e
sympathetic. But there is much to be done with the pen, all
bearing much on high and sacred ends, for even Homeric study as I
view it, is in this very sense of high importance; and what lies
beyond this is concerned directly with the great subject of
belief.

To Mrs. Gladstone he wrote (May 19, 1875): "I am feeling as it were my way
towards the purposes of the rest of my life. It will I dare say clear by
degrees. For the general business of the country, my ideas and temper are
thoroughly out of harmony with the ideas and temper of the day, especially
as they are represented in London."

The movement of negation had been in full swing for a dozen years before
the force and weight of it had, amid the stress and absorption of daily
business, reached his inner mind. In May 1872, in a speech as member of
the council of King's College--"averse from, and little used to platform
speaking," as he described himself to Manning--he used some strong language
about those who promulgate as science what is not science and as religion
what is not religion; but he took care to sever himself from the recent
Roman decrees, which "seemed much to resemble the proclamation of a
perpetual war against the progress and the movement of the human
mind."(325) In December 1872, he caused a marked sensation by an address
at Liverpool, in which he spoke of Strauss's book on _New and Old
Belief_.(326) He had become a member of the metaphysical society, where
eminent representatives of every faith and of no faith discussed every
aspect of the foundations of human creeds. He was of too masculine and
energetic a cast of mind to feel mere shock as he listened to Huxley,
Tyndall, Clifford, Harrison, firmly arguing materialism or positivism or
agnosticism or other unhistoric forms. That his whole soul was
energetically oppugnant, I need not say. His reverence for freedom never
wavered. He wrote to an editor who had criticised his Liverpool address
(Jan. 3, 1873):--

In the interest of my address, I wish to say that not a word to my
knowledge fell from me limiting the range of free inquiry, nor
have I ever supposed St. Paul to say anything so silly as "Prove
all things: but some you must not prove." Doubtless some obscurity
of mine, I know not what, has led to an error into which the able
writer of the article has fallen, not alone.

To the Duke of Argyll he wrote:--

_Dec. 28, '72._--I have been