 | | So end many hopes and planssadly enough, and yet not altogether bitterly. For as the little fellow was our greatest joy so is the recollection of him an enduring consolation. It is a heavy payment, but I would buy the four years of him again at the same price.
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A letter of condolence from Charles Kingsley produced from Huxley what is probably the most interesting and eloquent letter he ever wrote, a passionate defense of his agnosticism (a few years later, he was to coin the term). In contrast to the Kipling consolations, Christian belief is here quite explicitly considered and rejected. The arguments are familiar enough nowadays, and we shall revert to them in the next chapter: that our passionate wish for personal immortality, so far from being an argument in favor of it, is precisely the reason we should be especially skeptical about it; that arguments based on the nature of personality as the surest thing we know and therefore, in some sense, enduring lead to "mere verbal subtleties"; and that the claim that belief in future rewards and punishments is necessary to morality on this earth is a "mischievous lie." This last conviction is directly linked to the child's death::
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| | As I stood behind the coffin of my little son the other day, with my mind bent on anything but disputation, the officiating minister read, as a part of his duty, the words, "If the dead rise not again, let us eat and drink, for tomorrow we die." I cannot tell you how inexpressibly they shocked me. I could have laughed with scorn. What! because I am face to face with irreparable loss, because I have given back to the source from whence it came, the cause of a great happiness, still retaining through all my life the blessings which have sprung and will spring from that cause, I am to renounce my manhood, and, howling, grovel in bestiality? Why the very apes know better.
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There are two ways for God to disappear. As we read the Kipling correspondence, we can observe that God has slipped, silently and unnoticed, out of human consciousness. As we read Huxley's letter, we can see that God has been defiantly expelled. The motive for the latter has often been political: the radical atheism that runs from the French Revolution through Shelley, Richard Carlile, and Huxley's contemporary James Thomson claims that priests have often been the allies of kings in their oppression of humanity. Huxley's irreligion has no such explicit political content (despite his intellectual radicalism, Huxley held fairly conservative political views), but there is no doubt about the defiance: he even strikes a heroic posture
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