from which the following is an extract: "A more significant farewell a visitor has never received at our hands. Prof. Tyndall was welcomed among us as a man of science. It was known, indeed, that he claimed, in that character, a warrant to question some popular religious faiths; but we may safely say that the professors of those faiths never supposed that he would carry his assumed warrant upon the platform and into his lectures on 'Light.' Yet he did that very thing, attacking, in those lectures, both our religious faith and one large class of its professors. Moreover, when the assaults thus made were formally complained of, he expressed no regret for them. Indeed, lest even so significant silence might fail to be appreciated, he now took pains to emboss upon his farewell speech the following remarkable sentences: 'Were there any lingering doubt as to my visit at the bottom of my mind; did I feel that I had blundered—and, with the best and purest intentions, I might, through an error of judgment, have blundered—so as to cause you discontent, I should now be wishing to abolish the doubt, or to repair the blunder; but there is no drawback of this kind.' After this unusual assertion of his perfect satisfaction with his course, it would have been unjust, both to him and to a very large part of his American audiences, to suffer him to depart without some weighty reminder of his mistake."
Of Dr. Hitchcock's address the writer remarks: "The few opening sentences which have thus far been printed indicate the dignified and manly tone in which American Christians resented, through him, the effort of one sort of science to disparage religion;" and he then says: "But Dr. Hitchcock did not stand alone. He had sympathizers enough among his hearers to indorse his expressions with repeated applause; and, what was even more significant, he found the heartiest support in the speech of Parke Godwin, who followed him, speaking for the press. The fact that a clergyman should vindicate the claims of religion, even at a dinner given in compliment to one of his assailants, might not seem in any way remarkable or important. But the editor of the Post had no professional zeal to rally him to the same battle; and when, after a detail of some of the most arrogant assumptions of irreligious scientists, he proceeded, with indignant eloquence, to remand their science to its own exact sphere, and to claim for revelation the settlement of the questions of 'primal origin and ultimate destinies,' Mr. Tyndall must have had a complacency quite impervious by ordinary weapons, if he persisted in thinking he had 'made no blunder,' and had 'caused no discontent.' Did Mr. Godwin suppose that the sentiments he was uttering were those of his guest? Did not he and all the company know they were not? Then, did he in uttering them, and they in applauding them, offer a gratuitous insult to the man they pretended to honor? No; but they did a loyal duty to the religion which he had wantonly assailed. They set a stint to their courtesy to the man, lest the excess of it should make a betrayal of their faith."
Upon which, Prof. Tyndall remarks as follows, in a letter to a friend:
"I confess to reading with some amazement the article on the 'Tyndall Banquet,' in the Intelligencer. I am there charged with attacking, in my lectures, both the Christian faith and one large class of its professors. If the telling of the truth be a necessary entry on the passport to 'the better land,' then, assuming the maker of this charge to be not in a state of invincible ignorance, I would not exchange my chances on the frontier of immortality for his. The fact is that, though solicited to do so, I steadily refused to quit the neutral ground of the intellect during my visit to the United States. My audiences in Boston, Philadelphia, Baltimore, Washington, Brooklyn, and New Haven, can testify whether a single word relating to religion was heard in any lecture of mine delivered in those cities. New York can answer whether, in five out of the six lectures there delivered, a syllable was uttered, pro or con, regarding religion. And I confidently appeal to that heroic audience which paid me the memorable compliment of coming to hear me on the inclement night when the words were spoken on which this charge is hung, whether, as regards its substance or its tone, what I then said could, with fairness, be construed into an attack 'upon religious faith, and one large class of its professors.' Put my
