president's address. 879 



Religions." The sense of astonishment was perhaps unreason- 

 able. I must acknowledge that by this time oue ought to have 

 outgrown any possibility of having that feeling aroused by any 

 new posture of that ingenious, versatile and eccentric orator. 

 But the dismay which I felt had a better foundation. There 

 has been for at least the last thirty years in the liberal, learned 

 and intellectual society of which Mr. Gladstone has been one of 

 the conspicuous ornaments, a general, if tacit, consent to 

 discountenance, or to ignore, the futile attempts either to 

 overthrow the precise conclusions of Science in order to protect 

 Religion from an imaginary peril, or to force human knowledge 

 and revelation into a Procrustean conformity, as if they were 

 moulded upon the same type and had to be reduced to an identical 

 measurement. For the Scientific, as such, have no enmity except 

 to false Science ; the Religious, none except to false Religion. 

 And experience had shown so fully to the enlightened society in 

 which Mr. Gladstone lives, the mischief which arises from the 

 provocation of a quarrel which no natural hostility underlies, 

 that the oppositions and accommodations of mischiefmakers 

 between Genesis and Geology, had been hushed and almost 

 forgotten, when all at once the most conspicuous person in 

 Britain, almost in Europe, steps out into the field in paste- 

 board armour as a fresh champion in the name of Procrustes. 

 Now T think that both sides must acknowledge, under these 

 circumstances, some feeling of dismay. Mr. Gladstone has learnt 

 little from all that experience. He evidently supposes that 

 ascertained facts may, by the exercise of sufficient ingenuity, 

 be twisted into contradiction with themselves, or that the writer 

 of the first chapter of Genesis was a Geologist by revelation. 

 Such ways of thought may well excite ridicule, although they 

 deserve an indignant repudiation. Now in the December 

 number of the Nineteenth Century, with some sui'prise, I 

 saw that Huxley had donned his armour too, and had come out 

 into the field against Gladstone. It must have been the fame of 

 the champion and not ^his challenge or his cause that brought 

 Huxley to the front. For the arguments against which he had 



