350 POPULAR SCIENCE MONTHLY. 



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 practi- 

 cal measures the religious feeling, which is the essential basis of con- 

 duct, 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 Eng- 

 lish, 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 na- 

 tions 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 his- 

 torical 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 representa- 

 tives of the Church of England; Cardinal Manning, Father Dalgairns 

 and W. G. "Ward as Eoman Catholics; among statesmen, Gladstone, the 

 late Duke of Argyll, Lord Sherbrooke, Sir M. Grant Duff, John Morley, 



