods for men to attempt to pry into the wonderful art
wherewith they had constructed the universe. In like manner, the poet, at
a much later period, puts the following sentiment into the mouth of an
angel:--

"To ask or search, I blame thee not; for heaven
Is as the book of God before thee set,
Wherein to read his wondrous works, and learn
His seasons, hours, or days, or months, or years:
This to attain, whether heaven move or earth,
Imports not if thou reckon right; _the rest_
_From man or angel the great Architect_
_Did wisely to conceal, and not divulge_
_His secrets, to be scann'd by them who ought_
_Rather admire_; or, if they list to try
Conjecture, he his fabric of the heavens
Hath left to their disputes, perhaps to move
His laughter at their quaint opinions wide
Hereafter."

All this may be very well, no doubt, for him by whom it was uttered, and
for those who may have received it as an everlasting oracle of truth. But
the true lesson of humility was taught by Newton, when he solved the
problem of the world, and revealed the wonderful art displayed therein by
the Supreme Architect. Never before, in the history of the human race, was
so impressive a conviction made of the almost absolute nothingness of man,
when measured on the inconceivably magnificent scale of the universe. No
one, it is well known, felt this conviction more deeply than Newton
himself. "I have been but as a child," said he, "playing on the sea-shore;
now finding some pebble rather more polished, and now some shell rather
more agreeably variegated than another, while the immense _ocean of truth_
extended itself _unexplored_ before me."

It is, indeed, strangely to forget our littleness, as well as the limits
which this necessarily sets to the progress of the understanding, to
imagine that the Almighty has to conceal anything with a view to remind us
of the weakness of our powers. Indeed, everything around us, and
everything within us, brings home the convi