l68 HUXLEY 



the letter and the spirit it should be needless to say 

 that Huxley had no quarrel — who can have ? — with 

 religion, defining this as "a consciousness of the 

 limitations of man and a sense of an open secret 

 which is impenetrable,' , l and as " the reverence and 

 love for an ethical ideal, and the desire to realise that 

 ideal in life which every man ought to feel." 2 The 

 ideal will be low or high according to the standard 

 reached by a community, but, whatever that standard 

 may be, it represents the attitude towards unseen or 

 envisaged powers which affect men deeply and con- 

 stantly. No religion, however repellent it may be to 

 refined natures, has taken root which did not adjust 

 itself to, and answer, some need of the human heart. 

 And the measure of our knowledge of the various 

 faiths of mankind will be the measure of our sym- 

 pathy. What quarrel the evolutionist may have is 

 with the letter of theology, " which killeth," not with 

 the spirit of religion, which " giveth life." As 

 Huxley says : — 



The antagonism between science and religion, 

 about which we hear so much, appears to me to be 

 purely factitious — fabricated, on the one hand, by 

 short-sighted religious people who confound a certain 

 branch of science, theology, with religion ; and, on 

 the other, by equally short-sighted scientific people 

 who forget that science takes for its province only 



1 Coll. Essays, i. p. 33. 2 Id., v. p. 250. 



