ibility of holding up, in contrast with it, that method of
nature which it has been the vocation and triumph of science to
disclose, and in the application of which we can alone hope for
further light. Holding, then, 'that the nebulae and the solar system,
life included, stand to each other in the relation of the germ to the
finished organism, I reaffirm here, not arrogantly, or defiantly, but
without a shade of indistinctness, the position laid down at Belfast.

Not with the vagueness belonging to the emotions, but with the
definiteness belonging to the understanding, the scientific man has to
put to himself these questions regarding the introduction of life upon
the earth. He will be the last to dogmatise upon the subject, for he
knows best that certainty is here for the present unattainable. His
refusal of the creative hypothesis is less an assertion of knowledge
than a protest against the assumption of knowledge which must long, if
not for ever, lie beyond us, and the claim to which is the source of
perpetual confusion upon earth. With a mind open to conviction he
asks his opponents to show him an authority for the belief they so
strenuously and so fiercely uphold. They can do no more than point to
the Book of Genesis, or some other portion of the Bible. Profoundly
interesting, and indeed pathetic, to me are those attempts of the
opening mind of man to appease its hunger for a Cause. But the Book
of Genesis has no voice in scientific questions. To the grasp of
geology, which it resisted for a time, it at length yielded like
potter's clay; its authority as a system of cosmogony being
discredited on all hands, by the abandonment of the obvious meaning of
its writer. It is a poem, not a scientific treatise. In the former
aspect it is for ever beautiful: in the latter aspect it has been, and
it will continue to be, purely obstructive and hurtful. To knowledge
its value has been negative, leading, in rougher ages than ours, to
physical, and even in our own' free' age to moral, violence.

*****

No incident connected with the proceedings at Belfast is more
instructive than the deportment of the Catholic hierarchy of Ireland;
a body usually too wise to confer notoriety upon an adversary by
imprudently denouncing him. The 'Times,' to which I owe a great deal
on the score of fair play, where so much has been unfair, thinks that
the Irish Cardinal, Archbishops, and Bishops, in a recent manifesto,
adroitly emplo