184 HUXLEY 



Mr. George Russell wrote a pamphlet on " Mr. 

 Gladstone's Religious Development." It should 

 have been issued in blank, for Mr. Gladstone never 

 had any such development. He was in the nineties 

 what he was in the thirties, save that with advancing 

 years he attached greater importance to ritual observ- 

 ances. One evidence of this is his resignation of 

 membership of the Folklore Society in 1896, when 

 the Presidential Address of that year, dealing with 

 the significance of that portion of Dr. Frazer's 

 Golden Bough which treats of the large body of bar- 

 baric rites connected with "eating the god," pointed 

 out the relation of these to the sacrament. His 

 whilom colleague and brother-Churchman, Lord Sel- 

 borne, said of him that " he was too readily influenced 

 by opinions which fell in with his own wishes or 

 feelings, and by the men who held them, and was im- 

 patient of the dry light of facts when facts told the 

 other way. He could see into millstones farther than 

 other men, and, on the other hand, he had a wonder- 

 ful power of not seeing what he did not like." l 



The facts of natural science were accepted by him 

 only in so far as they were shown to be in accord 

 with the statements of Scripture ; and, as they could 

 not be ignored, the instruments of ambiguity and 

 evasiveness, which perform their disingenuous work in 



1 Memorials : Personal and Political, 1 865- 1 895. 



