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sincere doubters, who are struggling towards a proof of that to which their 
honest minds refuse to give a blind assent, and to which their inte ects 
do not permit them to agree. Among people of this class are those o 
whom we must expect to meet more and more in the present transitiona 
state of things. We are beginning to educate the people, and there is 
nothing, as we know proverbially, so dangerous as “a little knowledge. 
The masses of this country are in that position in which they may- 
be said to have a little knowledge ; therefore, it is to be expected that 
doubts of all kinds, on religious, as on other topics, will creep in amongst 
them. They will, to a certain extent, possess and display that pride 
of intellect to which I have referred, and which refuses to believe 
things that do not commend themselves to their understanding, and at 
the same time they will have that difficulty in appreciating the truth which 
is always found amongst those who have “ a little knowledge.” But we 
must look these things in the face, and do the best we can to alter them ; 
and we must do this by employing sound and appreciable argument. 
(Hear, hear.) You cannot tell people to receive things without question 
as a matter of faith, any more than you can persuade your children to sit 
still and ask no questions. I recollect that when I was a boy, and asked 
a difficult question, I was sometimes told it was not my business to ask ; 
but I am afraid that this was an indication rather of the inability ot the 
person so as asked to answer the question, than of my being wrong in 
asking it. In dealing with those whose opinions we desire to modify 
or influence, we must be careful not to impute motives, we must simply 
state facts. We may, no doubt, show, as we have endeavoured to show, 
the inconsistencies of those who start forward in their p rid e of inte ect, 
and proclaim that those old stories which we have believed from our 
childhood are not true. Some one once said, I think, of Voltaire, Uh, 
infidel, great is thy faith ! ” and if we can show that the sceptics with 
whom we have to cope, are prone to fall into inconsistencies greater than 
those they sneer at in us who believe, we shall, in my humble judgment, 
be doing good work. (Hear, hear.) Lepsius, the scientific traveller who 
explored the East, refused to believe the miraculous character of the journey 
of the children of Israel from Egypt to Canaan. He said that Moses was 
a great general, who conducted his people from one district to another, and 
had good reasons for every movement that he made. He entirely refuser 
to believe that the children of Israel were fed with manna by a nurac e. 
Manna, he said, was simply a distillation from the tamarisk bush- a dis- 
tillation which I myself have frequently tasted— and that Moses took one 
route rather than another because tamarisks were more abundant. INow, 
surely the idea that two millions of people, or more, were fed for so many 
years by the exudations of the tamarisk, which only drop at one season, 
and the whole supply of which, throughout the whole district, would not 
have afforded them one meal, required a greater capacity for belief, than 
the whole history which the Book of Exodus has put before us. Y ell, 
