person in public, and that the mere delivery of controversial lectures upon such a subject necessitates that the person delivering the controversial lecture should be prepared to recognise at least as much utility in the clashing of his thought publicly with another man's, disagreeing with him, as in the mere utterance of his own thought where there is no one to check it at the moment." The instructive character of the debate does not lie in any definite conclusion which might be arrived at by a reader in doubt as to the possibility or impossibility of miracles, but rather in a realisation of the difficulty two capable men with different points of view may have in settling upon a common meaning for certain words. In Mr Browne's first speech he defined a miracle to be "a supernatural marvel wrought by God," but this was a definition upon which they could not agree, because Mr Browne would not accept Mr Bradlaugh's meaning for "nature," as "the totality of all phenomena," and as equivalent to the word "existence," or the word "universe," nor would he himself define "God," for that, he said, was "beyond definition." The meaning of the words "force" and "creation," the idea of "perception," the doctrine of "free-will," and the existence of evil, all proved stumbling blocks to the smooth course of the debate; but as Mr Browne truly said in his concluding speech on the first evening, while it was true that they had not at that time advanced very far in the argument, it was better to make the ground sure as they went along than to attempt too much before their conceptions were clear. Some of Mr Browne's arguments were, for a trained speaker and debater, amazingly feeble. For example, his objection to Mr Bradlaugh's definition of the word "nature" was founded upon "the simple reason that such words as 'supernatural,' 'preternatural,' and 'unnatural,' are certainly used amongst us," and it did not seem to have occurred to him that these might be merely instances of a popular misuse of words. He also thought that the American War, which resulted in the abolition of slavery, showed "conclusively that there was a God who governs the world;" in this case his mind seemed to dwell only on the one fact of the abolition of slavery, and to ignore the waste of human life and the horrors of the war as well as the prior fact of the slavery itself.