But moral instruction must not be too rudely divorced from the system of belief current among the generality; and the Bible had been the instrument of the clergy of all denominations, to whose efforts the mass of half-instructed people owed such redemption from ignorance and barbarism as they possessed.  Make all needful deductions, and there remains a vast residuum of moral beauty and grandeur, interwoven with three centuries of our history.  The Bible, as English literature, as old-world history, as moral teaching, as the Magna Charta of the poor and of the oppressed, the most democratic book in the world, could not be spared.  The mass of the people should not be deprived of the one great literature which is open to them; not shut out from the perception of their relations with the whole past history of civilized mankind, nor from an unpriestly view of Judaism and Jesus of Nazareth, purged of the accretions of centuries.  Accordingly, he supported Mr. W.H.  Smith’s motion for Bible-reading, even against the champions of immediate secularization; but for Bible-reading under such regulations as would carry out for the children the intention of Mr. W.E.  Forster, the originator of the Education Act, that “in the reading and explanation of the Bible... no efforts will be made to cram into their poor little minds theological dogmas which their tender age prevents them from understanding.”

But the compromise was not permanently satisfactory.  In 1893-94 the clerical party on the School Board “denounced” the treaty agreed to in 1871, and up till then undisputed, in the expectation of securing a new one more favourable to themselves; and the Times, hurrying to their support, did not hesitate to declare in a leading article that “the persons who framed the rule” respecting religious instruction intended to include definite teaching of such theological dogmas as the Incarnation.

In a letter to the Times Huxley replied (April 29, 1893):—­

I cannot say what may have been in the minds of the framers of the rule; but, assuredly, if I had dreamed that any such interpretation could fairly be put upon it, I should have opposed the arrangement to the best of my ability.

In fact, a year before the rule was framed I wrote an article in the Contemporary Review, entitled “The School Boards—­what they can do and what they may do,” in which I argued that the terms of the Education Act excluded such teaching as it is now proposed to include.

And this contention he supported by the quotation from Mr. W.E.  Forster, given above.

Further, in October, 1894, he replied as follows to a correspondent who had asked him whether flat adhesion to the compromise had not made nonsense of a certain Bible lesson, which was the subject of much comment:—­