[Now this preacher was of a very different mind from the three bishops.  Instead of dwelling upon the “supreme importance of the purely spiritual in our faith,” he warned his hearers against dropping off any of the miraculous integument of their religion.  “Christianity is essentially miraculous, and falls to the ground if miracles be impossible.”  He was uncompromisingly opposed to any accommodation with advancing knowledge, or with the high standard of veracity, enforced by the nature of their pursuits, in which Huxley found the only difference between scientific men and any other class of the community.

But it was not merely this misrepresentation of science on its speculative side which Huxley deplored; he was roused to indignation by an attack on its morality.  The preacher reiterated the charge brought forward in the “Great Lesson,” that Dr. Murray’s theory of coral reefs had been actually suppressed for two years, and that by the advice of those who accepted it, for fear of upsetting the infallibility of the great master.

Hereupon he turned in downright earnest upon the originator of the assertion, who, he considered, had no more than the amateur’s knowledge of the subject.  A plain statement of the facts was refutation enough.  The new theories, he pointed out, had been widely discussed; they had been adopted by some geologists, although Darwin himself had not been converted, and after careful and prolonged re-examination of the question, Professor Dana, the greatest living authority on coral reefs, had rejected them.  As Professor Judd said, “If this be a ’conspiracy of silence,’ where, alas! can the geological speculator seek for fame?” Any warning not to publish in haste was but advice to a still unknown man not to attack a seemingly well-established theory without making sure of his ground. (Letter in “Nature.”)

As for the Bathybius myth, Huxley pointed out that his announcement of the discovery had been simply a statement of the actual facts, and that so far from seeing in it a confirmation of Darwinian hypotheses, he was careful to warn his readers] “to keep the questions of fact and the questions of interpretation well apart.”  “That which interested me in the matter,” he says, “was the apparent analogy of Bathybius with other well-known forms of lower life,"..."if Bathybius were brought up alive from the bottom of the Atlantic to-morrow, the fact would not have the slightest bearing, that I can discern, upon Mr. Darwin’s speculations, or upon any of the disputed problems of biology.” [And as for his] “eating the leek” [afterwards, his ironical account of it is an instance of how the adoption of a plain, straightforward course can be described without egotism.]

The most considerable difference I note among men [he concludes] is not in their readiness to fall into error, but in their readiness to acknowledge these inevitable lapses.

[As the Duke in a subsequent article did not unequivocally withdraw his statements, Huxley declined to continue public controversy with him.