APOLOGY FOR THE BELFAST ADDRESS. 501 
knowledge than a protest against the assumption of knowl- 
edge which must long, if not forever, lie beyond us, and 
the claim to which is the source of perpetual confusion 
upon earth. With a mind open to conviction he asks his 
opponents to show him an authority for the belief they so 
strenuously and so fiercely uphold. They can do no more 
than point to the book of Genesis, or some other portion 
of the Bible. Profoundly interesting, and indeed pathetic, 
to me are those attempts of the opening mind of man to 
appease its hunger for a cause. But the book of Genesis 
has no voice in scientific questions. To the grasp of 
geology, which it resisted for a time, it at length yielded 
like.. potter's clay; its authority as a system of cosmogony 
being discredited on all hands, by the abandonment of 
the obvious meaning of its writer. It is a poem, not a 
scientific treatise. In the former aspect it is forever 
beautiful: in the latter aspect it has been, and it will con- 
tinue to be, purely obstructive and hurtful. To knoivledge 
its value has been negative, leading, in rougher ages than 
ours, to physical, and even in our own "free" age to 
moral violence. 
No incident connected with the proceedings at Belfast 
is more instructive than the deportment of the Catholic 
hierarchy of Ireland; a body usually too wise to confer 
notoriety upon an adversary by imprudently denouncing 
him. The Times, to which I owe a great deal on the 
score of fair play, where so much has been unfair, thinks 
that the Irish cardinal, archbishops, and bishops, in a 
recent manifesto, adroitly employed a weapon which I, 
at an unlucky moment, placed in their hands. The ante- 
cedents of their action cause me to regard it in a different 
light; and a brief reference to these antecedents will, 
I think, illuminate not only their proceedings regarding 
Belfast, but other doings which have been recently noised 
abroad. 
Before me lies a document bearing the date of Novem- 
ber. 1873, which, after appearing for a moment, unac- 
countably vanished from public view. It is a Memorial 
addressed, by seventy of the students and ex-students of 
the Catholic University in Ireland, to the Episcopal Board 
of the University; and it constitutes the plainest and 
bravest remonstrance ever addressed by Irish laymen to 
