As showing how little reason alone has to do with the determining of
religious belief, let us take the case of mathematicians. This I think
is the fairest case we can take, seeing that of all intellectual
pursuits that of mathematical research is the most exact, as well as the
most exclusive in its demand upon the powers of reason, and hence that,
as a class, the men who have achieved highest eminence in that pursuit
may be fairly taken as the fittest representatives of our species in
respect of the faculty of pure reason. Yet whenever they have turned
their exceptional powers in this respect upon the problems of religion,
how suggestively well balanced are their opposite conclusions--so much
so indeed that we can only conclude that reason counts for very little
in the complex of mental processes which here determine judgement.

Thus, if we look to the greatest mathematicians in the world's history,
we find Kepler and Newton as Christians; La Place, on the other hand, an
infidel. Or, coming to our own times, and confining our attention to the
principal seat of mathematical study:--when I was at Cambridge, there
was a galaxy of genius in that department emanating from that place such
as had never before been equalled. And the curious thing in our present
connexion is that all the most illustrious names were ranged on the side
of orthodoxy. Sir W. Thomson, Sir George Stokes, Professors Tait, Adams,
Clerk-Maxwell, and Cayley--not to mention a number of lesser lights,
such as Routh, Todhunter, Ferrers, &c.--were all avowed Christians.
Clifford had only just moved at a bound from the extreme of asceticism
to that of infidelity--an individual instance which I deem of particular
interest in the present connexion, as showing the dominating influence
of a forcedly emotional character even on so powerful an intellectual
one, for the _rationality_ of the whole structure of Christian belief
cannot have so reversed its poles within a few months.