632 FRAGMENTS OF SCIENCE. 
versed in Scripture; for I loved the Bible, and was 
prompted by that love to commit large portions of it to 
memory. Later on I became adroit in turning my 
Scriptural knowledge against the Church of Rome, but 
the characteristic doctrines of that Church marked only 
for a time the limits of inquiry. The eternal Sonship of 
Christ, for example, as enunciated in the Athanasian 
Creed, perplexed me. The resurrection of the body was 
also a thorn in my mind, and here I remember that a pas- 
sage in Blair's " Grave" gave me momentary rest. 
Sure the same power 
That rear'd the piece at first and took it down 
Can reassemble the loose, scatter'd parts 
And put them as they were. 
The conclusion seemed for the moment entirely fair, but 
with further thought, my difficulties came back to me. I 
had seen cows and sheep browsing upon churchyard grass, 
which sprang from the decaying mold of dead men. The 
flesh of these animals was undoubtedly a modification of 
human flesh, and the persons who fed upon them were as 
undoubtedly, in part a more remote modification of the 
same substance. I figured the selfsame molecules as 
belonging first to one body and afterward to a different 
one, and I asked myself how two bodies so related could 
possibly arrange their claims at the day of resurrection. 
The scattered parts of each were to be reassembled and set 
as they were. But if handed over to the one, IIOAV could 
they possibly enter into the composition of the other? 
Omnipotence itself, I concluded, could not reconcile the 
contradiction. Thus the plank which Blair's mechanical 
theory of the resurrection brought momentarily into sight 
disappeared, and I was again cast abroad on the waste 
ocean of speculation. 
At the same time I could by no means get rid of the idea 
that the aspects of nature and the consciousness of man 
implied the operation of a power altogether beyond my 
grasp an energy the thought of which raised the temper- 
ature of the mind, though it refused to accept shape, 
personal or otherwise, from the intellect. Perhaps the 
able critics of the Saturday Review are justified in 
speaking as they sometimes do of Mr. Carlyle. They owe 
him nothing, and have a right to announce the fact ill 
