Ever yours,

T.H.  Huxley.

[The meeting of the Association to which he refers took place at Exeter, and he writes of it to Darwin (September 28):—­]

As usual, your abominable heresies were the means of getting me into all sorts of hot water at the Association.  Three parsons set upon you, and if you were the most malicious of men you could not have wished them to have made greater fools of themselves than they did.  They got considerably chaffed, and that was all they were worth. [(It is perhaps scarcely worth while exhuming these long-forgotten arguments in their entirety; but anyone curious enough to consult the report of the meeting preserved in the files of the “Academy,” will find, among other things, an entirely novel theory as to the relation of the Cherubim to terrestrial creation.)

And to Tyndall, whom an accident had kept in Switzerland:—­]

After a sharp fight for Edinburgh, Liverpool was adopted as the place of meeting for the Association of 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 reorganisation 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 House in 1867 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 fewer and less noisy, while the injustice of their attempts to stifle the new doctrine and to ostracise its supporters became more glaring.

Thus among the supporters of the old order of thought, there was one section more or less ready to learn of the new.  Another, seeing that the doctrines of which they were firmly convinced were thrust aside by the rapid advance of the new school, thought, as men not unnaturally think in the like situation, that the latter did not duly weigh what was said on their side.  Hence this section eagerly entered into the proposal to found a society which should bring together men of diverse views, and effect, as they hoped, by personal discussion of the great questions at issue, in the manner and with the machinery of the learned societies, a rapprochement unattainable by written debate.