Quarterly Review respecting Mr. Whewell. 219 
speaking of the man whose friendship he had lost, he says in- 
deed what he thinks, but his thoughts, which at best were 
often inaccurate, were now warped by his feelings of disap- 
pointment. 
I have not the slightest wish to take in any way from what 
may be justly due to Flamsteed ; on the contrary, I honour 
his self-devotion to that department of science in which he was 
qualified so eminently and so usefully to excel; I honour his 
independence and noble application of his own property to 
his great (and it ought to have been national) object; I re- 
spect his religion, but I fear that I do not adopt so high a 
view of it as some of his undiscriminating admirers. I do 
not mean to express any doubts of his opinions on the great 
truths of Revelation, or of his general intention to conform his 
conduct to the dictates of Christianity; but his unhappy tem- 
per, irritated by disease, was suffered to become ungovern- 
able. ‘If any man seem to be religious and bridleth not his 
tongue, but deceiveth his own heart,” the apostle has told us 
the state to which he may be reduced. I presume to judge 
no one or to pronounce that “his religion is vain”; but, with 
every allowance for the weakness of human nature, I must 
say, that professions of forgiveness too frequently repeated, 
and constant assumption of the special favour of Heaven, are, 
when unaccompanied by kind thoughts and mild language, 
the sources of very painful impressions. 
To enter fully into the character of Halley would require 
more time and space than can now be assigned to it ; but there is 
one point which must not be passed over. To call him a 
“ self-convicted infidel ” is, to say the least, strong language, 
which when applied to the mighty dead, should not have been 
used without mature consideration. The authority, from which 
it is derived, was probably Whiston’s account of the election 
in 1691 to the Savilian Professorship. The application, that 
Whiston makes of it to his own case, might have suggested 
the possibility of some bias in the direction which he gives to 
the story; and as the question is now about Halley’s own view 
of his opinions, we have much better evidence ina letter which 
he wrote on the 22nd of June, in the same year, to Mr. Abra- 
ham Hill, which proves that, so far from submitting of neces- 
sity to an examination, in which he was likely to bear himself, 
as Whiston reports, with unbending defiance towards Bentley, 
he courted the inquiry in confidence of being able to clear himself 
from the charge which was brought against him. ‘The letter like- 
wise supplies us with the definite nature of this charge ; for it 
mentions a caveat having been entered against him till he could 
show that he was “ not guilty of asserting the eternity of the 
