umiliation, from being mixed up in religious controversy; they are
ashamed of the very name. However, they have had occasion at some time to
publish on some literary or scientific subject; they have wished to give
no offence; but after all, to their great annoyance, they find when they
least expect it, or when they have taken considerable pains to avoid it,
that they have roused by their publication what they would style the
bigoted and bitter hostility of a party. This misfortune is easily
conceivable, and has befallen many a man. Before he knows where he is, a
cry is raised on all sides of him; and so little does he know what we may
call the _lie_ of the land, that his attempts at apology perhaps only make
matters worse. In other words, an exclusive line of study has led him,
whether he will or no, to run counter to the principles of Religion; which
principles he has never made his landmarks, and which, whatever might be
their effect upon himself, at least would have warned him against
practising upon the faith of others, had they been authoritatively held up
before him.

9.

Instances of this kind are far from uncommon. Men who are old enough, will
remember the trouble which came upon a person, eminent as a professional
man in London even at that distant day, and still more eminent since, in
consequence of his publishing a book in which he so treated the subject of
Comparative Anatomy as to seem to deny the immateriality of the soul. I
speak here neither as excusing nor reprobating sentiments about which I
have not the means of forming a judgment; all indeed I have heard of him
makes me mention him with interest and respect; anyhow of this I am sure,
that if there be a calling which feels its position and its dignity to lie
in abstaining from controversy and in cultivating kindly feelings with men
of all opinions, it is the medical profession, and I cannot believe that
the person in question would purposely have raised the indignation and
incurred the censure of the religious public. What then must have been his
fault or mistake, but that he unsuspiciously threw himself upon his own
particular science, which is of a material character, and allowed it to
carry him forward into a subject-matter, where it had no right to give the
law, viz., that of spiritual beings, which directly belongs to the science
of Theology?

Another instance occurred at a later date. A living dignitary of the
Established Church wrote a