d courage wasted against a truth,
like spray against a rock! A truth valuable to the world, the world will
never part with. You will not injure the truth, but you will mislead
and may destroy many, whose best security is in the truth which you so
eruditely insinuate to be a fable. Soul and Hereafter are the heritage
of all men; the humblest, journeyman in those streets, the pettiest
trader behind those counters, have in those beliefs their prerogatives
of royalty. You would dethrone and embrute the lords of the earth by
your theories. For my part, having given the greater part of my life
to the study and analysis of facts, I would rather be the author of the
tritest homily, or the baldest poem, that inculcated that imperishable
essence of the soul to which I have neither scalpel nor probe, than be
the founder of the subtlest school, or the framer of the loftiest verse,
that robbed my fellow-men of their faith in a spirit that eludes the
dissecting-knife,--in a being that escapes the grave-digger. Burn your
book! Accept This Book instead; Read and Pray."

He placed his Bible in my hand, embraced me, and, an hour afterwards,
the old man and the child left my hearth solitary once more.

(1) The summary of this distinguished lecturer's objections to
phrenology is to be found in the Appendix to vol i. of "Lectures on
Metaphysics," p. 404, et seq. Edition 1859.

(2) The change of length of iron girders caused by variation of
temperature has not unfrequently brought down the whole edifice into
which they were admitted. Good engineers and architects allow for such
changes produced by temperature. In the tubular bridge across the Menai
Straits, a self-acting record of the daily amount of its contraction and
expansion is ingeniously Contrived.

(3) Bacon's "Essay on Atheism." This quotation is made with admirable
felicity and force by Dr. Whewell, page 378 of Bridgewater Treatise
on Astronomy and General Physics considered with reference to Natural
Theology.

CHAPTER XLVII.

That night, as I sat in my study, very thoughtful and very mournful, I
resolved all that Julius Faber had said; and the impression his words
had produced became gradually weaker and weaker, as my reason, naturally
combative, rose up with all the replies which my philosophy suggested.
No; if my imagination had really seduced and betrayed me into monstrous
credulities, it was clear that the best remedy to such morbid tendencies
towards the Supersti