rated mathematician. As a matter of
fact, he is not celebrated for having discovered the law of
gravitation. That was known for thousands of years before he was
born; and if the reverend gentleman would read a little more he
would find that Newton's discovery was not that there is such a
law as gravitation, but that bodies attract each other "with a
force proportional directly to the quantity of matter they contain,
and inversely to the squares of their distances." I do not think
he made the discoveries on account of his Christianity. Laplace
was certainly in many respects as great a mathematician and
astronomer, but he was not a Christian.

Descartes was certainly not much inferior to Newton as a mathematician,
and thousands insist that he was his superior; yet he was not a
Christian. Euclid, if I remember right, was not a Christian, and
yet he had quite a turn for mathematics. As a matter of fact,
Christianity got its idea of algebra from the Mohammedans, and,
without algebra, astronomical knowledge of to-day would have been
impossible. Christianity did not even invent figures. We got
those from the Arabs. The very word "algebra" is Arabic. The
decimal system, I believe, however, was due to a German, but whether
he was a Christian or not, I do not know.

We find that the Chinese calculated eclipses long before Christ
was born; and, exactness being the rule at that time, there is an
account of two astronomers having been beheaded for failing to tell
the coming of an eclipse to the minute; yet they were not Christians.
There is another fact connected with Newton, and that is that he
wrote a commentary on the Book of Revelation. The probability is
that a sillier commentary was never written. It was so perfectly
absurd and laughable that some one--I believe it was Voltaire--said
that while Newton had excited the envy of the intellectual world
by his mathematical accomplishments, it had gotten even with him
the moment his commentaries were published. Spinoza was not a
mathematician, particularly. He was a metaphysician, an honest
thinker, whose influence is felt, and will be felt so long as these
great questions have the slightest interest for the human brain.

He also compares Chalmers with Hume. Chalmers gained his notoriety
from preaching what are known as the astronomical sermons, and, I
suppose, was quite a preacher in his day.

But Hume was a thinker, and his works will live for ages after Mr.
Ch