132 THE POPULAR SCIENCE MONTHLY. 



discussions. The sermon was first preached in Belfast, and afterward, 

 in an amplified and amended form, in the Exhibition Building in Dub- 

 ' lin. In passing, I would make a single remark upon its opening para- 

 graph. This contains an argument regarding Christ which I have 

 frequently heard used in substance by good men, though never before 

 with the grating emphasis here employed. " The resurrection of our 

 Saviour," says Dr. Reichel, " is the central fact of Christianity. 

 Without his resurrection, his birth and his death would have been 

 alike unavailing : nay more, if he did not rise from the dead, his 

 birth was the birth of a bastard, and his death the death of an impos- 

 tor." This may be " orthodoxy ; " but entertaining the notions that I 

 do of Christ, and of his incomjiarable life upon the earth, if the mo- 

 mentary use of the term " blasphemy " were granted to me by my 

 Christian brethren, I should feel inclined to employ it here. 



Better instructed than he had been at Belfast, the orator in Dublin 

 gave prominence to a personal argument which I have already noticed 

 elsewhere. He has been followed in this particular by the Bishop of 

 Meath and other estimable persons. This is to be regretted, because 

 in dealing with these high themes the mind ought to be the seat of 

 dignity if possible of chivalry but certainly not the seat of little- 

 ness. " I propose," says the preacher, "making some remarks on the 

 doctrine thus propounded" [in Belfast]. "And, first, lest any of you 

 should be unduly impressed by the mere authority of its propounder, 

 as well as by the fluent grace with which he sets it forth, it is right 

 that I should tell you, that these conclusions, though given out on an 

 occasion which apparently stamped them with the general approba- 

 tion of the scientific world, do not possess that approbation. The 

 mind that arrived at them, and displayed them with so much compla- 

 cency, is a mind trained in the school of mere experiment, not in the 

 study, but in the laboratory. Accordingly, the highest mathematical 

 intellects of the Association disclaim and repudiate the theories of its 

 president. In the mathematical laws to which all material phenomena 

 and substances are each year more distinctly perceived to be subordi- 

 nated, they see another side of Nature, which has not impressed itself 

 upon the mere experimentalist." * 



In view of the new virtue here thrust upon the mathematician, 

 D'Alembert and Laplace present a difliculty, and we are left without 

 a clew to the peculiar orthodoxy of Prof. Clifibrd and other distin- 

 guished men. As regards my own mental training, inasmuch as my 

 censors think it not beneath them to dwell upon a point so small, I 

 may say that the foregoing statement is incorrect. The separation, 

 moreover, of the "study "from the " laboratory " is not admissible, 



' " Es ist ihre Taktik, die Gegner, gegen welche sie nichts sonst auszurichten vermogen, 

 veriichtlich zu behandeln, und allmahlich in der Achtung des Publikums herabzusetzen." 

 This was written of the Jesuits in reference to their treatment of Dr. Dollinger. It is 

 true of others. 



