We have been at Margot Tennant's wedding to-day [I wrote to my son on May 10, 1894]--a great function, very tiring, but very brilliant and amusing--occasionally dramatic, too, as, when after the service had begun, the sound of cheering in the street outside drowned the voice of the Bishop of Rochester, and warned us that Mr. Gladstone was arriving. Afterward at the house we shook hands with three Cabinet Ministers on the door-step, and there were all the rest of them inside! The bride carried herself beautifully and was as composed and fresh as though it were any ordinary party. From our seat in the church one saw the interior of the vestry and Mr. Gladstone's white head against the window as he sat to sign the register; and the greeting between him and Mr. Balfour when he had done. This was written while Lord Rosebery was Prime Minister and Mr. Balfour, still free, until the following year, from the trammels of office, was finishing his brilliant _Foundations of Belief_, which came out in 1895. In acknowledging the copy which he sent me, I ventured to write some pages on behalf of certain arguments of the Higher Criticism which seemed to me to deserve a fuller treatment than Mr. Balfour had been willing to give them--in defense also of our English idealists, such as Green and Caird, in their relation to orthodoxy. A year or two earlier I find I had been breaking a lance on behalf of the same school of writers with a very different opponent. In the controversy between Professor Huxley and Doctor Wace, in 1889, which opened with the famous article on "The Gadarene Swine," the Professor had welcomed me as an ally, because of "The New Reformation," which appeared much about the same time; and the word of praise in which he compared my reply to Mr. Gladstone, to the work "of a strong housemaid brushing away cobwebs," gave me a fearful joy! I well remember a thrilling moment in the Russell Square drawing-room in 1889, when "Pater" and I were in full talk, he in his raciest and most amusing form, and suddenly the door opened, and "Doctor Wace" was announced--the opponent with whom at that moment he was grappling his hardest in the _Nineteenth Century_. Huxley gave me a merry look--and then how perfectly they both behaved! I really think the meeting was a pleasure to both of them, and when my old chief in the _Dictionary of Christian Biography_ took his departure, Huxley found all kinds of pleasant personal things to say about him. But the Professor and I were not always at one. Caird and Green--and, for other reasons, Martineau--were to me names "of great pith and moment," and Christian Theism was a reasonable faith. And Huxley, in controversy, was no more kind to my _sacra_ than to other people's. Once I dared a mild remonstrance--in 1892--only to provoke one of his most vigorous replies: