in tone. It makes no attacks on the special beliefs of any sect, but confines itself to neutralizing the poisonous doctrines of those who oppose Science to Religion, by showing that all attacks made on Faith in the name of Science must necessarily rest on a mistaken apprehension of the bearing of scientific observation. There are, probably, out of the Scriptures, few sublimer conceptions than Mr. Babbage's Vision of future rewards and punishments; he pictures the cruel man, not tortured by an angry Deity, but mercifully awakened to true self-knowledge, by being endowed with senses fine enough to perceive things as God sees them; and to hear the reverberations, through the infinite ether-spaces, of the long-silenced cries of his victims. It might have been supposed that the book would immediately take a place among educational text-books, among which it is well suited to rank high. But the education of the country was, in those days, in the hands of ecclesiastical parties; and, by common consent, the book was ignored.
The study of Mathematics seems to have a wonderful tendency both to induce religious faith and to counteract the influence of dogmatists; and the instinct of the latter class seems to detect this without their being able to give any rational explanation of their dislike. There is a mysterious link, more easy to perceive than to describe, between mathematical truth and the doctrine of the Fatherhood of God in its old Mosaic sense. Of course, the fact of learning at second-hand, and applying to practical uses results arrived at by the investigations of others, has no relation to any sort of religion; it leaves the field equally clear for dogma or for atheism. But whoever has truly apprehended the nature of the
