pleasant to himself, that he should sometimes be obliged to employ his dogs and rifles in destroying vermin. "I feel that an apology is due from me to you and the public, for entering the lists with my opponent. It is soon given. When I first offered to meet him in discussion on the Bible, I supposed him to be a well-informed and respectable man, and the representative of the highest intellectual and moral culture, combined with superior talent and experience as a debater, that the orthodox world could boast. I soon found out my mistake, but I did not feel at liberty to withdraw my challenge. When I learned the infamous character of his personal lectures, I declined all further correspondence with him till he should retract his slanders; but still I did not feel free to say I would not debate with him, if his friends should bring him to reasonable terms. His friends in Halifax succeeded in doing so, and out of regard to the wishes of my friends, I submitted to the temporary degradation of being placed on the same platform with my unprincipled calumniator, and the calumniator of the best, the wisest, and the greatest men of every age and nation. I do not regret having done so. "He will leave this discussion a sadder and a wiser man. He has found that the power of insolence, and falsehood, and of vulgar, brutal wit, has its bounds; that there are those whom they cannot abash or cow; that the _might_ in moral encounters is with the _right_. "I part with my opponent without malice, though without regret. If he has natural characteristics which others have not, and lacks some higher qualities which others have, the fault is not entirely his. He did not make himself. Nor did he nurse, or rear, or train himself. He is the production, and his character may, to a great extent, be the production, of influences over which he had no control. I shall not therefore state all I have felt while listening to the false and fierce personalities with which this discussion has been disgraced. I will rather acknowledge my own errors, and lament that anything he has said or done should have been permitted, in any case, to affect my own style of advocacy, and render me less gentle or guarded in my utterances than I otherwise might have been. I retract every expression of unkindness or resentment. I apologize for everything harsh, offensive, or ungraceful in my manner; and I am sorry I could not declare and advocate my views, without shocking or distressing some of your minds. And now, with best and heartiest wishes for your welfare, and for the welfare of mankind at large, and in the fall and certain hope of the final, universal, and eternal triumph of the truth, and in the ultimate regeneration and salvation of our race, I bid you all farewell."