Ceadmon's belief that God inspired him
with the poetic faculty, did not make him the less laborious and
careful versifier. Bishop John's blessing the dumb boy's tongue in
the name of Him whom he believed to be Word of God and the Master of
that poor dumb boy, did not prevent his anticipating some of the
discoveries of our modern wise men, in setting about a most practical
and scientific cure. Alfred's continual prayers for light and
inspiration made him no less a laborious and thoughtful student of
war and law, of physics, language, and geography. These old Teutons,
for all these superstitions of theirs, were perhaps as businesslike
and practical in those days as we their children are in these. But
that did not prevent their believing that unless God showed them a
thing, they could not see it, and thanking Him honestly enough for
the comparative little which He did show them. But we who enjoy the
accumulated teaching of ages--we to whose researches He is revealing
year by year, almost week by weeks wonders of which they never
dreamed--we whom He has taught to make the lame to walk, the dumb to
speak, the blind to see, to exterminate the pestilence and defy the
thunderbolt, to multiply millionfold the fruits of learning, to
annihilate time and space, to span the heavens, and to weigh the sun--
what madness is this which has come upon us in these last days, to
make us fancy that we, insects of a day, have found out these things
for ourselves, and talk big about the progress of the species, and
the triumphs of intellect, and the all-conquering powers of the human
mind, and give the glory of all this inspiration and revelation, not
to God, but to ourselves? Let us beware, beware--lest our boundless
pride and self-satisfaction, by some mysterious yet most certain law,
avenge itself--lest like the Assyrian conqueror of old, while we
stand and cry, "Is not this great Babylon which I have built?" our
reason, like his, should reel and fall beneath the narcotic of our
own maddening self-conceit, and while attempting to scale the heavens
we overlook some pitfall at our feet, and fall as learned idiots,
suicidal pedants, to be a degradation, and a hissing, and a shame.
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