MY DEAR M.--Thanks for your pleasant letter. I do not know whether I like the praise or the scolding better. They, like pastry, need to be done with a light hand--especially praise--and I have swallowed all yours, and feel it thoroughly agrees with me. As to the scolding I am going to defend myself tooth and nail. In the first place, by all my Gods and No Gods, neither Green, nor Martineau, nor the Cairds were in my mind when I talked of "Sentimental Deism," but the "Vicaire Savoyard," and Charming, and such as Voysey. There are two chapters of "Rousseauism," I have not touched yet--Rousseauism in Theology, and Rousseauism in Education. When I write the former I shall try to show that the people of whom I speak as "sentimental deists" are the lineal descendants of the Vicaire Savoyard. I was a great reader of Channing in my boyhood, and was much taken in by his theosophic confectionery. At present I have as much (intellectual) antipathy to him as St. John had to the Nicolaitans. ... Green I know only from his Introduction to Hume--which reminds me of nothing so much as a man with a hammer and chisel knocking out bits of bad stone in the Great Pyramid, with the view of bringing it down.... As to Caird's _Introduction to the Philosophy of Religion_, I will get it and study it. But as a rule "Philosophies of Religion" in my experience turn out to be only "Religions of Philosophers"--quite another business, as you will admit. And if you please, Ma'am, I wish to add that I think I am _not_ without sympathy for Christian feeling--or rather for what you mean by it. Beneath the cooled logical upper strata of my microcosm there is a fused mass of prophetism and mysticism, and the Lord knows what might happen to me, in case a moral earthquake cracked the superincumbent deposit, and permitted an eruption of the demonic element below.... Luckily I am near 70, and not a G.O.M.--so the danger is slight. One must stick to one's trade. It is my business to the best of my ability to fight for scientific clearness--that is what the world lacks. Feeling Christian or other, is superabundant.... Ever yours affectionately, T. H. HUXLEY. A few more letters from him--racy, and living as himself--and then in 1895, just after his first article on the "Foundations of Belief," we heard with dismay of the illness which killed him. There was never a man more beloved--more deeply mourned.