(MATHEMATICS, BIOLOGY, AND EELIGION 337 

 How many medical men do you suppose believe in the 

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

 octrine that contradicts his daily experience of obstetric 

 ractice, must be strong indeed ; a thousand times stronger 

 tnan 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 Eeligion ' 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 



