Page:Popular Science Monthly Volume 58.djvu/358

350 for by all the members except six, three of whom were the Roman Catholics, who did not vote either way.

"I have been," he said, "seriously perplexed to know by what practical measures the religious feeling, which is the essential basis of conduct, was to be kept up, in the present utterly chaotic state of opinion on these matters, without the use of the Bible. Take the Bible as a whole; make the severest deductions which fair criticism can dictate for short-comings and positive errors; eliminate, as a sensible lay-teacher would do if left to himself, all that it is not desirable for children to occupy themselves with; and there still remains in this old literature a vast residuum of moral beauty and grandeur. And then consider the great historical fact that for three centuries this book has been woven into the life of all that is best and noblest in English history; that it has become the national epic of Britain, and is as familiar to noble and simple, from John o' Groat's House to Land's End, as Dante and Tasso were once to Italians; that it is written in the noblest and purest English, and abounds in exquisite beauties of mere literary form; and, finally, that it forbids the veriest hind who never left his village to be ignorant of the existence of other countries and other civilizations, and of a great past, stretching back to the furthest limits of the oldest nations in the world. By the study of what other book could children be so much humanized and made to feel that each figure in that vast historical procession fills, like themselves, but a momentary space in the interval between two eternities, and earns the blessings or the curses of all time, according to its effort to do good and hate evil, even as they also are earning their payment for their work?"

Another remarkable side of Huxley's mind was his interest in and study of metaphysics. When the Metaphysical Society was started in 1869, there was some doubt among the promoters whether Huxley and Tyndall should be invited to join or not. Mr. Knowles was commissioned to come and consult me. I said at once that to draw the line at the opinions which they were known to hold would, as it seemed to me, limit the field of discussion, and there would always be doubts as to when the forbidden region began; that I had understood there was to be perfect freedom, and that though Huxley's and Tyndall's views might be objectionable to others of our members, I would answer for it that there could be nothing in the form of expression of which any just complaint could be made.

The society consisted of about forty members, and when we consider that they included Thompson, Archbishop of York, Ellicott, Bishop of Gloucester and Bristol, Dean Stanley and Dean Alford as representatives of the Church of England; Cardinal Manning, Father Dalgairns and W. G. Ward as Roman Catholics; among statesmen, Gladstone, the late Duke of Argyll, Lord Sherbrooke, Sir M. Grant Duff, John Morley,