APOLOGY FOR Till: /,///. !>/ MHHIRS8. 501 



knowledge than H protest against the assumption of knowl- 

 e<Tge which musl loiig^Jljiot forever, lie beyond us, and 

 the claim to which is the source of perpetual confusion 



upon earth. With a mind open to conviction ho asks his 

 opponents to show him JIM authority for the helief they so 

 strenuously and so fiercely uphold. " They can do no moro 

 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 hook of <; 

 has no vi.-e in scientific questions. To the 

 geology, which it resisted for a time, it at length yield, d 

 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 A. 

 scientific treatise. In the former aspect it is forever r 

 beautiful: in the hitter aspect it has been, and it will con- 

 tinue to be, purely obstructive and hurtful. To km>- 

 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 ( 'at holic 

 hierarchy of Ireland, a body usually too wise to confer 

 notoriety upon an adversary by imprudently denouncing 

 him. The '/'////'.<. to which I owe a great deal on the 

 score of fair play, where BO much has been unfair, thinks 

 that the Irish cardinal, archbishops, and bishops, in a 

 recent manifesto, adroitly employed a weapon which 1. 

 at an unlucky moment, placed in their hands. The ante- 

 cedents of their action cause me to regard it in a different 

 liirht: and a brief reference to these antecedents will, 

 I think, illuminate not only their proceedings repaid 

 K.'lfas.t, but other doings which 1. . recently noised 



abroad. 



re mo lies a document bearing the date of Novem- ,<* 

 ber, hich, after appearing for a moment, unac- 



rountably vanished from public view. It is a M.-moi ial ^fc* 

 addressed, by seventy of the stud. nt students of 



the Catholic University in Ireland, lo the I .! Hoard 



of the ('Diversity; and it const i . plainest and 



bravest remonstrance ever addressed by Irish laymen to 



