the few moments which remained at my disposal, constitute the real and permanent significance of natural knowledge.

If these ideas be destined, as I believe they are, to be more and more firmly established as the world grows older; if that spirit be fated, as I believe it is, to extend itself into all departments of human thought, and to become co-extensive with the range of knowledge; if, as our race approaches its maturity, it discovers, as I believe it will, that there is but one kind of knowledge and but one method of acquiring it; then we, who are still children, may justly feel it our highest duty to recognise the advisableness of improving natural knowledge, and so to aid ourselves and our successors in their course towards the noble goal which lies before mankind.

1 (return)
[ A Lay Sermon delivered in St. Martin's Hall on Sunday, January 7th, 1866, and subsequently published in the 'Fortnightly Review'.]

2 (return)
[ Need it be said that this is Tennyson's English for Homer's Greek?]