Kevin L.

Morgan 900489139
HIS 5106, Dr Michael J. Turner
Oct. 11, 2011

Scientific Research and Discovery Stimulate

Controversy in Victorian Britain1
It was an age of certainty; it was an age of transition.2 It was an age of freedom and
opportunity; it was an age of paradox.3 It was the age in which the faith of Britain would
be most severely put to the test, but not by physical circumstance or military strife.
The established domain of crown and church had been severely curtailed.
Parliament and the British constitution had limited the role of the crown. The emergence

Richard J. Helmstadter, Bernard V. Lightman, Victorian faith in crisis: essays on continuity and

change in (1990), 391 pp: Appleman, 1859: Entering an Age of Crisis; Symondson, Victorian Crisis of
Faith.
2

For transition, see W. E. Houghton. The one distinguishing fact about the time was that we are

living in an age of transition (Henry Holland, The Progress and Spirit of Physical Science, Edinburgh
Review, 108 (1858), 71, quoted by W. H. Houghton, The Victorian Frame of Mind, 18301870 [New
Haven, CT: Yale University Press, 1957], p. 1). See also E. H. H. Green (ed.), An Age of Transition: British
Politics, 18801914 (Edinburgh, 1997).
3

G. M. Young speaks of release. As I see it, the function of the nineteenth century was to

disengage the disinterested intelligence, to release it from the entanglements of party and sectone might
almost add, of sexand to set it operating over the whole range of human life and circumstance (G. M.
Young, Victorian England: Portrait of an Age [Oxford: Oxford University Press, 1936], 186).

of democracy meant not only the transference of political power from the aristocracy to
the people, mainly by the successive Reform Bills of 1832, 1867, and 1884, but also the
arrival of what is often termed a democratic society. This breakdown of the old
conception of status owed something to democratic ideas about the rights of man, but its
primary cause was economic. The development of commerce, drawing men off from the
land and opening new and independent careers to talent, had been the main instrument in
dissolving the feudal nexus of society.4 Non-conformist congregations were nibbling
away at the monopoly of Henrys church, but this was not by secularization, but by the
impetus of faith. The steady removal of the privileges of the Church of England, for
example the ending in 1868 of compulsory Church rates (taxes in order to support
Anglican worship), came about not through a general weakening of the importance of
faith in society, but rather as the result of a forceful political campaign by Nonconformists who were typically deeply devout Christians with an alternative theological
vision that prompted a rejection of Church establishments.5 Middle-class scientists were
becoming professionals and seeking to secularize all of Science. Amateur scientists, who
were members of the clergy-crown elite, were losing traction.6

Walter E. Houghton, The Victorian Frame of Mind, 18301870, p. 4.

Timothy Larsen, Religion, Secularization and the Crisis of Faith, Encyclopedia of Nineteenth-

Century Thought, (London and New York: Routledge, 2005), 395.

6

In a series of important articles published during the seventies and later republished in

Contesting Cultural Authority (1993) and in his Between Science and Religion (1974), Turner drew the
attention of scholars to the clash between the scientists and amateurs who were part of the Anglican-Tory
establishment, which controlled Oxbridge, the major scientific societies, and government resources for
science right up until the middle of the century, and the middle-class professional scientists, bent on

At the beginning of the 19th Century, most people accepted the Word and works of
God as compatible sources of truth. William Paleys Natural Theology (1802) pointed to
design as evidence of the Designer. Yet, winds called science were blowing across
the Channel, and these challenged the prior agreement between science and faith.7
Likewise, domestic disturbances in the 1820s from the emerging discipline of geology
were also challenging the Biblical concept of a world-wide flood. The most influential
voice in this discipline was Charles Lyell. In the 1830s and 1840s expressions of doubt
about traditional views of the Bible were still rare from within the churches; most
believers still held the Bible to be divinely inspired and took that to entail its also being
inerrant and infallible in every detail. Biblical criticism was a matter of German
rationalism, Unitarian unorthodoxy, and militant skeptics.8
Lyell had been entertaining doubts regarding catastrophism as early as 1817.
These grew over the next ten years as he studied geological features in England and on

secularizing both British science and society. Scientific naturalists like Huxley, Spencer, Tyndall, William
Clifford, Lewes, Edward Tyler, John Lubbock, Edwin Lankester, Edward Clodd, and Henry Maudsley put
forward new interpretations of humanity, nature, and society derived from the theories, methods, and
categories of empirical science, in particular evolutionary science. This cluster of ideas and attitudes was
naturalistic in the sense that it would permit no recourse to causes not empirically observable in nature. The
ideas of scientific naturalism provided the main weapons for middle-class members of the intellectual elite
who were attempting to wrest control of English society from the Anglican clergy (Bernard V. Lightman,
ed., Victorian Science in Context [Chicago and London: The University of Chicago Press, 1997], 5).
7

http://www.victorianweb.org/science/science&religion.html par. 3.

Gerald Parsons, Religion in Victorian Britain (), 239.

the continent.9 Intending to publish his Principles in 1827, he was delayed by his doing
further research.10 When Buckland and Sedgwick, members of the geological society
who supported catastrophism, out of collegial deference declined to review it, Lyells
treatise was reviewed sympathetically by Scrope, with whom he carried on a vigorous
correspondence prior to publication.11 Because of its clear reasoning and prosaic style,
Lyells work was warmly received by the general public.12 Both Sedgewick and Whewell
praised Lyell for his painstaking work. Sedgewick wrote: His work has already taken,
and will long maintain a distinguished place in the philosophic literature of this country.
Yet, he went on to argue vigorously against Lyells concept of continuity, affirming his
belief that the evidence points to frequent interruptions of the geological record by great
convulsions.13 Whewell concurred with Sedgewick. While admiring his carefulness of
observation, scientists of that generation did not accept his unifying theory. That would
be left for a new generation of scientists.

The New Generation

John Wesley Judd, The Coming of Evolution (The Echo Library, 2010), 32.

10

Charles Lyell, The Principles of Geology: Being an Attempt to Explain the Former Changes of the

Earths Surface, by Reference to Causes Now in Operation, vol. 1 (1834), 3rd edition, iii. It is puzzling to
me how he fails to see the catastrophic nature of his observations since he points out that this further
research entailed the review of the work of Signor O. G. Cosa regarding fossilized seashells as the markers
for stratasome at the dizzying height of 2000 feet above sea level.
11

Judd, 34.

12

Judd, 38. IS THIS SO?

13

Judd, 39.

The link to the new generation is made in Professor Henslows qualified

recommendation of Lyells work to Darwin, as he was to depart in the H.M.S. Beagle. As
Darwin recalled it, Henslow told him:

Take Lyells new book with you and read it by all means, for it is very
interesting, but do not pay any attention to it, except in regard to facts, for it is
altogether wild as far as theory goes.14

Eventually Lyells research was accepted as fact and its schema of strata was
adapted into different recastings of the Biblical account of origins. Three examples of this
are Charles Williamss The First Week of Time; or Scripture in Harmony with Science
(1864), Thomas Coopers Evolution, the Stone Book, and the Mosaic Record of Creation
(1878), which were three lectures he presented throughout England, and Henry
Walducks Darwinism Refuted Out of Darwins Book (1885).15 Cooper correlates the
layers and fossils in the geological column with the days of the creation week.
Walduck correlated the fossils of the geological column with the wreck of an old
world, described in Genesis 1:1, 2, that was restored through a new creation.

The two first verses of Genesis describe the wreck of an old world, void of
life and light, and covered with water; and geologists have discovered in the

14

Judd, 39.

15

Charles Williams, The First Week of Time; or Scripture in Harmony with Science (London:

Jackson, Walford, and Hodder, 1863); Thomas Cooper, Evolution, the Stone Book, and the Mosaic Record
of Creation (London: Hodder and Stoughton, 1878); Henry Walduck, Darwinism Refuted Out of Darwins
Book [The Origin of Species] (London: Elliot Stock, 1885)

wreck of this old world the fossilized remains of its former inhabitants, and
evidences that through unknown ages this old world must have been subject to
vast changes and stupendous operations, and that the whole of its former
inhabitants were swept away. All this took place, as clearly appears from the
narrative, before the first of the six days of Creation.16

A scan of the publications of Charles Darwin in the 1870s on Google Books reveals
a steady flow of revisions of his original Origin of Species, as well as other publications
in the same line of thinking. These included Insectivorous Plants, The Various
Contrivances by Which Orchids are Fertilized by Insects (1876), and A Biographical
Sketch of an Infant (1877).
Germans were more inclined than the French to accept the views of Lyell and
Darwin. Fritz Mller wrote Facts and Arguments for Darwin (1869). Thomas Huxley,
Darwins bulldog, led the intellectual charge. Yet, in the first ten to twenty years from
Origins publication, most of the popular literature was against it.

Literature against Darwins Views

In London, George Twemlow wrote Facts and Fossils Adduced to Prove the Deluge
of Noah, and Modify the Transmutation System of Darwin, with Some Notices Regarding
Indus Flint Cores (1868), and Sidney Herbert Laing wrote Darwinism Refuted: An Essay
on Mr. Darwins Theory of "The Descent of Man (1871). Apologetically, the Victoria
Institute (a religious organization) wrote:

16

Henry Walduck, Darwinism refuted out of Darwins book [The origin of species], 3, 4

Mr. Darwin has never yet asserted that to be his belief, and which may be
expressed briefly thus: that the origin of species by natural selection is not
subject to higher law.17

Max Muller emphasized Darwins initial Deism:

It is well known that, according to Mr. Darwin, all animals and plants have
descended from about eight or ten progenitors. He is satisfied with this and
declines to follow the deceitful guidance of analogy, which would lead us to
the admission of but one prototype. And he adds that even if he were to infer
from analogy that all the organic beings which had ever lived on this earth had
descended from some one primordial form, he would hold that life was first
breathed into that primordial form by the Creator. Very different from this is
the conclusion proclaimed by Professor Haeckel, the most distinguished and
most strenuous advocate of Mr. Darwins opinions in Germany. He maintains
that in the present state of physiological knowledge, the idea of a Creator, a
Maker, a Lifegiver has become unscientific; that the admission of one
primordial form is sufficient; and that that first primordial form was a
Moneres, produced by self genie ration.18

17

Victoria Institute, Faith and Thought (London: Robert Hardwicke, 1873), 31.

18

Professor Max Muller, Lectures on Mr. Darwins Philosophy of Language, delivered at the

Royal Institution, March 22, 1873, The Living Age, vol. 117, 674.

Many other writers thoughtfully took exception with various parts of Darwins
inferential theory:

[Mr. Darwin] recognises very distinctly the variability of species; who does
not? But he does not see the limits of this variability; and this is precisely what
he ought to see. In short, the author uses everywhere a figurative language,
which he does not explain, and which deceives him as he deceives those who
make use of it. In the place of God it put nature. The more I reflect the
more I am persuaded that Darwin confounds variability with mutability.
These are two phenomena, which cannot be kept too distinct.19

We come to the second question, whether Darwin, though unable to adduce

a single authentic instance of the origin of a species by selective breeding, has
yet been able to present plausible reasons for the belief, that the transformation
of the descendants of a single pair into distinct species, has ever taken place in
the past, is in progress in the present, and is likely to go on in all the future. It
is the leading aim of Darwins book to set forth reasons for such a belief.20

In accounting for these great changes, Mr. Darwin falls back upon
unlimited periods of time. Now time is recognised in other physical sciences
as an essential element of natural operations; but Mr. Darwin does not leave us

19

Charles Robert Bree, An Exposition of the Fallacies in the Hypothesis of Mr. Darwin (London:

Longmans, Green, and Co., 1872), 395, 404.

20

The Congregational Review, vol. 11 (1871), 245.

even a guess in respect to how long a period it takes to modify a species, as he

cannot point to any modification during the last several thousand years. He
confesses, also, that many animals have remained unchanged since the
commencement of the glacial period, and these have been exposed to great
changes of climate, arid have migrated over great distances.

If the theory of Natural Selection is true, Geology ought to furnish the most
valuable and complete evidence in its support. But Mr. Darwin acknowledges
that some of the facts of Geology are nearly fatal to his theory; and in order to
surmount these difficulties, he lays great stress on the imperfection of the
geological record. In the lowest known fossiliferous rocks are found species
belonging to several of the main divisions of the animal kingdom; and Mr.
Darwin says, that if his theory is true, it is indisputable that before the lowest
Cambrian stratum was deposited, long periods elapsed, as long as, or probably
far longer than the whole interval from the Cambrian age to the present day,
and that during these vast periods the world swarmed with living creatures.

Now Geology at present gives us no evidence of these vast periods, and Mr.
Darwin acknowledges the almost entire absence as at present known of
formations rich in fossils beneath the Cambrian stratum.21

21

Samuel Davey, Darwin, Carlyle, Dickens: the Fools, Jesters, and Comic Characters in

Shakspeare, with Other Essays, &c (London: J. G. Taylor, 1879), 24, 25.

 Mr. Darwins argument is a continuous conjugation of the potential

mood. It rings the changes on can have been, might have been, would have
been, until it leaps with a bound into must have been.

When Mr. Darwin is confronted with the extremely remote and uncertain
nature of the agencies on which he relies, he continually falls back on what
might have been in the lapse of unlimited periods of time. Such a style of
argument is, to say the least, destitute of any scientific value. 22

The philosophical position of naturalistic origins was not convincing to all:

We notice the half-apologetic way in which some scientific men introduce

the idea of a Creator, as if He had been disposed of; and the argument of Paley
as to the evidence of a Creator from design was obsolete; but Paleys
arguments, although they may be old, are yet unanswered: and it is much easier
to put forth new questions than answer old argumentsto start paradoxes than
make discoveries.23

Others averred that Englishmen would never be satisfied as a whole with

disbelief:

22

Francis Orpen Morris, All the Articles of the Darwin Faith (London: W. Poole, 1877), 38.

23

Samuel Davey, Darwin, Carlyle, Dickens: the Fools, Jesters, and Comic Characters in Comic

Characters in Shakespeare: With Other Essays, Etc. (London: E. Bumpus, 1879), 11, 12.

Referring to some of the modern theories of life and of the origin of the
earth, we were taught that the universe is but a vast moving machine, selfsupported and self sustained, and that this is a forsaken and fatherless world. Is
the time coming which Lichtenberg prophesied in bitter irony, when belief in
God will be as tales with which old women frighten children? when, in the
language of Richter, of the world will be made a machine, of the ther a gas,
of God a force, and of the second world a coffin. And are we to believe, with
Mr. Mill, that a religion may exist without belief in God; and that a religion
without a God may be even to Christians an instructive and profitable object of
contemplation? And is this the millennium we are to look forward to when
the faith in a personal God is extinguished, when prayer and praise are no
longer to be heard, when the belief is universal that with the body dies the soul;
then the false morals of theology will no longer lead the mind astray.*
Holding such a creed might not that arch pessimist, Schopenhauer, well
describe Life as a cheat, and a uselessly interrupting episode in the blissful
repose of nothing. We do not fear these doctrines making any great
impression in this country. Englishmen may go back to Roman Catholicism, or
become converted to Mahommedanism or Buddhism, but they are not likely to
accept such a creed of negations. And there is one consolation in these and the
like speculations. As their authors have descended into the lowest depths of
scepticism and materialism it is to be hoped that, as they can no lower go, they
will begin to ascend into the regions of life, light, and immortality.

Physical Science is wholly incompetent to deal with mans moral and

spiritual nature. There is a science of Mind as well as a science of Physics.
These sciences, as Lord Bacon has well shown, are distinct. For in the analysis
of Matter you cannot reach Mind, so from Mind you cannot reach Matter. The
Physicist recognizes physical facts, the Metaphysician moral and spiritual
facts. One deals with the objective, the other with the subjective. If there is a
spiritual life there must be spiritual facts, and the verification of these facts
must be from within, and not from without. Now, Faraday, as a scientific man,
recognized both. But Professor Huxley speaks as a man of science, and only as
such, when he says, That the man of science has learned to believe in
justification, not by faith, but by verification. The truth is, we must render
unto Science the things that belong to Science, and to Faith the things that
belong to Faith.24

Little by little, the handful of British scientists who supported Darwins new views
grew in number. In More Criticism on Darwin (1872), Huxley wrote:

as time has slipped by, a happy change has come over Mr. Darwins
critics. The mixture of ignorance and insolence which, at first, characterized a
large proportion of the attacks with which he was assailed, is no longer the sad
distinction of anti-Darwinian criticism. Instead of abusive nonsense, which
merely discredited its writers, we read essays, which are, at worst, more or less

24

Davey, 16, 17.

intelligent and appreciative; while, sometimes, like that which appeared in the
North British Review for 1867, they have a real and permanent value.25

Many historians pass off the countering of Darwins ideas as religious

protectionism.

Walter E. Houghton has published a sympathetic analysis of the Victorian

mind, showing how Darwinism and evolution contributed to anxiety by
raising the fear of atheism and its corollaries, immorality and revolution, and
by inflicting the pain of doubt that came from successive retrenchments before
scientific explanation.26

As then, so today, the concerns over the effects of naturalism are seen merely as
science against faith. This framing of the debate is the real success of philosophical
naturalism. It tended to separate the magisteriums of science and faith, as if the two
realms had nothing to do with one another and could be only maintained if kept separate.
Though Thomas Huxley and John Tindall were not totally opposed to faith, they both
argued that science should be carried out by specialist expertsclergymen should focus
on being experts in their own, separate, fields of theology and pastoral care. Two
American books made things worse, purporting to show that religion had held science

25

Thomas Huxley, More Criticism on Darwin and Administrative Nihilism (New York: D. Appleton

and Company, 1872), p. 5, 6.

26

James R. Moore, The post-Darwinian controversies: a study of the Protestant struggle to come to

terms with Darwin in Great Britain and America 18701900 (Cambridge: Cambridge University Press,
1979), 103.

back throughout history: John Drapers History of the Conflict between Religion and
Science (1875) and Andrew Whites The Warfare of Science with Theology in
Christendom (1876).

The rhetoric of this group of professionalisers, and their growing

prominence within the sciences meant that by the 1870s and 1880s, the
sciences and religion were increasingly seen as utterly separate and
distinct.27

Science and faith suffered a divorce, and the children of that broken marriage began
to adapt to their new frame of reference.

Cannon [has] argued that the publication of Darwins Origin of Species in

1859 led to the fragmentation of modern culture, for it resulted in the demise of
the truth complex, a universal norm for truth built on the corpuscular theories
of Robert Boyle and the philosophic triumphs of Isaac Newton.28

Crisis of Faith
Bert James Loewenberg writes:

27

Aileen Fyfe, Dept. of History, National University of Ireland, Galway and John van Wyhe, Fellow,

NUS; Researcher, History & philosophy of science, Cambridge University, accessed at

http://www.victorianweb.org/science/science&religion.html 10/11/2011.
28

Walter (Susan) Cannon, Science and Culture: The Early Victorian Period (New York: Folkestone,

1978) 3, 268, cited in Bernard V. Lightman (ed.), Victorian Science in Context (Chicago and London: The
University of Chicago Press, 1997), 5.

The Darwinian conflict was not simply a conflict between ideas, but a
conflict between men. It was not a struggle between reason and emotion; it was
a struggle among complex psychological states contingent upon both. The
sources fully record the causes of unrest incident to social change and
scientific speculation, but they fail to record the shattering impact on the
human spirit itself.29

Coupled with the shifting of assumptions in the interpretation of science was the
scientific assault on Scripture itself. Guizots Meditations on the Essence of
Christianity, Strausss Leben Jesu, and John Henry Newmanns Apologia pro vita sua
occasioned the writing of The Crisis of Faith, an 1864 article in The National Review.30
The author recognized the repetitive nature of challenges to faith, but opined: The
present crisis of faith is far deeper and wider than any since the Reformationperhaps
we might say, since the apostolic age.31 Study of Scripture was subsumed under new

29

Bert James Loewenberg, The Mississippi Valley Historical Review, vol. 28 (1942), 358.

30

J. M., Crisis of Faith, The National Review, vol. 19 (London: Chapman and Hall, 1864).

31

The Crisis of Faith, The National Review, vol. 19, [Nov. 1864] 252. He adds: Lessing and

Schleiermacher were only Spinoza in disguise. Coleridge was but Schelling done into English. In Maurice,
we have the Cambridge Platonists again. Were not Chillingworth forgotten, Newman and the Tractarians
could never show their face. What do Strauss and what do the Tubingen school offer but minor varieties of
the old exploded rationalism? If Germany has recovered from Eichhorn and Gesenius, England will
recover from Colenso. And if we have forgotten the Deists of the last century, what is to keep in memory
the Freethinkers and Latitudinarians of this ? This mode of dealing with the phenomena of our time may
satisfy a theologian whose critical discernment just enables him to divide mankind into two classes
Infidels and Christiansand who binds up all literature under these two labels, as he fuses all the books

forms of biblical scholarship and science no longer sought to think Gods thoughts after
Him but to aimed to explain the natural world through the lense of philosophical
naturalism.32 Yet faith survived and it still survives.

On Balance
The literature on the crisis of faith in the Victorian world is immense. Yet recent
evidence has emerged, showing that the crisis of doubt was also a factor.33 Timothy
Larson portrays the dissatisfaction of notable Victorian skeptics with doubt as a fuel for
living life long-term and how they returned to faith. For many, the controversy between
science and faith could only be resolved by accepting both. The harmonization of the two
takes different forms and is the subject for future treatment.

of the Hebrew and Greek Scriptures into one Bible. But how weak and false it is can be no secret to
anyone who can really compare the present with the past; and is dimly felt, if not confessed, in the evident
alarm of all churches and the religious suspense of intellectual and scholarly men everywhere. Whoever
can look beneath the surface must be aware that the present crisis of faith is far deeper and wider than any
since the Reformationperhaps we might say, since the apostolic age; deeper, as reaching more
fundamental problems; wider, as affecting the inner life of the whole civilised world. He will not be
deceived by the loud voices of unyielding dogmatism, and the hard features of professional advocacy; but
will mark the multiplying signs of spiritual perplexity, and overhear the running whisper of prayer for more
light (The Crisis of Faith, The National Review, vol. 19, [Nov. 1864] 252, 253)
32

John D. Barbour, Versions of Deconversion: Autobiography and the Loss of Faith (Richmond ??,

Virginia: The University Press of Virginia, 1994), 54.

33

Timothy Larson, Crisis of Doubt: Honest Faith in Nineteenth-Century England (Oxford: Oxford

University Press, 2006), 317 p.