s of which
we are a part, the sport of changeable and capricious deities, the
pawns in a game of the gods, as some of the Greeks held; or of a power
drunkenly malicious, as Heine once cynically suggested; or a
battle-ground for a force of good and a force of evil as in so many
Eastern religions? Are we dominated by pure evil, as some dark creeds
have held, or by pure good, as the religion of the Western world
teaches? And if we are dominated by pure evil, whence come good and
the idea of good, or, if by pure good, whence evil and the idea of
evil?

Huxley's interest in these great problems appears and reappears
throughout his published writings, but his views are most clearly and
systematically exposed in his "Romanes" lecture on "Evolution and
Ethics" delivered and published at Oxford in 1894, and afterwards
republished with a prefatory essay in the last volume of his
_Collected Essays_. Not long before his death, Professor Romanes, who
had come to live in Oxford, founded a University lectureship, the
purpose of which was that once a year a distinguished man should
address the University on a subject neither religious nor political.
Mr. Gladstone was the first lecturer, and, at the suggestion of the
founder, Huxley was chosen as the second. For years he had been taking
a special interest in both religion and politics, and he was not a
little embarrassed by the restrictions imposed by the terms of the
foundation, for he determined to make ethical science the subject of
his address, and

"ethical science is, on all sides, so entangled with religion and
politics, that the lecturer who essays to touch the former
without coming in contact with either of the latter, needs all
the dexterity of an egg-dancer, and may even discover that his
sense of clearness and his sense of propriety come into conflict,
by no means to the advantage of the former."

As Huxley, on that great occasion, ascended the rostrum in the
Sheldonian theatre, very white and frail in his scarlet doctor's
robes, there must have been present in his mind memories of the
occasion, four-and-thirty years before, when he first addressed an
audience in the University of Oxford. Then he was a young man, almost
unknown, rising to lead what seemed a forlorn hope for an idea utterly
repugnant to most of his hearers. Now, and largely by his own efforts,
the idea had become an inseparable part of human thought, and Huxley
himself was t