utterly ignorant, then he has surely a right to pray God to deliver
him from those dangers; and if not,--if he is doomed to suffer from
them,--to pray God that he may discover and understand the new
dangers of that new land, in order to warn future travellers against
them, and so make his private suffering a benefit to mankind.

This, then, is our duty as to known dangers,--to guard ourselves
against them by science, and the reason which God has given us; and
as to unknown dangers, to pray to God to deliver us from them, if it
seem good to him: but above all, to pray to him to deliver us from
them in the best way, the surest way, the most lasting way, the way
in which we may not only preserve ourselves, but our fellow-men and
generations yet unborn; namely, by giving us wisdom and understanding
to discover the dangers, to comprehend them, and to conquer them, by
reason and by science.

This is the spirit of sound science and of sound religion. And it
was in this spirit, and for this very end, that this Ancient and
Honourable Corporation of the Trinity House was founded more than
three hundred years ago. Not merely to pray to God and to the
saints, after the ancient fashion, to deliver all poor mariners from
dangers of the seas. That was a natural prayer, and a pious one, as
far as it went: but it did not go far enough. For, as a fact, God
did not always answer it: he did not always see fit to deliver those
who called upon him. Gallant ships went down with all their crews.
It was plain that God would not always deliver poor mariners, even
though they cried to him in their distress.

Then, in the sixteenth century, when men's minds were freed from many
old superstitions, by a better understanding both of Holy Scripture