Page:Inaugural address, delivered before the members of the Victorian Institute, on Friday the 21st of September, 1854 (IA inauguraladdres00barr).pdf/9

5  which deface the disk of learning will be acknowledged as a benefactor, and hailed as a good and faithful servant in the cause.

Moreover this is an age of which the tendency is not as formerly to meet a novel proposition with a contemptuous denial, or its author with an accusation of atheism, intimacy with the father of Evil, or the yet more heinous offence of heresy; and expose him to the hemlock, the dungeon, or the stake. The custom of denouncing and descrying innovations, as such, no longer reigns despotic. We are no longer oppressed by a bigoted veneration for "the wisdom of our ancestors:" it is received with a deferential respect, and regarded in relation to the lights by which they were illuminated. New doctrines and inventions are submitted to dispassionate investigation before they are wholly condemned; if found to bear the tests applied, they are readily approved and adopted, if not in the land in which they originate, in some more congenial spot, amongst some more liberal spirits; and are made fulcra on which a thousand anxious minds rest their levers to propel into a fuller growth the germ from which they have sprung.

The dignified modesty of true learning is conscious that it is only by slow and painful steps that man has been able to evolve and eliminate those portions of knowledge with which he has been allowed to make himself acquainted; and while it will not suffer the self-sufficiency of ignorance to dictate that which reason must repel, it not allow the arrogance of sciolism to assert that nothing has been left for the present generation to acquire.

Not only on such abstract grounds, but for reasons of a more particular nature is the occasion favourable. One