Then, unless it be true that life and mind with all their inexplicable wonders, are the necessary outgrowth of those purely physical and mechanical molecular forces which have their rise in the heat of nebulous mists, or in the fires of the sun, evolution must go to the wall, and Prof. Tyndall is the judge who pronounces the fatal decree.

And we are not imputing anything to him which he would disclaim; on the contrary we have allowed him to speak for himself in every instance, and the doctrine which appears in the extracts here given is the same which will be found upon however extensive a study of his writings, and it is inseparable from the system which he has formerly taught, and which he now formally adopts; and his own defense of which in the very words we quote he now commits after the most careful consideration to the judgment of thoughtful men; and it can easily be shown that it is the precise doctrine of the other men of science with whom he claims to agree, as when Dubois Reymond says:

"It is a mistake to see in the first introduction of life on the earth, anything supernatural or indeed anything more than an extremely difficult problem in mechanics."

And other passages might be added in abundance if needed; but it is already clear that the one doctrine upon which evolution necessarily insists, and upon which its whole existence is staked, is the sufficiency of molecular forces mechanically correlated, and convertible into and out of each other, to account for everything which spiritualism attributes to creative power and wisdom, and it is further clear that Prof. Tyndall so ⚫ understands it. Whether this is in fact the doctrine avowed in the Belfast Address, is a question of no small importance. Why it is important and to what extent, may better be considered at another time. At present our concern is as to the fact.

We have already shown by some of the passages in Fragments of Science in which he has asserted it, that Prof. Tyndall has heretofore held this doctrine, and again by his own words in the preface to the Belfast Address, that he regards himself as having avowed it afresh in the address. Yet if we look in the address after data upon which to base such a conclusion, it will be extremely difficult to find them, and if we mistake not those thoughtful people whose final verdict upon his work Prof.

Tyndall now challenges, will find themselves greatly perplexed to know what to do with what they do find.

For if they enter upon the search, as really thoughtful people will, with some clear conception of the doctrines which constitute the system they are studying, and with which the name of the author of the Belfast Address is indissolubly associated, and mindful as they must be of the great issues involved in them, they can scarcely fail to measure what they read by the momentous sense of responsibility under which they know it was spoken, as also by the acknowledged eminence of the speaker; and if he enters upon the discussion with a charge of unscientific method upon those who differ with him, they will expect him to be scientific, as, if he charges them with ignorance, they will certainly expect him to show himself well informed. But if the author of the Belfast Address is well informed about anything, what shall we say that it is, if not the new philosophy which he has spent his life in expounding to us as a substitute for our traditional beliefs, and the correlation of force upon which it is founded, and by authority of which he imposes upon evolution the fatal necessity of establishing the mechanical as distinguished from the spiritual nature and origin of life?

What must be the feelings then of such thoughtful minds when instead of what they so confidently expect, they come upon such a passage as this, in which Prof. Tyndall prepares the way for the supposed avowal, by explaining the principle upon which it is to be made, in which, speaking of the diferentiation of species from one or a few primordial forms, he says:

"As to the diminution of the number of created forms, one does not see that much advantage is gained by it. The anthropomorphism which it seemed the object of Mr. Darwin to set aside, is as firmly associated with the creation of a few forms as with the creation of a multitude. We need clearness and thoroughness here. Either let us open our doors freely to the conception of creative acts, or, abandoning them, let us radically change our notions of matter. If we look at matter as pictured by Democritus or as defined for generations in our scientific text-books, the absolute impossibility of any form of life coming of it would be sufficient to render any other hypothesis preferable. But the definitions of matter given in our scientific text-books were intended to cover its purely physical and mechanical properties; and taught as we have been to regard these definitions as complete, we naturally and rightly reject the monstrous notion

that out of such matter any form of life could possibly arise."* No. 23, Belfast Address.

Tribune Extra,

The reasoning here runs in this wise. The object of evolution is to substitute matter for spirit in our theory of the universe, by showing that necessity and law are competent to render a complete account of all that has been attributed to spiritual power. But evolution is nothing to the purpose, unless we carry it back to the very beginning of life and mind in matter. But if matter is no more than Democritus and the text-books say, we go from bad to worse if we make the attempt; for nothing could be worse than to pretend that the higher faculties of man could grow out of the common properties of matter. But the difficulty after all is not so much with the truth of things as with our imperfect knowledge of the facts. And when we come to know the wonderful revelations which the doctrine of conservation has made, about the occult, mystical, and transcendental molecular forces, the difficulty immediately disappears. The old philosophers and methematicians, held that matter had none but purely physical and mechanical properties, but the new philosophy which I have the honor to expound to you to-day, gives us a new definition of matter which better expresses what we now believe; and thus equipped we have no further difficulty with the problem.

This we say is the reasoning which we find in this phenomenal passage. The obvious difficulty about it is that it asserts as his deliberate conviction what it is simply incredible that he should even for a moment believe, viz., that molecular force is something different from a physical and mechanical property of matter; and asserts it, too, in behalf of the new philosophy and the hypothesis of evolution, which, as he has shown in two elaborate papers, must stand or fall by the contrary notion, that it is nothing but a physical and mechanical

*It will be observed that in the revised address the language of this passage has been changed, and seemingly for the very reason that Prof. Tyndall now discerns in it, and seeks to evade, the contradiction of his system which is here pointed out. It is to be borne in mind, however, that our concern is with the address as delivered, until such time as the author shall see fit to retract any position advanced in it; but whether he retracts or maintains the position now in question, he must equally do it directly in the face of his own positive declaration upon the other side.

S. H. W.

property of matter, and that life, on account of its origin in molecular force, is a purely mechanical problem. And if we have here an assertion of the necessity of a new definition of matter, to rid us of the crude notions of Democritus, we shall find an instructive commentary upon the assertion in these words from the address, concerning the six propositions in which Democritus embodied his views of the nature of matter. "The first five propositions are a fair general statement of the atomic philosophy as now held."-Address, p. 40.

If, then, Democritus implies the reprobated definitions in these five propositions, as he clearly does, it seems a necessary consequence that if we discard his definition of matter, we likewise discard that of the modern atomists with whom Prof. Tyndall would persuade us he now agrees; and we find him setting out to correct "the very inadequate and foolish notions" of others concerning this universe, and to contrast with them views which he holds to be more in accordance with the verities which science has brought to light, and ending with an objurgation of the vital principle of the system he is about to adopt, as he has declared it himself.

What Prof. Tyndall intended to do, was to rid his system of a fatal objection; what he has in fact done, is to stamp the objection indelibly into it Most men have followed him, in regarding his address, as an espousal of evolution, but those really thoughtful men, whose judgment he now invokes, are more likely to say that he has fatally assailed it, and that the task which now confronts him, is not as has been heretofore assumed, to show how he can refute the theologians, but rather how he can come to terms with the materialists-not how he can answer our objections to his position, but how he can possibly meet his own objections to it? In short any really thoughtful examination of the case, is likely to show that the really legitimate answer to the Belfast Address, is to ask Prof. Tyndall how we can adopt it, without abolishing the nebular theory and Mr. Spencer's philosophy?

ARTICLE III.-THE LAST CENTURY OF CONGREGATIONALISM;

OR, THE INFLUENCE IN CHURCH AND STATE OF THE FAITH AND POLITY OF THE PILGRIM FATHERS.

THE present year is fruitful in historical studies; and it becomes those who to-day represent the Pilgrim faith and polity, to estimate afresh their value, as the traces of their power shall be found in the events of the century just closed.

At the birth of our nation, in 1776,-a little over a century and a half from the landing of the Pilgrims-it is supposed that the Congregational Churches numbered about seven hundred, with not quite so large a number of ministers. No statistics exist of the communicants, but they could scarcely have averaged over one hundred to a church, making seventy thousand in all. It is a simple thing to turn to the carefully prepared statistical tables of the Congregational Quarterly and ascertain our present strength, which is as follows: churches 3,438; ministers 3,300; membership 338,313. This indicates an increase of not quite five-fold. The increase is moderate, at best, while it falls far behind that of other denominations which have been running the race at our side. It will do us good to study a little into this phenomenon.

Taking things, first, in the aggregate form, we find that while, during the century, the Congregational Churches increased five-fold, the population of the country increased eleven-fold; so that, from this general point of view, we have come short, by more than one-half, of relatively holding our own; supposing religion as a whole to have exhibited no gain in its relation to the population. But the churches of all kinds in the land have multiplied, during the century, from about 1950, in a population of three millions and a half, to 72,000, in a population of thirty-eight millions; or from one church to every 1700 souls, to a church for every 529 souls. This is an aggregate advance of thirty-seven-fold, or more than seven times the ratio of increase of the Congregational Churches alone; proving that