bjective
benefits." Prayer as a means of inducing patience when you do not get
what you ask for, is outside my province. I leave it to the clergy.
Prayer as a means of obtaining what you require is my concern, and I
defy Mr. Blomfield to prove a single case. Yet if prayer is not answered
objectively, the Secular principle holds the field that science is man's
only providence. I am aware that Christians employ doctors, insure their
houses, and put lightning-conductors over their church steeples. They
leave as little to God as possible. Mr. Blomfield says this is quite
right, and I agree with him; but I will give him, if he cannot find
them, twenty texts in support of the honest old doctrine of prayer from
the New Testament.

Mr. Blomfield tells me I do not understand the Bible. Well, as I am
not exactly a fool, the fault may be in the book. Why was it not made
plainer? Why did God write it so that thousands of gentlemen get a fine
living by explaining it--in all sorts of different ways? I am reminded
that the Bible is not a handbook of physical science. But did the Church
think so when it imprisoned Galileo and made him swear that the earth
did _not_ go round the sun? Mr. Blomfield says that "Genesis gives an
account of the origin of matter, and of life, and, finally, of man,
which science has not disproved, on the admission of her most eminent
sons." The Bible is a handbook of science after all then! But what has
science to do with the origin of matter? The origin of life is still
an open question. The origin of man is _not_ an open question. Genesis
gives us a piece of mythology; Darwin gave us the truth. Among the
eminent sons of science who is greater than he? Yet he has utterly
exploded the Adam and Eve story. Darwin has left it on record that he
rejected all revelation, and that for nearly forty years of his life
he was a disbeliever in Christianity. He did subscribe to a Missionary
Society that was attempting to reform South American savages, but he
never subscribed a penny for the propagation of Christianity in England.
I myself might think Christianity good for savages.

If I understand Mr. Blomfield rightly, God was unable to teach the Jews
any faster than he did, although he is both omnipotent and omniscient.
Were I to imitate Mr. Blomfield I should call this "sheer nonsense."

In my lecture I stated that the Old Testament sanctioned slavery, and
that there was not a word against it in the New Testament. Mr.