What are the conceptions in regard to which I place myself in the position here indicated? The pope himself provides me with an answer. In the Encyclical Letter of December, 1864, his Holiness writes: "In order that God may accede more easily to our and your prayers, let us employ in all confidence, as our Mediatrix with Him, the Virgin Mary, Mother of God, who sits as a Queen on the right hand of her only-begotten Son, in a golden vestment, clothed around with various adornments."
In regard to this, as to other less pictorially anthropomorphic and sartorial conceptions of the Supreme, I stand in an attitude of unbelief; for, taken in connection with what is known of the extent, organization, and general behavior of this universe, they lack the congruity necessary to commend them to me as truth.
Soon after the delivery of the Belfast Address, the Protestant Bishop of Manchester did me the honor of noticing it; and, in reference to that notice, a brief and, I trust, not uncourteous remark was introduced into my first preface. Since that time the bishop's references to me have been very frequent. Assuredly this is to me an unexpected honor. Still a doubt may fairly be entertained whether this incessant speaking before public assemblies on emotional subjects does not tend to disturb that equilibrium of head and heart which it is always so desirable to preserve—whether, by giving an injurious predominance to the feelings, it does not tend to swathe the intellect in a warm haze, thus making the perception, and consequent rendering of facts, indefinite, if not untrue. It was to the bishop I referred in a recent brief discourse[1] as "an able and, in many respects, a courageous man, running to and fro upon the earth, and wringing his hands over the threatened loss of his ideals." It is doubtless to this sorrowing mood—this partial and, I trust, temporary overthrow of the judgment by the emotions—that I must ascribe a probably unconscious, but still grave, misrepresentation contained in the bishop's last reference to me. In the Times of November 9th, he is reported to have expressed himself thus: "In his lecture in Manchester, Prof. Tyndall as much as said that at Belfast he was not in his best mood, and that his despondency passed away in brighter moments." Now, considering that a verbatim report of the lecture was at hand in the Manchester Examiner, and that my own corrected edition of it was to be had for a penny, the bishop, I submit, might have afforded to repeat what I actually said, instead of what I "as much as said." I am sorry to add that his rendering of my words is a vain imagination of his own. In my lecture at Manchester there was no reference, expressed or implied, to my moods in Belfast.
To all earnest and honest minds acquainted with the paragraph of
- ↑ See The Popular Science Monthly for January, 1875.
