efore been so
powerful, had been broken when Newman and many other leaders of the
party had passed to Catholicism. Darwin and Herbert Spencer had not
yet risen above the horizon. Mill was in the zenith of his fame and
influence. The intellectual atmosphere was much agitated by the recent
discoveries of geology, by their manifest bearing on the Mosaic
cosmogony and on the history of the Fall, and by the attempts of Hugh
Miller, Hitchcock, and other writers to reconcile them with the
received theology. In poetry, Tennyson and Longfellow reigned, I
think with an approach to equality which has not continued. In
politics, the school of orthodox political economy was almost
unchallenged. In spite of the protests of Carlyle, all sound Liberals
in England then desired to restrict as much as possible the functions
of government, and to enlarge as much as possible the sphere of
individual liberty; and they regarded unrestrained competition and
inviolable contracts as the chief conditions of material progress.

The first great intellectual influence which I experienced was, I
believe, that of Bishop Butler, who was at that time probably studied
more assiduously at Dublin than in any other university in the
kingdom. There were few sermons in the college chapel in which some
allusion to his writings might not be found, and few serious students
whose modes of thought were not at least coloured by his influence.
That influence now appears to me to have been not only various, but
even in some measure contradictory. The 'Analogy' is perhaps the most
original, if not the most powerful, book ever written in defence of
the Christian creed; but it has probably been the parent of much
modern Agnosticism, for its method is to parallel every difficulty in
revealed religion by a corresponding difficulty in natural religion,
and to argue that the two must stand or fall together. Butler's
unrivalled sermons on human nature, on the other hand, have been
essentially conservative and constructive, and their influence has
been at least as strong on character as on belief. Their doctrine is
that consciousness reveals in the inner principles of our being a
moral hierarchy, 'a difference in nature and kind altogether distinct
from strength'; and that among these principles conscience has, by the
very structure of our nature, a recognised supremacy or guiding
authority which clearly distinguishes it from all others.

'The principle of reflection or con