in a manner which requires only a little more
knowledge to see. I have, in my life, heard from the pulpit or read, at
least a dozen times, that all sin is infinitely great, proved as follows.
The greater the being, the greater the sin of any offence against him:
therefore the offence committed against an infinite being is infinitely
great. Now the mathematician, of which the proposers of this argument are
not aware, is perfectly familiar with quantities which increase together,
and never cease increasing, but so that one of them remains finite when
{71} the other becomes infinite. In fact, the argument is a perfect _non
sequitur_.[152] Those who propose it have in their minds, though in a
cloudy and indefinite form, the idea of the increase of guilt being
_proportionate_ to the increase of greatness in the being offended. But
this it would never do to state: for by such statement not only would the
argument lose all that it has of the picturesque, but the asserted premise
would have no strong air of exact truth. How could any one undertake to
appeal to conscience to declare that an offence against a being 4-7/10
times as great as another is exactly, no more and no less, 4-7/10 times as
great an offence against the other?

The infinite character of the offence against an infinite being is laid
down in Dryden's _Religio Laici_,[153] and is, no doubt, an old argument:

"For, granting we have sinned, and that th' offence
Of man is made against Omnipotence,
Some price that bears proportion must be paid,
And infinite with infinite be weighed.
See then the Deist lost; remorse for vice
Not paid; or, paid, inadequate in price."

Dryden, in the words "bears proportion" is in verse more accurate than most
of the recent repeaters in prose. And this is not the only case of the kind
in his argumentative poetry.

My old friend, the late Dr. Olinthus Gregory,[154] who was a sound and
learned mathematician, adopted this dangerous kind of illustration in his
_Letters on the Christian Religion_. {72} He argued, by parallel, from what
he supposed to be the necessarily mysterious nature of the _impossible_
quantity of algebra to the necessarily mysterious nature of certain
doctrines of his system of Christianity. But all the difficulty and mystery
of the impossible quantity is now cleared away by the advance of
algebraical thought: and yet Dr. Gregory's book continues to be sold, and
no doubt the illustration is still accepte