344 MEMOIR OF AUGUSTUS DE MORGAN. 



1 866. who desire no better can cram different systems from his 

 res? 6 * - lectures. There is more proof of his competency in this 

 tion. respect than in the case of any of the untried candidates. 



Keturn to the old principle. If the College fall, it will 

 fall wren honour. No concession of narrow minds, philo- 

 sophical or theological, will save it. The enemy will give 

 one sneer more, the Mend nine cheers less. Thing'embigot, 

 who says that his son shall not enter the College if Mr. 

 Martineau teach there, never meant to send his son in 

 any case. The late vicar of St. Pancras, then a lessee 

 in Gower Street, found the noise of the playground 

 disagreeable, and sent word that if the nuisance were not 

 abated he should withdraw his patronage ; he had been 

 an inveterate opponent. He was left to subtract his 

 negative quantity if he pleased. Let Thing'embigot learn 

 the same rule of algebra. 



On the other hand, the enemy of religious disqualifica- 

 tion, if the present course be persisted in, must decide 

 whether his son shall be educated under selection carried 

 up to its logical extent in the professed fear of God, or 

 exclusion nibbled at up to compulsion of circumstances in 

 the concealed fear of man as to religion, and another fear 

 of God as to philosophy. I should myself be puzzled to 

 make a choice, for if there be a tincture of atheism in the 

 second fear of God, there is a tincture of blasphemy in the 

 first. Of the two different ways of putting man in the 

 place of God, I think the world at large would prefer the 

 first. 



My best wishes remain with the College which I leave, 

 but I wish to make myself clearly understood on the question 

 which has been opened. I trust that by return to and 

 future maintenance of the sound principle on which it was 

 founded, in which there is more religion than in all 

 exclusive systems put together, the College will rise into 

 prosperity under the protection, not of the Infinite, not of 

 the Absolute, not of the Unconditioned, not of the Nature 

 of things, not of the chapter of accidents, but of God, the 



