APOLOGY FOR THE BELFAST A DURESS. 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 knowledge 

 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, 



