Pangloss, and bow to the dictum of Justice Shallow, it is true; but the more we know of physiology, the more we learn of jurisprudence, the less is our acquiescence a mere submission to authority. As to so much of the Bishop’s sermon as deals with the authority of revelation and miracles, and which in effect declares that, on the authority of a revelation not made to me, I may be required to believe in Jesus Christ as the “only son” of God, while that very revelation tells me that God had more than one son—(Job i. 6, ii. 1)—and which on the authority of miracles disbelieved by the mass of the people who are supposed to have seen them, requires me to believe that Jesus, “very God of very God,” having descended into hell, afterwards ascended into heaven with “his body, flesh, and bones, and all things appertaining to man’s nature,” and there sits at the right hand of God—(Article four and Nicene Creed)—my answer is a very simple one. The Bishop’s declaration that here no tyranny is attempted over Freethought is not a fair and honest declaration. The revelation does not submit its proof to Freethought, but, on the contrary, my Lord Bishop of Peterborough, as the spokesman of his Church, is bound to tell us in the words of his own horrible creed, that the man who will not submit to acknowledge the dogmas of his Church, without doubt shall perish everlastingly. When the Bishop says that men are continually submitting to authority, and that if they did not they would never learn anything, he is woefully inaccurate in his analogy. It is perfectly true that Humboldt, Lyell, Huxley, Darwin, Lewes, Spencer, Mill, and such men’s names are names of authority, and that our experience is supplemented and aided by the recorded experiences of such men. But our confidence is not an unlimited one, their authority is not supreme. It is limited by the measure of our own experience in the first place, and by our acquaintance with the experience of other men than these in the next; both of these, too, modified and affected by our general intellectual ability. But all that our scientific teachers say is, We have learned such and such things, we learned them in such a fashion, you may if you have leisure and means verify our experiments, we show you the road we have travelled, we have mapped and scaled it for you. But in religion there is no such teaching, the authority of the Church dominates, denies, and annihilates experience with a graveyard resurrection for lack of living verification. Nothing could more fittingly be denounced as a trick of pulpit advocacy had it come from the mouth of any other man, than the supposition of an impossible event in a graveyard as evidence on some equally impossible doctrine. It would be far more natural in thought to suppose deception in the alleged graveyard conjuring, than to suppose anything else. For decomposing bodies, fleshless skeletons, forms in which the vital