Great Britain and Her Queen - by Anne E. Keeling
are honoured and useful and speaking unadvisedly on matters theological, this ought not to deter us from
acknowledging the value of true service rendered. The Queen's reign can claim as its own such men as
John Herschel, worthy son of an illustrious father, Airy, Adams, and Maxwell, Whewell and Brewster
and Faraday, Owen and Buckland and Lyell, Murchison and Miller, Darwin and Tyndall and Huxley,
with Wheatstone, one of the three independent inventors of telegraphy, and the Stephensons, father and
son, to whose ability and energy we are indebted for the origination and perfection of our method of
steam locomotion; it can boast such masters in philosophy as Hamilton and Whately and John Stuart
Mill, each a leader of many. It has also the rare distinction of possessing one lady writer on science who
has attained to real eminence - eminence not likely soon to be surpassed by her younger sister-rivals - the
late Mrs. Mary Somerville, who united an entirely feminine and gentle character to masculine powers of
mind.
Only to catalogue the recent discoveries and inventions we owe to men of science, from merciful
anaesthetics to the latest applications of electric power, would occupy more space than we ought here to
give. All honour to these servants of humanity! We rejoice to find among them many who could unite the
simplest childlike faith with a wide and grand mental outlook; we exult not less to find in many Biblical
students and commentators the same patience, thoroughness, and resolute pursuit of the very truth as that
exemplified by the devotees of physical science. God's Word is explored in our day - the same clay
which has seen the great work of the Revised Version of the Scriptures begun and completed - with no
less ardour than God's world. And what vast additions have been made to our knowledge of this earth!
We have seen Nineveh unburied, the North-West Passage explored, and the mysterious Nile stream at
last tracked to its source. To compare a fifty-years-old map of Africa with one of the present day will a
little enable us to estimate the advances made in our acquaintance with the Dark Continent alone; similar
maps including the Polar regions of North America will testify also to a large increase of hard-won
knowledge.
Exploration - Arctic, African, Oriental and Occidental - has had its heroic devotees, sometimes its
martyrs. Witness Franklin, Burke and Wills, and Livingstone. The long uncertainty overhanging the fate
of the gallant Franklin, after he and the expedition he commanded had vanished into the darkness of
Arctic winter in 1845, and the unfaltering faithfulness with which his widow clung to the search for her
lost husband, form one of the most pathetic chapters of English story. The veil was lifted at last and the
secret of the North-West Passage, to which so many lives had been sacrificed, was brought to light in the
course of the many efforts made to find the dead discoverer. As Franklin had disappeared in the North, so
Livingstone was long lost to sight in the wilds of Africa, and hardly less feverish interest centred round
the point, so long disputed, of his being in life or in death - interest freshly awakened when the remains
of the heroic explorer, who had been found only to be lost again, were brought home to be laid among
the mighty dead of England. The fervent Christian philanthropy of Livingstone endeared him yet more to
the national heart; and we may here note that very often, as in his case, the missionary has served not
only Christianity, as was his first and last aim, but also geographical and ethnological science and
colonial and commercial development. We have briefly referred already to some of the struggles, the
sufferings, and the triumphs of missionary enterprise in our day: to chronicle all its effort and
achievement would be difficult, for these have been world-wide, and often wonderfully successful. Nor
has much less success crowned other agencies for meeting the ever-increasing need for religious
knowledge, which multiply and grow in number and in power. Witness, among many that might be
named, the continuous development of the Sunday School system and the immensely extended
operations of the unsectarian Bible Society.
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