I regard questions concerning a book and a human being to be purely secular, and desire to discuss them, not indeed with ridicule but with freedom. When _I_ discuss them, he treats my act as intolerably offensive, as though the subject were sacred; yet he now pretends that _I_ think such topics "pertain to God," and he was not aware of it until I told him so! Thus he turns away the eyes of his readers from my true charge of profanity, and fixes them upon a fictitious charge so as to win a temporary victory. At the same time, since Christians believe the morality of the _Old_ Testament to have great defects, and that there was much imperfection in the character of its eminent saints, prophets, and sages; I cannot understand how my holding the very same opinion concerning the _New_ Testament should be a peculiarly appropriate ground of banter and merriment; nor make me more justly offensive to Christians, than the Pauline doctrine is to Jews. In more than one place of this "Defence" he misrepresents what I have written on Immortality, in words similar to those here used, though here he does _not_[15] expressly add my name. In p. 59, he says, that "according to Mr. Newman's theology, it is most _probable_ (in italics) that the successive generations of men, with perfect indifference to their relative moral conditions, their crimes or wrongs, are all knocked on the head together; and that future adjustment and retribution is a dream." (So p. 72.) In a note to the next page, he informs his readers that if I say that I have left the question of immortality _doubtful_, it does not affect the argument; for I have admitted "the probability" of there being no future life. This topic was specially discussed by me in a short chapter of my treatise on the "Soul," to which alone it is possible for my critic to refer. In that chapter assuredly I do _not_ say what he pretends; what I _do_ say is, (after rejecting, as unsatisfactory to me, the popular arguments from metaphysics, and from the supposed need of a future state to _redress the inequalities of this life_;) p. 232: "But do I then deny a future life, or seek to undermine a belief of it? _Most assuredly not_; but I would put the belief (whether it is to be weaker or firmer) on a _spiritual_ basis, and on none other."