intervention of a priest." The clergy decided that Mr. Babbage was "an unbeliever"; and the then rising generation lost the benefit of his aid, to the great injury of both Religion and Science—"Friends whom we cannot think apart"; but which, thanks to ecclesiastical jealousies, are made to "seem each other's foe." It is impossible not to detect, in the antagonism excited by such work as that of Mr. Babbage, the same feelings which caused some persons in an Irish town to ill-use a sick and inoffensive stranger (who, as it afterwards turned out, was a Jewess); "She says she don't want the parson, nor yet the priest; so she must be something queer"—the same spirit which has made Gentiles in all ages taunt Judaism with the question—"Where is thy God?"
The result of introducing Mr. Babbage's book into a school, is a spontaneous development of the feeling expressed in the Pentateuch: that properly taught people are a nation of priests and can find God each for himself. The book to which he gave the name "Ninth Bridgewater Treatise" can occasionally be procured at second-hand; and whoever reads it carefully finds it the entrance to a rich mine of religious truth, of a peculiarly elastic and liberal kind. Its teaching leaves the mind free to believe without difficulty in the existence of any order of phenomena, however miraculous-seeming, for which there may appear to be sufficient evidence; but destroys the inclination to address actual worship to anything except the Divine Unity.
