process of mathematical discovery, knows henceforth that the mind in him which can go through such a process is the child of the Creator. Contact with the Mathesis which underlies human thought constitutes an absolute revelation or unveiling of Deity. For this reason mathematicians are usually disliked by priests; the true mathematician has (though in a very humble manner and small degree) "seen God"; and the slightest glimpse of that vision is often sufficient to destroy the possibility of believing in priest-made and partial deities. Mr. Babbage says nothing against any particular doctrine; but under all his statements there resounds perpetually, as a deep harmonic undertone, the implied thought: "Nature is the representation of the action of those mathematical laws which can also be represented by interrupted numerical series; I have made a machine which is able to represent to the eye the action of some mathematical laws and the existence of certain interrupted series; therefore my mind is, in its own little way, akin to the Creative Mind. I believe that some such events as those called miraculous must have taken place during some portion of the history of our planet; but my faith in God rests on no testimony concerning such past wonders; for I stand in presence of the perpetual miracle that man is made in the Image of God; a sharer in His power to understand numerical law and impose it on matter; a sharer in His power to apprehend moral law and to be the author of joy and woe: a sharer in His power to trace events to their causes; and therefore a sharer in His own immortality. I am, by natural inheritance, a child of the Living God; and when He has anything to say to me He can say it without the
