It so happened that ever since he had arrived in Australia he had been very much interested in exploration, and much mixed up with persons engaged in that work.

He had known the veteran explorer Sturt, the discoverer of South Australia; and he had also been acquainted with his brave companion, John McDouall Stuart, who had marked out the route subsequently followed by the trans-continental telegraph line from Adelaide to Port Darwin, for, wonderful to say, no better route could afterwards be discovered; the map of Stuart's journey and the map of the telegraph line were almost identical.

With regard to Mr.Forrest's exploratory labours, referred to with unaffected and characteristic modesty by the young explorer himself, his lordship believed that great and practical results would follow, and that, even as Stuart's track from south to north of the continent had become the line of communication between those two extreme points, so would the path traversed by Mr.
Forrest become, some day or other, the line of communication through the central portion of the continent from West to South Australia.

(Cheers.) With respect to the necessity for exploration, no doubt it was a very essential work to be carried out.

Whenever he had gone to distant and sequestered parts of the colony in the exercise of his ecclesiastical functions, and was called upon to console people so situated as to be cut off from the blessings of regular ministration, he was in the habit of saying to them, "Although you are at present cut off, yet you may believe that God in His providence has designed that His world shall be inhabited, and ordained that pioneers shall go forth into desert places in order to accomplish that end." Explorers, therefore, like Mr.Forrest, might well feel that in devoting themselves to the work of exploration they were doing their duty to God and to their country in seeking to discover new fields, likely to be of practical use as new settlements for the ever-increasing human family.