detail, his lecture being nothing but a mass of fallacies and unproved assertions. Christian courtesy allows him to call those who dissent from his assumptions "fools;" and as these terms of abuse are not considered admissible by those whom he assails as unbelievers, there is a slight difficulty in "answering" Dr. McCann "according to his" deserts. I content myself with suggesting that they who wish to learn how pretended reasoning may pass for solid argument, how inconsequent statements may pass for logic, had better study this lecture. For my own part, I confess that my "folly" is not, as yet, of a sufficiently pronounced type to enable me to accept Dr. McCann's conclusions. The best representation I can select of the second orthodox party, those who admit that the existence of God is not demonstrable, is the late Dean Mansel. In his 'Limits of Religious Thought,' the Bampton Lectures for 1867, he takes up a perfectly unassailable position. The peculiarity of this position, however, is that he, the pillar of orthodoxy, the famed defender of the faith against German infidelity and all forms of rationalism, regards God from exactly the same point as does a well-known modern "atheist." I have almost hesitated sometimes which writer to quote from, so identical are they in thought. Probably neither Dean Mansel nor Mr. Bradlaugh would thank me for bracketing their names; but I am forced to confess that the arguments used by the one to prove the endless absurdities into which we fall when we try to comprehend the nature of God, are exactly the same arguments that are used by the other to prove that God, as believed in by the orthodox, cannot exist. I quote, however, exclusively from the Dean, because it is at once novel and agreeable to find oneself sheltered by Mother Church at the exact moment when one is questioning her very foundations; and also because the Dean's name carries with it so orthodox an odour that his authority will tell where the same words from any of those who are outside the pale of orthodoxy would be regarded with suspicion. Nevertheless, I wish to state plainly that a more "atheistical" book than these Bampton Lectures--at least, in the earlier part of it--I have never read; and had its title-page borne the name of any well-known Free-thinker, it would have been received in the religious world with a storm of indignation.