356 



MY LIFE 



[Chap. 



statement about your * only three converts ' is, he and his 

 associates may add me to their number. I do not profess to 

 have wandered through the thickets of the Commissioners* 

 contradictory Reports, but I have long learnt in controversies 

 involving facts, to take more account of the style of the con- 

 troversialists, and their apparent regard for truth, than of their 

 assertions and references to other people, and the final 

 balance of voting. Specially I had to do so in the somewhat 

 similar controversy in the Times which lasted several months 

 in iZ^J-Z in which, from the accident of being put in the 

 chair of a hospital meeting that had been called to turn out 

 some doctors for homoeopathic heresy, I had gradually to 

 take a leading part, being helped by information from the 

 experts on both sides as the dispute went on. Finally the 

 Times pronounced that I had completely proved the charges 

 of medical conspiracy and tyranny, which the * orthodox' 

 party had been called upon at the meeting to answer, and 

 declined to attempt, except by their own dicta. 



Such letters as that of Dr. Bond, even without the 

 answers to it, always go a long way to persuade me that the 

 author has no solid case ; and I regard them as mere con- 

 troversial fireworks, throwing no real light on the subject of 

 discussion. In most controversies involving facts, it soon 

 becomes apparent to competent judges, after hearing the 

 professed experts, on which side is the balance of truth and 

 honesty, as it is very clearly in one of a very different kind 

 which has been going on in the Times for two months, on 

 what is called clerical and episcopal lawlessness, in which the 

 writers on one side think themselves at liberty to assert 

 anything that is * necessary for their position ' (as their great 

 founder avowed fifty years ago), and take their chance of being 

 refuted. 



" In your dispute, as in that, the really decisive facts are 

 becoming more and more extant from the intolerable mass of 

 assertions and references to other people's writings which are 

 worth very little in the face of current genuine evidence, such 

 as you and other writers on your side have produced in 

 manageable form, and which the other side have now had 



