"'of the Most High'--as they claim--one upon "whose head has been poured the divine petroleum "of authority. Compare this king with Hæckel, who "towers an intellectual Colossus above the crowned "mediocrity. Compare George Eliot with Queen "Victoria. The queen is clothed in garments given "her by blind fortune and unreasoning chance, while "George Eliot wears robes of glory, woven in the "loom of her own genius. The world is beginning "to pay homage to intellect, to genius, to heart." I said not one word against Queen Victoria, and did not intend to even intimate that she was not an ex- cellent woman, wife and mother. I was simply trying to show that the world was getting great enough to place a genius above an accidental queen. Mr. Tal- mage, true to the fawning, cringing spirit of ortho- doxy, lauds the living queen and cruelly maligns the genius dead. He digs open the grave of George Eliot, and tries to stain the sacred dust of one who was the greatest woman England has produced. He calls her "an adultress." He attacks her because she was an atheist--because she abhorred Jehovah, denied the inspiration of the Bible, denied the dogma of eternal pain, and with all her heart despised the Presbyterian creed. He hates her because she was great and brave 75 and free--because she lived without "faith" and died without fear--because she dared to give her honest thought, and grandly bore the taunts and slanders of the Christian world. George Eliot tenderly carried in her heart the burdens of our race. She looked through pity's tears upon the faults and frailties of mankind. She knew the springs and seeds of thought and deed, and saw, with cloudless eyes, through all the winding ways of greed, ambition and deceit, where folly vainly plucks with thorn-pierced hands the fading flowers of selfish joy--the highway of eternal right. Whatever her relations may have been--no matter what I think, or others say, or how much all regret the one mistake in all her self-denying, loving life--I feel and know that in the court where her own conscience sat as judge, she stood acquitted--pure as light and stainless as a star. How appropriate here, with some slight change, the wondrously poetic and pathetic words of Laertes at Ophelia's grave: _Leave her i' the earth; And from her fair and unpolluted flesh May violets spring! I tell thee, churlish priest, A ministering angel shall this woman be, When thou liest howling!_ I have no words with which to tell my loathing for a man who violates a noble woman's grave. 76 _Question_. Do you think that the spirit in which Mr. Talmage reviews your lectures is in accordance with the teachings of Christianity?