EEV. MARTINEAU AND BELFAST ADDRESS 257 



smooth, and cylindrical — often leafless for a foot or more. 

 But at the end of every one of them the unsightly twig 

 unlocked the exuberant beauty hidden within it, and broke 

 forth into a mass of fronds, almost large enough to fill the 

 arms. We stand here upon a higher level of the wonder- 

 ful: we are conscious of a music subtler than that of the 

 piano, passing unheard through these tiny boughs, and 

 issuing in what Mr. Martineau would opulently call the 

 ** clustered magnificence" of the leaves. Does it lessen 

 my amazement to know that every cluster, and every leaf 

 — their form and texture — lie, like the music in the rod, 

 in the molecular structure of these apparently insignificant 

 stems? Not so. Mr. Martineau weeps for* 'the beauty of 

 the flower fading into a necessity." I care not whether it 

 comes to me through necessity or through freedom, my 

 delight in it is all the same. I see what he sees with a 

 wonder superadded. To me, as to him, not even Solomon 

 in all his glory was arrayed like one of these. 



I have spoken above as if the assumption of a soul 

 would save Mr. Martineau from the inconsistency of cred- 

 iting pure matter with the astonishing building power dis- 

 played in crystals and trees. This, however, would not 

 be the necessary result; for it would remain to be proved 

 that the soul assumed is not itself matter. "When a boy I 

 learned from Dr. Watts that the souls of conscious brutes 

 are mere matter. And the man who would claim for mat- 

 ter the human soul itself, would find himself in very or- 

 thodox company. *'A11 that is created," says Fauste, a 

 famous French bishop of the fifth century, **is matter. 

 The soul occupies a place; it is enclosed in a body; it 

 quits the body at death, and returns to it at the resurrec- 

 tion, as in the case of Lazarus; the distinction between 



