Page:Popular Science Monthly Volume 8.djvu/144

132 discussions. The sermon was first preached in Belfast, and afterward, in an amplified and amended form, in the Exhibition Building in Dublin. In passing, I would make a single remark upon its opening paragraph. This contains an argument regarding Christ which I have frequently heard used in substance by good men, though never before with the grating emphasis here employed. "The resurrection of our Saviour," says Dr. Reichel, "is the central fact of Christianity. Without his resurrection, his birth and his death would have been alike unavailing: nay more, if he did not rise from the dead, his birth was the birth of a bastard, and his death the death of an impostor." This may be "orthodoxy;" but entertaining the notions that I do of Christ, and of his incomparable life upon the earth, if the momentary use of the term "blasphemy" were granted to me by my Christian brethren, I should feel inclined to employ it here.

Better instructed than he had been at Belfast, the orator in Dublin gave prominence to a personal argument which I have already noticed elsewhere. He has been followed in this particular by the Bishop of Meath and other estimable persons. This is to be regretted, because in dealing with these high themes the mind ought to be the seat of dignity—if possible of chivalry—but certainly not the seat of littleness. "I propose," says the preacher, "making some remarks on the doctrine thus propounded" [in Belfast]. "And, first, lest any of you should be unduly impressed by the mere authority of its propounder, as well as by the fluent grace with which he sets it forth, it is right that I should tell you, that these conclusions, though given out on an occasion which apparently stamped them with the general approbation of the scientific world, do not possess that approbation. The mind that arrived at them, and displayed them with so much complacency, is a mind trained in the school of mere experiment, not in the study, but in the laboratory. Accordingly, the highest mathematical intellects of the Association disclaim and repudiate the theories of its president. In the mathematical laws to which all material phenomena and substances are each year more distinctly perceived to be subordinated, they see another side of Nature, which has not impressed itself upon the mere experimentalist."

In view of the new virtue here thrust upon the mathematician, D'Alembert and Laplace present a difficulty, and we are left without a clew to the peculiar orthodoxy of Prof. Clifford and other distinguished men. As regards my own mental training, inasmuch as my censors think it not beneath them to dwell upon a point so small, I may say that the foregoing statement is incorrect. The separation, moreover, of the "study" from the "laboratory" is not admissible,