MEN I HAVE PAINTED
numberless men and women of good sense and repute in all Christian Churches. This is a matter for students of mind. Here are two emotions of the mind as mysterious as life itself. The searchers for the origin of life should not arrogate to themselves too much—they should wait until they know what life is, what thought is, and what emotion is. And they are still a long way off. "Can ye by seeking find out God?"
It is not a little remarkable that astronomers are religious men, and believers in a Divine direction of this vast universe, while scientists who deal with fossils and with biology are incredulous, and as a rule unbelievers. A knowledge of little things seems to be also a dangerous thing. One man looks out of a window and sees mud, another looks out and sees stars.
Tyndall took the safe ground, compromising, as it were, between the knowable and the unknowable. What his fearless and reasonable nature would have thought of the present-day creed that MAN is God I dare not consider.
A question of much greater importance to Tyndall at that time than belief and unbelief, and around which the political factions were raging, was Home Rule.
John Tyndall was a loyal Irishman; he understood perfectly the situation in Ireland, a situation which had grown out of the circumstances of its history. He knew that however unfortunate those circumstances may have been during the long centuries of the island's evolution, they had their origin in the turbulent character of the original peoples, and however unjust or unfair may have seemed to be the actions of the sovereigns of England, that the circumstances were inevitable, and that to give Home Rule to a house divided against itself would not unite it,
98
