very terms of J. T.

-'s own arguments! We, surely, are not to be blamed for following conscience any more than such mad apologists for its eccentricities!

Such are a few hints which, if I were near you, I should give him.

Yours truly,

R. E. H. G.

LETTER LXVIII.

To

London, Dec. 11, 1851.

My dear Sir,

I cannot offer a single word of apology to your “secular ' guest for what I said. You know he distinctly affirmed, in consistency with some of the "Secularist" authorities of our time, that he believed it was desirable to get rid of the conception of a presiding Deity under any possible modifications !—and that the absence of any such notion was more favourable to human virtue and morality than its presence. This opinion is asserted, as in some other Atheistical works (all obscure enough, to be sure), so in a little one which proposes it as the "Task of To-day," to annihilate the - Deity! No doubt it will be the task of tomorrow also, and, I should think, the day after that.

You will recollect that when your "secularist" acquaintance affirmed the above strange dogmas, I gave him a fair opportunity of retracting, by saying that if he merely meant that such a God as millions had worshipped,

a Belial, a Moloch, even a Venus or a Bacchus,

an obscene and cruel Deity, might possibly be as bad as none (or worse), many might agree with him; but if he meant such a Deity as implied Perfection of Wisdom, Justice, Power, and Goodness, none but a liar or a madman would. He positively re-affirmed, however, his opinion that, under any

modification, the idea of a God was pernicious; that Atheism was better than Theism; and particularly appealed to those great"authorities" M. Comte, Mr. and Miss It was then I said, if you recollect (what I still say, and am prepared to maintain), that I hold myself absolved from arguing with any one who can affirm that the idea of a perfectly holy, invisible, ever present, infallible Governor (sincerely entertained), is more unfavourable to virtue than the notion that there is no God at all; or that, so far as it has any conceivable bearing on human conduct, it can be other than auxiliary to every imaginable motive to morality; that I was convinced, so long as the human intellect was constituted as it is, that the man who asserted such a paradox must be regarded by ninety-nine men out of every hundred as a liar, and that the hundredth would only shield him from that by supposing him mad.

I still hold to every syllable of that declaration. It is impossible, constituted as we are, that we can believe any man other than a hypocrite or an idiot, who tells us that, if you add a motive or two motives coincident with ten others, to these last, the whole will be diminished in force: that the supposition of an unseen judge over the thoughts as well as actions, and who will infallibly reward or punish them, in accordance with what even your "secularist " acquaintance himself believes to be true principles of human conduct, will be an impediment to right-doing! Would it not be just as easy to believe that two and two make five? . . .

I am quite ready to argue with any candid Atheist, if such there be (of which I have my doubts), as to whether there is a God or not; I am sure he will not descend to this sort of knavish or idiotic paradox. If sincere, he will say, "Well, if there be no such God as you have described, so much the worse for the world. I admit that; one must confess that it is desirable there should be such an one; but that does not prove that there is one." That is what I should call intelligent and candid; and the argument might go on.

As to what he says of my want of charity but let the man

say what he pleases. If he be a liar, who would, and if an idiot, who could, reason with him? and that he is either one or the other, is beyond doubt with me.

...

Yours very truly,

R. E. H. G.

My dear Friend,

LETTER LXIX.

To a Homœopathic Friend.

I thank you for your kind inquiries after my health. I am happy to say that I am much better, without going to consult the homœopathic doctor whom you so ardently recommend. But I have, pray do not be offended done what is almost the very same thing; that is, nothing. Dr. E, though not a homœopathist, is, I believe, as well acquainted with his profession as any man in it. Finding the symptoms very obscure, he declined, like a wise man, poking about in the dark, and possibly doing me more harm than good; and advised me, after giving me a few simple directions as to diet and regimen, to put myself under all the natural conditions of health among the mountains. I did so, and voilà! I have returned, I do believe, as well as if I had taken-if I could be ever sure I had taken sundry trecillionths

of a grain of that infallible specific you were so kind as to prescribe for me.

Your zeal on behalf of homœopathy amuses me; but you quite mistake matters, when you tax me with forgetting the Baconian philosophy. You say it does not become me to reject well-ascertained facts, "because they are mysterious and inexplicable."

I have no objection in the world to facts, be they ever so mysterious and inexplicable. But I must be sure that they are facts on a just induction. I assure you that if I found, from a report

of a "Joint Committee" of Allopathists and Homœopathists (and it must be so constituted, else the two factions would have no effectual check on each other's prepossessions), that of a thousand patients labouring under a certain complaint, say scarlatina, 80 per cent. were cured under allopathy, 70 per cent. without any treatment at all (though I should not wonder if Dame Nature did just as well as any of the faculty), and 90 per cent. under homœopathy; and if the experiment, several times repeated, gave each time the same or approximate results, I should at once become a homœopathist, all the mystery and incomprehensibility of its "facts" notwithstanding. So that you see I am, after all, a very consistent Baconian. But I cannot receive quasi "facts" as facts, without just evidence, and certainly cannot take their mysterious" character as an antecedent presumption of probability. As to the general principle of homœopathy — “ Similia similibus curantur"—I have nothing to say about it; I am an incompetent judge; as incompetent as yourself, who are an excellent lawyer, I believe, but, so far as I know, as little of a physician as I am.

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I must leave the faculty, therefore, to wrangle about this principle. But as to the minute doses, for the physical efficacy of which you vouch so manfully, I have a few things to object. You say that it is as well ascertained a fact that the tenth thousandth part of a grain of antimony will produce an appreciable effect, as that a scruple will; or as any fact in the range of inductive science. I doubt it; I can and must judge, principally, from my own consciousness, though not from that alone. I take your prescribed globule, and cannot find that it produces the slightest effect on me. I have taken, -I am willing to take any of your decillionths of grains (only bargaining that I may be sure of the necessary dilution or trituration by performing the process for myself, but under your eye if you like), from one to fifty. I have done so, and I do not find that the effects you assign follow from these minute elements. I have known many other people say the same. What am I to think of the matter?

You say that the experience of others is different that they

find the minute doses palpably "potential;" that the effect of even a decillionth of some substances has been appreciable. No such averments can annul the negative instances I have mentioned; for your inference, on the positive side, may easily be the fallacy of "Non causa pro causâ." For example, the peristaltic action is often slightly increased by the mere imagination that medicine has been taken, when it has not; many other processes are similarly quickened by fancy; in many, again, all that is required, is, instead of taking medicine, to use a little patience; and nature will perform her wonted task without the globules, and will doubtless perform it none the less because of the globules.

I have known a person, troubled with sleeplessness, take his invaluable "minutissimum" of a soporific,—his narcotic atomand congratulate himself next morning that, after only two hours or so of restlessness, he fell into a calm sleep,—all owing, of course, to the viaticum of a globule! I, on the other hand, equally troubled with sleeplessness, perform the same feat perpetually-without any globule at all. Two or three hours of sleeplessness are not spent altogether in vain. The simple solution is that both parties are wearied out, and at last go to sleep.

Now I can account for the effects in many such cases, without supposing your globule has had anything to do with them; but I cannot account for the want of effect in the negative instances; that is, where your globules, to all consciousness, produce

none.

You may reply, perhaps, that there are cases in which large doses fail of their effect. I grant it; there are no doubt cases in which the effect is intercepted by special causes; but we must go by general induction, and five grains of opium or two scruples of rhubarb will effectually convince nine hundred and ninety-nine out of every thousand that they have taken something. The difference in the two cases is, that those who venture to say they are conscious of the effects of your decillionths are, so far as I can find, very rare exceptions; while, of those who take the larger doses, the rare exceptions are those who are not affected; that is,