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personal friend, and, therefore, I may claim to know something of his 
mind. I am quite sure that, had he been spared, he would have brought 
out a wonderful work of positive Christian philosophy, ethical and 
metaphysical, and have given us the affirmative side of that of which we 
now have only the negative. Therefore, I ask all those who study him and 
hear about him, to remember that we have only had from him one half, and 
that while, we can consider that half, the other half is withheld from us. A s 
to the able paper of Mr. Lias, before I ask him to reply to the remarks made 
upon it, I must congratulate him on the way in which he has hit the right 
nail on the head. He has shown, I think, distinctly, the fallacy which lies at 
the root of the Agnostic theory, which is, the confusion that is made between 
knowledge and comprehension. We cannot comprehend God, because the 
finite cannot take in the Infinite ; but we can know God, because we can 
know something of Him. To use Prebendary Row’s illustration, I can get 
out of a gallon of water a pint very easily, and the pint may be exceedingly 
good water ; but Herbert Spencer and the Agnostic school seem to 
argue that, because I cannot put the whole of the gallon into my pint 
pot, I cannot get any at all, and consequently cannot drink. I say I am 
able to know something of God, because like apprehends like, and I know 
I am made in the image of God — that my intellect is a representation of 
God’s intellect, and, though inferior to it, is of the same kind and nature. But 
although we are able to know something about God, we must, as Christians, 
freely admit that we cannot comprehend God, because He who is Infinite 
cannot be restrained by the limits of the intellect of His own creatures- 
(Applause.) 
The meeting was then adjourned. 
REMARKS BY THE (LATE) RIGHT HON. THE 
LORD O’NEILL. 
The Rev. J . J. Lias’s paper appears to me to contain some very valuable 
observations on Mr. Herbert Spencer’s theories. He has well and clearly 
pointed out the inconsistency of that author in rejecting the doctrine of a 
personal Creator of the universe, on account of the apparent contradictions 
in which we find ourselves involved when we endeavour to frame a concept 
of the Absolute or the Infinite, and yet acknowledging the existence of 
space, time, matter, motion, and force, with respect to which he maintains 
that we are beset by similar difficulties. Mr. Spencer admits that there 
must be a first cause, to which, however, he denies personality. He even 
corrects Sir William Hamilton and Dean Mansel, on account of that very 
sceptical tendency of their reasoning of which Mr. Lias justly complains. 
Their mistake, according to him, consists in asserting that in such anti- 
nomies of thought, as relative and non-relative (or absolute), equal and 
VOL. XVII. L 
