Biology Reference
In-Depth Information
Many English Protestants were attracted to this. When R. H. Hutton
dubbed him “Pope Huxley” in a
Spectator
editorial, he was not objecting to
Huxley's religious posturing. Rather, he was objecting to Huxley's violation
of his own Protestant ethos in a heavy-handed response to an anonymous
letter writer who had attempted to correct a small point made in his 1870
lecture on the ethnology of Basques, Celts, and Saxons. A fellow “Metaphys-
ical,” Hutton had been present at the society's meeting the year before when
Huxley first employed the word “agnostic,” and the liberal theologian now
demonstrated his sympathy for this concept by becoming the first person to
use it in print.
71
Hutton expressed admiration for Huxley's determination
“to preach to us all the gospel of suspense of judgment on all questions,
intellectual and moral,” but he thought that Huxley's dogmatic dismissal of
the letter writer's point had belied this Protestant ideal. He wondered aloud
whether this “tone of bitterness and even virulence is worthy of the very
strongest man amongst us” and whether Huxley did not “seem to presume
the infallibility of which he is the honest and frank assailant?”
72
What Hutton had observed in 1870 was merely a momentary lapse.
More typically we find Huxley facing down opponents by drawing upon
symbolic resources more consistent with his Calvinist upbringing. In 1888,
after being attacked by the Reverend Henry Wace as an “infidel” and “unbe-
liever” for his modernist views of the Bible, he did not hesitate to put on his
clerical surplice. Huxley had undoubtedly undertaken these popular expo-
sitions of German higher criticism as part of his campaign to undermine
the Protestant orthodoxy that Wace represented, but this did not stop him
from invoking some of its principles. Never to be outdone in the making of
biblical allusions, Huxley turned the tables on Wace by presenting himself
as a faithful young David besieged by Anglican Philistines. He protested
that he “had the 'Lion and the Bear' to deal with, and it is long since I got
quite used to the threatenings of episcopal Goliaths, whose croziers were
like unto a weaver's beam.” It was he who acted as a true Protestant and
his critics were the Sauls who had abandoned God's truth in their lust for
earthly power.
But, nevertheless, my position is really no more than that of an expositor;
and my justification for undertaking it is simply that conviction of the
supremacy of private judgment (indeed, of the impossibility of escaping
it) which is the foundation of the Protestant Reformation, and which was
the doctrine accepted by the vast majority of the Anglicans of my youth,
before that backsliding towards the “beggarly rudiments” of an effete and
