THE JUDGE AND HIS JUDGES.

Nelson Examiner and New Zealand Chronicle, Volume XXVIII, Issue 67, 21 August 1869, Page 3

THE JUDGE AND HIS JUDGES.

To the Editor of the ' Nelson Examinee.' Sie — The community may legitimately find matter for congratulation in Judge Bichniond's late lecture ; not less because of its own intrinsic merits, high as they unquestionably are, than for the qualities of tbe reviews which it has elicited in your own and your contemporary's columns. It has proved the existence among us of thinkers of a calibre of which we may well be proud. If it is a privilege to have high thought developed with the eloquence and fairness of Judge Eichmond, it is no less a privilege to have it discussed with the candour and acutencss of his reviewers. It is to be hoped that tho lecture and the reviews will be accepted by the clergy as containing a valuable suggestion. They may convince them that difficulties, such as sermons rarely grapple with, are seriously felt by men not only not prejudiced against religion, but by its determined and most valuable champions. These difficulties cannot be burked by contemptuously ignoring them, nor silenced by hard names. They are felt acutely by almost all thinking laymen, most acutely by those who cannot dismiss religion from their thoughts. The differences existing between the Judge and his reviewers, will strike .some persons far less than the ground which they possess in common. This common ground may be accepted as the utmost that is claimed as unquestionable, by the strongest opponents of materialism that can be found in the ranks of those who care to keep themselves übreast of the thought and science of the day. It would require too much time to enter anew upon the consideration of Judge Richmond's lecture, but yet it may be remarked that in Mr. Mill's rejection of the terms " cause and effect," and adoption of tho terms " antecedent and consequent," may

bo found a valuablo weapon ngainst materialism. The phenomena which distinguish man aro to bo found wherever a certain arrangement of tissue exists unimpaired ; they disappear either partially or wholly with its derangement". Of the close connection between tho manifestation of these phenomena and that arrangement, there is no doubt. The materialist, to whom " the scalpel can discover no trace of the soul," wishes us to believe that this arrangement is the cause of tho3e phenomena. We prefer to believe that it is the consequent, or rather the concomitant. The co-effioient, which no scalpel can reveal, is also necessary to produce those phenomena. The phenomena of galvanism are tho consequences, not the results, of a certain arrangement of metals and acids ; we know the electric force exists independently of either metal or acid. In both instances the phenomena accompany, though in the first instance we know, and in the second it is open to us to suppose, that the phonomena are ,the product of no arrangement of matter whatever. May it not then be that this arrangement of matter, which accompanies human consciousness, like the galvanic battery, merely localizes and makes palpable an energy" having an independent existence, which its derangement does but displace, while it cannot destroy ? One more suggestion. No single discovery in the range of modern science is more startling than that of the indestructibility of energy. Enorgy is Protean: it appears and re-appears as motion, force, sound, or light, but destroyed it cannol be. Does not the analogy now traceable even to our dim eyes through all that part of creation which has been explored sufficiently to discover it, suggest that human consciousness too may be indestructible ? I do but point to this as a window, through which possibly it may be — to use tho pregnant words that have already appeared in your columns — "our lot, by groping through darkness that may be felt, to prepare tho way for the admission of a flood of light to a futuie generation." I am, &c, Nelson, August 20. S.