“Never ‘did Science seem so vast and mere creeds so little’.”

A man got up [after one of Huxley’s ‘sermons’] and said ‘they had never heard anything like that in Norwich before’.

With science’s truths the only accessible ones.

Dissolving the dross which had ‘encrusted’ Christianity ‘in the days of ignorance and superstition’.

It invited new ways of thinking.

Science was tearing through the ‘fine-spun ecclesiastical cobwebs’.

It demanded a new rationale for belief.

Perhaps the greatest lesson [Huxley] learned from reading Carlyle was that real religion.

a world of evolution ‘and unchanging causation’.

What a wretched lot of old shrivelled creatures we shall be by-and-by. Never mind – the uglier we get in the eyes of others, the lovelier we shall be to each other; that has always been my firm faith about friendship.