MATHEMATICS, BIOLOGY, AND EELIGION 337 



How many medical men do you suppose believe in the 

 doctrine of the Incarnation '? A medical man's faith in a 

 doctrine that contradicts his daily experience of obstetric 

 practice, must be strong indeed ; a thousand times stronger 

 than that of non-medicos. 



It has often struck me that had the biological sciences 

 preceded or run abreast with the mathematics and classics, 

 we should long ago have had a religion of pure reason, such 

 as Huxley has sketched at the end of one of his Essays I 

 forget which. As it is. biological science is hardly a century- 

 old, and just see what havoc it is making in doctrinal religion. 



To the Same 



Dec. 29, 1893. 



I have just finished Huxley's last volume. The Essay 

 on the ' Evolution of Religion ' is most remarkable and 

 gives an astonishing idea of his grasp of mind, powerful 

 reasoning, and admirable style. Certainly no one, theo- 

 logian or other, has brought the subject before the ordinary 

 reader in anything like the persuasive manner and rhetorical 

 power he displays. It goes to Darwin to-day. 



To the Same 



February 18, 1897. 



Your letter has interested me much, if only by the 

 contrast it affords to our readings. I have been going 

 through a long course of Boswell's Johnson, and of Bos- 

 welliana. I had already long ago read the Tour in the 

 Hebrides, and Madame Piozzi, so I am pretty well up in the 

 old Hero, whom one cannot help admiring (and disliking 

 rather). But he had great nobility of character, and I 

 much like the prayers and invocations he addresses to his 

 Maker like a man, with all humility and earnestness, and 

 yet in the language of one who felt it his duty to do so in 

 his best style neither whining nor pompous, not studied 

 nor stilted, but as one deeply affected by the awful presence 

 of his Maker. He has published his prayers and meditations 

 somewhere, and I will try to get them. 



As to poor, half crazy, clever, kindly, vain Bozzy, it 

 was a shock to me, after having derived much pleasure 

 from his writings, to find that he died at 55, the victim of 



