Canon Liddon preached a fine sermon before the Medical Congress
at St. Paul's last Sunday afternoon, in which he .suggested at least, if he did not inculcate, the limits which ethics should impose on scientific inquiry into the secrets of life, and administered an antidote to Professor Virchow's crude and, as we hold, cruel teaching on the subject of vivisection. Might knowledge be bought, he asked, at the price of the virtue it brings ? And he indicated pretty clearly, we think, his own belief that it might not. Scientific inquiry ought always to be controlled by a directly benevolent end, an end which would restrain the excesses of the passion for knowledge,—a passion which may, we believe, become as lawless and hideous a passion as any other in our nature. We confess that it has to us been a great and even a severe disappointment, to find this great Medical Congress cheering Professor Virchow's repudiation of all the ethics of mercy in the name of Science. Almost every human character has been more or less poisoned by fragments of knowledge obtained• at a frightful moral cost ; and yet men go about preaching such obsolete nonsense as that all know- ledge, however obtained, is necessarily and per se beneficial to him who has it.
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