APOLOGY FOR THE BELFAST ADDKESS. 205 



affix with links of steel to the name of Professor Tyndall. 

 the dread imputation against which he struggles.' 



Here we have a very fair example of subjective re- 

 ligious vigour. But my quarrel with such exhibitions 

 is that they do not always represent objective fact. No 

 atheistic reasoning can, I 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 embodi- 

 ment of the religious sentiment will have to bear more 

 and more, as the world become more enlightened, the 

 stress of scientific tests. We must be careful of pro- 

 jecting 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 feelings 

 are as real, as if his imagination of what mine are were 

 equally real. His picture of my ' struggles ' is, how- 

 ever, a mere delusion. I do not struggle. I do not 

 fear the charge of Atheism ; nor should I even disavow 

 it, in reference to any definition of the Supreme which 

 he, or his order, would be likely to frame. His ' links ' 

 and his ' steel ' and his ' dread imputations ' are, there- 

 , fore, 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 making an unjustifiable raid into the domain of 

 theology. This I fail to see. Laying aside abuse, I 



