, than it did in the five thousand years
preceding it, and that new discoveries in the sciences and the arts
are being made every day. Nature has been compelled, and is still
being compelled, to yield up secrets which have been for centuries
regarded as beyond the power of human capacity to penetrate. How is
this? Is the world to go on thus, always? Is this rush of progress to
remain unchecked, always? If so, what mystery, even of Omnipotent
wisdom, will remain unsolved at last? What results will not human
energy be able to accomplish? Is the time to come when man shall be
able to shape out of clay, fashion from wood, or stone, an image of
himself, and, breathing upon it, command it to walk forth a thing of
life, and be obeyed? Will he be able to search out a universal
antidote to disease? Will he discover the means of supplying the human
frame with such recuperative power as will nullify the law that
prescribes to all flesh the dilapidation and decay of age, of weakness
and of death? Will he search out some secret agency which will hold
his body in perpetual youth, defying alike the attritions of age, and
the ravages of disease? Will he discover how it is that time saps the
strength, and steals away the vigor of the human system, and a remedy
for exhausted and wasted energies? It is not my purpose to advance a
theory based upon an affirmative answer to these inquiries, but when
we contemplate the stupendous pace at which the world is moving
forward, who will venture to assert where the limit to this progress
is to be found? You tell me that man cannot _create_; that he can only
combine into new shapes elements which God has furnished to his hands.
I do not know this. That he _has_ not created I admit; but that he has
not capabilities, as yet undeveloped, as a creator, I do not KNOW. I
will not venture the assertion that the time will ever come when he
will have discovered wherein lies the mystery of life; that he will
ever find an antidote to disease; that he will search out some
recuperative agency stronger than the law of decay, and that will hold
the human system in the perpetual vigor, and bloom, and beauty of
maturity. I will not assert that science will, at last, be carried to
such perfection, that there shall be no more infirmities of age; that
the pestilence will be stayed from walking in the darkness, and
destruction from wasting at noonday; that men will cease to grow old,
save in years, or that death will be