umor and commonsense usually go together. Huxley had a goodly stock of both. When George Eliot died, there was a very earnest but ill-directed effort made to have her body buried in Westminster Abbey. Huxley, being close to the Dean, serving with him on several municipal boards, was importuned by Spencer to use his influence toward the desired end. Huxley saw the incongruity of the situation, and in a letter that reveals the logical mind and the direct, literary, Huxley quality, he placed his gentle veto on the proposition and thus saved the "enemy" the mortification of having to do so.
Darwin is buried in Westminster Abbey, but this was not to be the final resting-place of the dust of Mill, Tyndall, Spencer, George Eliot or Huxley. These had all stood in the fore of the fight against superstition and had both given and received blows.
The Pantheon of such battle-scarred heroes was to be the hearts of those who prize above all that earth can bestow the benison of the God within. "Above all else, let me preserve my integrity of intellect," said Huxley. Here is Huxley's letter to Spencer:
4 Marlborough Place, Dec. 27, 1880
My Dear Spencer: Your telegram which reached me on Friday evening caused me great perplexity, inasmuch as I had just been talking to Morley, and agreeing with him that the proposal for a funeral in Westminster Abbey had a very questionable look to us, who desired nothing so much as that peace and honor should attend George Eliot to her grave.
It can hardly be doubted that the proposal will be bitterly opposed, possibly (as happened in Mill's case with less provocation) with the raking up of past histories, about which the opinion even of those who have least the desire or the right to be pharisaical is strongly divided, and which had better be forgotten.
With respect to putting pressure on the Dean of Westminster, I have to consider that he has some confidence in me, and before asking him to do something for which he is pretty sure to be violently assailed, I have to ask myself whether I really think it a right thing for a man in his position to do.
Now I can not say I do. However much I may lament the circumstance, Westminster Abbey is a Christian Church and not a Pantheon, and the Dean thereof is officially a Christian priest, and we ask him to bestow exceptional Christian honors by this burial in the Abbey. George Eliot is known not only as a great writer, but as a person whose life and opinions were in notorious antagonism to Christian practise in regard to marriage, and Christian theory in regard to dogma. How am I to tell the Dean that I think he ought to read over the body of a person who did not repent of what the Church considers mortal sin, a service not one solitary proposition of which she would have accepted for truth while she was alive? How am I to urge him to do that which, if I were in his place, I should most emphatically refuse to do? You tell me that Mrs. Cross wished for the funeral in the Abbey. While I desire to entertain the greatest respect for her wishes, I am very sorry to hear it. I do not understand the feeling which could create such a desire on any personal grounds, save those of affection, and the natural yearning to be near, even in death, those whom we have loved. And on public grounds the wish is still less intelligible to me. One can not eat one's cake and have it too. Those who elect to be free in thought and deed must not hanker after the rewards, if they are to be so called, which the world offers to those who put up with its fetters.
Thus, however I look at the proposal, it seems to me to be a profound mistake, and I can have nothing to do with it. I shall be deeply grieved if this resolution is ascribed to any other motives than those which I have set forth at greater length than I intended.