PROFESSOR TYN-DAJLIi'S LATE LECTURE.

Grey River Argus, Volume XV, Issue 1984, 15 December 1874, Page 4

PROFESSOR TYNDALL'S LATE LECTURE.

■ With reference to Professor Tyndali's address. "iEdipus," in the Melbourne " Leader" says : — The excitement caused by Professor Tyndali's escapade at Belfast has not yet yet subsided. He has published his address in an extended form. As originally written it was tod voluminous for oral delivery. He. has now restored the excised portions, and in his preface he avails himself of the opportunity to defend himself from his critical assailants. To the Dean of Manchester, who calls him "an avowed material atheist," he curtly says that such names have lost their power to wound, or to injure. He tells Cardinal Cullen that the inbibations of scientific knowledge by the youth of Ireland, will be more powerful than any Protestant propogandism or other external influence to bring about an abatement of "the mediaeval proceeding among Catholics which are a scandal and an amazement to nineteenth ceniury intelligence." He denies the correctness of the inference drawn by the Belfast Presbytery that he and Huxley "ignored the existence of God, and advocated pure and simple materialism." As so much has been said similar to. this, it is bufc fair k> allow Professor Tyndall to define his own feelings in his own words :— " Christian meu are proved by, their writings to have their hours of:weakness and of doubt as well as their hours of strength and conviction, and men like myself share in their own way i hose variations of mood and tense. Were the religious v'ewa oi many of my assailants only, alternative ones, I do not know how strong 'the claims of the doctrine, of .'material , atheism' upon my allegiance might : be. Probably they would be very strong; but a3 it is, I bare noticea/dvmrig years of seltobserva-. tion, that it is not in hours of clearness and vigor that this ' doctrine commends itself to my mind ; that in the presence of stronger and healthier thought it ever dissolves and disappears as offering no solution of the mystery in which we dwell and of which we form a part." After this admission, it is open to doubt whether, at the time ot.hia penning his Belfast addresß, Professor' Tyndall waa "in the preseoce of stronger and healthier thought," or was in one cf his "hours of weakness." .