APOLOGY FOR THE BELFAST ADDRESS. 49? 
Here we have a very fair example of subjective religious 
vigor. But my quarrel with such exhibitions is that they 
do not always represent objective fact. JsTo atheistic 
reasoning can, 1 hold, dislodge religion from the human 
heart. Logic cannot deprive us of life, and religion is 
life to the religious. As an experience of consciousness it 
is beyond the assaults of logic. But the religious life is 
often projected in external forms I use the word in its 
widest sense and this embodiment of the religious senti- 
ment will have to bear more and more, as the world becomes 
more enlightened, the stress of scientific tests. We must 
be careful of projecting into external nature that which 
belongs to ourselves. My critic commits this mistake: he 
feels, and takes delight in feeling, that I am struggling, 
and he obviously experiences the most exquisite pleasures 
of " the muscular sense " in holding me down. His feel- 
ings are as real as if his imagination of what mine are 
were equally real. His picture of my " struggles" is, 
however, a mere delusion. I do not struggle. I do not 
fear the charge of atheism; nor should I even disavow it, 
in reference to aiiy definition of the Supreme which he, or 
his order, would be likely to frame. His "links" and his 
" steel " and his "dread imputations" are, therefore, even 
more unsubstantial than my "streaks of morning cloud," 
and they may be permitted to vanish together. 
These minor and more purely personal matters at an 
end, the weightier allegation remains~~that at Belfast I 
misused my position by quitting the domain of science, and 
riTaTsing an unjustifiable raid into the domain of theology. 
This I fail to see. Laying aside abuse, I hope my accusers 
will consent to reason with me. Js it not lawful for a 
scientific man to speculate on the antecedents of the solar 
system? Did Kant, Laplace and William Herschel quit their 
legitimate spheres, when they prolonged the intellectual 
mum beyond the boundary of experience, and propounded 
the nebular theory? Accepting that theory as probable, is 
it not permitted to a'scientific man to follow up, in idea, 
tlie. sejjes of changes associated with the condensation of 
the nebulae; to picture the successive detachment of planets 
and moons, a.nd the relation of all of them to the sun? 
If I look upon our earth, with its orbital revolution and 
axial rotation, as one small issue of the process which made 
