P.S.—You are at liberty to make what use you please of this letter.
4 Marlborough Place, November 19, 1876.
My dear Darwin,
I confess I have less sympathy with the half-and-half sentimental school which he represents than I have with thoroughgoing orthodoxy.
If we are to assume that anybody has designedly set this wonderful universe going, it is perfectly clear to me that he is no more entirely benevolent and just in any intelligible sense of the words, than that he is malevolent and unjust. Infinite benevolence need not have invented pain and sorrow at all—infinite malevolence would very easily have deprived us of the large measure of content and happiness that falls to our lot. After all, Butler's "Analogy" is unassailable, and there is nothing in theological dogmas more contradictory to our moral sense, than is to be found in the facts of nature. From which, however, the Bishop's conclusion that the dogmas are true doesn't follow.
With best remembrances to Mrs. Darwin, ever yours very faithfully,
T.H. Huxley.
[This incident suggests the story of a retort he once made upon what he considered an unseasonable protest in church, a story which exemplifies, by the way, his strong sense of the decencies of life, appearing elsewhere in his constant respect for the ordinary conventions of his dislike for mere Bohemianism as such.
Once in a country house he was sitting at dinner next to his hostess, a lady who, as will sometimes happen, liked to play the part of Lady Arbitress of the whole neighbourhood. She told him how much she disapproved of the Athanasian Creed, and described how she had risen and left the village church when the parson began to read it; and thinking to gain my father's assent, she turned to him and said graciously, "Now Mr. Huxley, don't you think I was quite right to mark my disapproval?">[
"My dear Lady —" [he replied,] "I should as soon think of rising and leaving your table because I disapproved of one of the entrees."