REV. MARTINEAU AND BELFAST ADDRESS 257 



smooth, and cylindrical often leafless for a foot or more. 

 But at the end of every one of them the unsightly twig 

 unlocked the exuberant beauty hidden within it, and broke 

 forth into a mass of fronds, almost large enough to fill the 

 arms. We stand here upon a higher level of the wonder- 

 ful: we are conscious of a music subtler than that of the 

 piano, passing unheard through these tiny boughs, and 

 issuing in what Mr. Martineau would opulently call the 

 4 'clustered magnificence" of the leaves. Does it lessen 

 my amazement to know that every cluster, and every leaf 

 their form and texture lie, like the music in the rod, 

 in the molecular structure of these apparently insignificant 

 stems? Not so. Mr. Martineau weeps for *' the beauty of 

 the flower fading into a necessity. ' ' I care not whether it 

 comes to me through necessity or through freedom, my 

 delight in it is all the same. I see what he sees with a 

 wonder superadded. To me, as to him, not even Solomon 

 in all his glory was arrayed like one of these. 



I have spoken above as if the assumption of a soul 

 would save Mr. Martineau from the inconsistency of cred- 

 iting pure matter with the astonishing building power dis- 

 played in crystals and trees. This, however, would not 

 be the necessary result; for it would remain to be proved 

 that the soul assumed is not itself matter. "When a boy I 

 learned from Dr. Watts that the souls of conscious brutes 

 are mere matter. And the man who would claim for mat- 

 ter the human soul itself, would find himself in very or- 

 thodox company. "All that is created,' 1 says Fauste, a 

 famous French bishop of the fifth century, "is matter. 

 The soul occupies a place; it is enclosed in a body; it 

 quits the body at death, and returns to it at the resurrec- 

 tion, as in the case of Lazarus; the distinction between 



