1869 THE METAPHYSICAL SOCIETY. 451 



1870, and I am to be President ; although the Times says 

 that my best friends tremble for me. (I hope you are 

 not among that particular lot of my best friends.) 



I think we shall have a good meeting, and you know 

 you are pledged to give a lecture, even if you come with 

 your leg in a sling. 



The foundation of the Metaphysical Society in 1869 

 was not without interest as a sign of the times. As 

 in the new birth of thought which put a period to 

 the Middle Ages, so in the Victorian Renaissance, a 

 vast intellectual ferment had taken immediate shape 

 in a fierce struggle with long-established orthodoxy. 

 But whereas Luther displaced Erasmus, and the 

 earlier reformers fought out the quarrel with the 

 weapons of the theologian rather than those of the 

 Humanist, the latter-day reformation was based upon 

 the extension of the domain of positive science, upon 

 the force of historical criticism, and the sudden re- 

 organisation of accumulated knowledge in the light 

 of a physical theory adequate to explain it. 



These new facts and the new or re-vivified theories 

 based upon them, remained to be reckoned with after 

 the first storm of denunciation had passed by, and 

 the meeting at Sion College in 1867 1 showed that 

 some at least of the English clergy besides Colenso 

 and Stanley wished to understand the real meaning 

 of the new movement. Although the wider effect of 

 the scientific revival in modifying theological doctrine 

 was not yet fully apparent, the irreconcilables grew 



1 See p. 436. 



