ached in truth to another place,
I was still haunted with its fanciful appropriateness to this one,
because of the very steepness of this larger slope and the mystery
of that larger sea. I even had the fancy that one might fish
for them and find them in such a sea, turned into monsters;
sea-swine or four-legged fishes, swollen and with evil eyes,
grown over with sea-grass for bristles; the ghosts of Gadara.

And then it came back to me, as a curiosity and almost a coincidence,
that the same strange story had actually been selected as the text
for the central controversy of the Victorian Age between Christianity
and criticism. The two champions were two of the greatest men
of the nineteenth century; Huxley representing scientific scepticism
and Gladstone scriptural orthodoxy. The scriptural champion
was universally regarded as standing for the past, if not for the
dead past; and the scientific champion as standing for the future,
if not the final judgment of the world. And yet the future
has been entirely different to anything that anybody expected;
and the final judgment may yet reverse all the conceptions of their
contemporaries and even of themselves. The philosophical position
now is in a very curious way the contrary of the position then.
Gladstone had the worst of the argument, and has been proved right.
Huxley had the best of the argument, and has been proved wrong.
At any rate he has been ultimately proved wrong about the way the world
was going, and the probable position of the next generation.
What he thought indisputable is disputed; and what he thought dead
is rather too much alive.

Huxley was not only a man of genius in logic and rhetoric; he was
a man of a very manly and generous morality. Morally he deserves
much more sympathy than many of the mystics who have supplanted him.
But they have supplanted him. In the more mental fashions
of the day, most of what he thought would stand has fallen,
and most of what he thought would fall is standing yet.
In the Gadarene controversy with Gladstone, he announced it
as his purpose to purge the Christian ideal, which he thought
self-evidently sublime, of the Christian demonology, which he thought
self-evidently ridiculous. And yet if we take any typical man
of the next generation, we shall very probably find Huxley's sublime
thing scoffed at, and Huxley's ridiculous thing taken seriously.
I imagine a very typical child of the age succeeding Huxley's may
b