" THE METAPHYSICAL SOCIETY:' 803 



enough that none of them, except of course Dr. Ward, whose paper 

 was really read (though he may have made no final reply), spoke on 

 this particular occasion, as I have imputed to them ; and though sev- 

 eral of those to whom I have attributed remarks may not have been 

 present at this particular discussion at all, yet I do not think I shall 

 be found to have misrepresented any of their views.* If I have, the 

 responsibility and fault are mine. 



At the meeting of the Metaphysical Society which was held on 

 the 10th of December, 1872, Dr. Ward was to read a paper on the 

 question, " Can experience prove the uniformity of Nature ? " " Mid- 

 dlemarch " had been completed and published a few days previously. 

 On the day following the meeting the Convocation of Oxford was to 

 vote upon the question raised by Mr. Burgon and Dean Goulburn, 

 whether the Dean of Westminster (then Dr. Stanley) should be ex- 

 cluded for his heresies from the List of Select Preachers at Oxford 

 or not. The " Claimant " was still starring it in the provinces in the 

 interval between his first trial and his second. Thus the dinner itself 

 was lively, though several of the more distinguished members did not 

 enter till the hour for reading the paper had arrived. One might have 

 heard Professor Huxley flashing out a skeptical defense of the use 

 of the Bible in board-schools at one end of the table, Mr. Fitzjames 

 Stephen's deep bass remarks on the Claimant's adroit use of his com- 

 mittal for perjury, at another, and an eager discussion of the various 

 merits of Lydgate and Rosamond at a third. " Ideal Ward," as he 

 used to be called, from the work on the " Ideal of a Christian Church," 

 for which he had lost his degree nearly thirty years earlier at Oxford, 

 was chuckling with a little malicious satisfaction over the floundering 

 of the orthodox clergy, in their attempts to express safely their dis- 

 like of Dean Stanley's latitudinarianism, without bringing the Estab- 

 lishment about their ears. He thought we might as well expect the 

 uniformity of Nature to be disproved by the efforts of spiritualists to 

 turn a table, as the flood of latitudinarian thought to be arrested by 

 Mr. Burgon's and Dean Goulburn's attempt to exclude the Dean of 

 Westminster from the List of Select Preachers at Oxford. Father 

 Dalgairns, one of Dr. Newman's immediate followers, who left the 

 English Church and entered the Oratory of St. Philip Neri with him, 

 a man of singular sweetness and openness of character, with something 

 of a French type of playfulness in his expression, discoursed to me 

 eloquently on the noble ethical character of George Eliot's novels, and 

 the penetrating disbelief in all but human excellence by which they 

 are pervaded. Implicitly he intended to convey to me, I thought, that 



* Whenever those views were actually given in the words here used, though occurring 

 in the reading of other papers, I have always placed them in inverted commas. When- 

 ever no inverted commas are used the words and thoughts are mine, though I believe 

 them to represent faithfully the views of the speakers to whom they are attributed. 

 R. H. H. 



