d be
ashamed to put my name to bad chemistry made to do duty for good reasoning.
The declaration is an awkward attempt to saturate sophism with truism; but
the sophism is left largely in excess.

{262}

"I owe the inquisitors a grudge for taking down my conceit of myself. For
two months I have crowed in my own mind over my friend Sir J. Herschel,
fancying that the promoters instinctively knew better than to bring their
fallacies before a writer on logic. Ah! my dear Sir John! thought I, if you
had shown yourself to be well up in _Barbara Celarent_,[414] and had ever
and anon astonished the natives with the distinction between _simpliciter_
and _secundum quid_, no autograph-hunters would have baited a trap with
_non sequitur_[415] to catch your signature. What can I say now? I hide my
diminished head, diminished by the horns which I have been compelled to
draw in.

"Those who make personal solicitation for support to an opinion about
religion are bound to know their men. The king had a right to Brother
Neale's money, because Brother Neale offered it. Had he put his hand into
purse after purse by way of finding out all who were of Brother Neale's
mind, he would have been justly met by a rap on the knuckles whenever he
missed his mark.

"The kind of test before me is the utmost our time will allow of that
inquisition into opinion which has been the curse of Christianity ever
since the State took Providence under its protection. The writ _de haeretico
commiserando_ is little more than the smell of the empty cask: and those
who issue it may represent the old woman with her

"O suavis anima, quale in te dicam bonum
Antehac fuisse; tales cum sint reliquiae."[416]

It is no excuse that the illegitimate bantling is a very little one. Its
parents may think themselves hardly treated when they are called lineal
successors of Tony Fire-the-faggot: {263} but, degenerate though they be,
such is their ancestry. Let every allowance be made for them: but their
unholy fire must be trodden out; so long as a spark is left, nothing but
fuel is wanted to make a blaze. If this cannot be done, let the flame be
confined to theology, though even there it burns with diminished vigor: and
let charity, candor, sense, and ridicule, be ready to play upon it whenever
there is any chance of its extending to literature and science.

"What would be the consequence if this test-signing absurdity were to grow?
Deep would call unto deep; counter-d