impossible for them beyond its simplest elements; or their minds
have been stunted in early years from want of education; or in the
providence of God they have been made "hewers of wood and drawers of
water," rather than intellectual princes among the people. Yet let
none of us who are so ignorant, and who as yet think and speak like
children, be discouraged by a conscious sense of our weak intellectual
grasp and scanty information; but rather rejoice with Christ in
the dispensation by which God reveals Himself not to talent but to
goodness; not to the giant intellect but to the babe-like spirit: "I
thank thee, O Father, that thou hast hid these things from the wise
and prudent, and hast revealed them unto babes!"

God has, nevertheless, made the acquisition of truth by the intellect
a source of supreme delight. You well know how every field in nature
has been searched, and every quarter of the globe ransacked, and many
days and nights of patient intellectual toil consumed by men who have
endured incredible labour, supported by no other motive than their
love of knowledge. The immediate joy which is experienced by a great
discoverer when a new fact or truth flashes on his mind is to others
almost inconceivable. We read that when Newton, after years of
difficulty, was just about to step on the summit of that mountain from
which he knew he was to hear such intellectual music as never before
had sounded in the mind of man, and to catch a glimpse of the
hitherto unseen glory of that new ocean of truth which he alone had
reached,--for

"He was the first that ever burst
Into that silent sea!"--

his joy was so great that he was overcome by his emotions, and wept!