enough that none of them, except of course Dr. Ward, whose paper was really read (though he may have made no final reply), spoke on this particular occasion, as I have imputed to them; and though several of those to whom I have attributed remarks may not have been present at this particular discussion at all, yet I do not think I shall be found to have misrepresented any of their views.[1] If I have, the responsibility and fault are mine.
At the meeting of the Metaphysical Society which was held on the 10th of December, 1872, Dr. Ward was to read a paper on the question, "Can experience prove the uniformity of Nature?" "Middlemarch" had been completed and published a few days previously. On the day following the meeting the Convocation of Oxford was to vote upon the question raised by Mr. Burgon and Dean Goulburn, whether the Dean of Westminster (then Dr. Stanley) should be excluded for his heresies from the List of Select Preachers at Oxford or not. The "Claimant" was still starring it in the provinces in the interval between his first trial and his second. Thus the dinner itself was lively, though several of the more distinguished members did not enter till the hour for reading the paper had arrived. One might have heard Professor Huxley flashing out a skeptical defense of the use of the Bible in board-schools at one end of the table, Mr. Fitzjames Stephen's deep bass remarks on the Claimant's adroit use of his committal for perjury, at another, and an eager discussion of the various merits of Lydgate and Rosamond at a third. "Ideal Ward," as he used to be called, from the work on the "Ideal of a Christian Church," for which he had lost his degree nearly thirty years earlier at Oxford, was chuckling with a little malicious satisfaction over the floundering of the orthodox clergy, in their attempts to express safely their dislike of Dean Stanley's latitudinarianism, without bringing the Establishment about their ears. He thought we might as well expect the uniformity of Nature to be disproved by the efforts of spiritualists to turn a table, as the flood of latitudinarian thought to be arrested by Mr. Burgon's and Dean Goulburn's attempt to exclude the Dean of Westminster from the List of Select Preachers at Oxford. Father Dalgairns, one of Dr. Newman's immediate followers, who left the English Church and entered the Oratory of St. Philip Neri with him, a man of singular sweetness and openness of character, with something of a French type of playfulness in his expression, discoursed to me eloquently on the noble ethical character of George Eliot's novels, and the penetrating disbelief in all but human excellence by which they are pervaded. Implicitly he intended to convey to me, I thought, that
- ↑ Whenever those views were actually given in the words here used, though occurring in the reading of other papers, I have always placed them in inverted commas. Whenever no inverted commas are used the words and thoughts are mine, though I believe them to represent faithfully the views of the speakers to whom they are attributed. R. H. H.
