[On February 11 he wrote once more, again taking certain broader aspects of the problem presented by the first chapter of Genesis.  He expressed his belief, as he had expressed it in 1869, that theism is not logically antagonistic to evolution.  If, he continues, the account in Genesis, as Philo of Alexandria held, is only a poem or allegory, where is the proof that any one non-natural interpretation is the right one? and he concludes by pointing out the difficulties in the way of those who, like the famous thirty-eight, assert the infallibility of the Bible as guaranteed by the infallibility of the Church.

Apart from letters and occasional controversy, he published this year only one magazine article and a single volume of collected essays, though he was busy preparing the Romanes Lecture for 1893, the more so because there was some chance that Mr. Gladstone would be unable to deliver the first of the lectures in 1892, and Huxley had promised to be ready to take his place if necessary.

The volume (called “Controverted Questions”) which appeared in 1892, was a collection of the essays of the last few years, mainly controversial, or as he playfully called them, “endeavours to defend a cherished cause,” dealing with agnosticism and the demonological and miraculous element in Christianity.  That they were controversial in tone no one lamented more than himself; and as in the letter to M. de Varigny, of November 25, 1891, so here in the prologue he apologises for the fact.]

This prologue,—­of which he writes to a friend], “It cost me more time and pains than any equal number of pages I have ever written,”—­[was designed to indicate the main question, various aspects of which are dealt with by these seemingly disconnected essays.]

The historical evolution of humanity [he writes], which is generally, and I venture to think not unreasonably, regarded as progress, has been, and is being, accompanied by a co-ordinate elimination of the supernatural from its originally large occupation of men’s thought.  The question—­How far is this process to go? is, in my apprehension, the controverted question of our time.

This movement, marked by the claim for the freedom of private judgment, which first came to its fulness in the Renascence, is here sketched out, rising or sinking by turns under the pressure of social and political vicissitudes, from Wiclif’s earliest proposal to reduce the Supernaturalism of Christianity within the limits sanctioned by the Scriptures, down to the manifesto in the previous year of the thirty-eight Anglican divines in defence of biblical infallibility, which practically ends in an appeal to the very principle they reject.