Page:Biographical and critical studies by James Thomson ("B.V.").djvu/334

 3l8 CRITICAL STUDIES of the popular worship is the real devil, and the devil of the populai: abhorrence the real Divine Saviour of humanity ; that Ormuzd shall ultimately conquer and annihilate or absorb Ahriman, as in the apocalyptic vision of the " Prometheus Unbound." But it is time to return to our strange book, to consider the process of its production, and then try to appraise its worth. Here let me state, once for all, that I have perfect confidence in Dr. Wilkin- son's veracity. I have not indeed the honour of his personal acquaintance (I use the conventional phrase in no conventional sense), have indeed seen and heard him but once, when he was upon a public platform, and myself (attracted solely by his name) in the body of the hall ; but I do not believe that any one, being neither dishonest nor stupid, can study his great and noble works* without deriving from them the absolute conviction that their author is quite incapable of falsehood or equivocation. Err he may and must, being human ; but we may be sure that his errors are genuine, that he is not conscious of them. Moreover, he is a man of science, a philo- sopher, and was a doctor of long practice, even in 1857, and thus a trained and experienced observer, specially fitted for discriminating and recording the phenomena of his own being, whether physical or mental. Lastly, he is a man of subtlest insight, of far-reaching vision, of massive and magnificent genius ; a man of whom Emerson wrote, not more generously and the introduction to " Swedenborg's Economy of the Animal Kingdom," 1846.
 * As "The Human Body, and its Connection with Man," 1851,