Page:The Harveian oration - delivered at the Royal College of Physicians, London, on October 18, 1884 (IA b21778929).pdf/42

 II. In reverence Harvey knelt before her, but not satisfied with what he saw and heard, he asked her questions-and this, with no notion of confusing her, or misreading what she had already said or written, for he was just the kind of questioner to ask the kind of question to which she readily gave answer.

He examined her "in chief" to find out the right; he "cross-examined" her, but in no unfriendly tone, to bring her answer to a "yes" or "no," and so disprove the wrong, the untruth which other questioners had placed in evidence.

Nature," said he to Ent, "is the best and most faithful interpreter of her own secrets; and what she presents either more briefly or obscurely in one department, that she ex- plains more fully and clearly in another. . . . . Truth," he continues, scarce wants an advocate." Nature to him was a perfect verity: the one witness that could never be abashed or shaken; the one witness in whom there could be no false way; the one witness who could not lie.

There was no need to put her "on her oath," for she, in her prime, had been adjured, by the Most High God, to tell "the truth, and nothing but the truth." This she has always done, is doing now, and will, as we believe, go on to do. "C (6 But, can she tell "the whole truth?" Will Nature ever tell, or teach, us this? I can not presume to answer the question which yet I dare to ask; but my own conviction is, that she neither will nor can do this thing until the last hour of Time has struck, and has ushered in the dawn of that one, long, clear, eternal day, whose "sun shall no more go down," and, in whose ever-growing light, we may hail the presence of that "far-off Divine event, To which the whole creation moves."