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Published online by Cambridge University Press: 18 January 2010
Essays and Reviews was an immediate sensation when it came out in 1860. It was a collection of essays by seven ‘liberal’ Anglicans, six of them clergymen, who were vilified by their opponents as ‘Septem Contra Christum’ (Seven Against Christ). Essays and Reviews was associated in the public mind with Darwin's Origin of Species which had come out the year before: this is how Samuel Butler sees it in The Way of All Flesh (1903):
It must be remembered that the year 1858 was the last of a term during which the peace of the Church of England was singularly unbroken … I need hardly say that the calm was only on the surface … the wave of scepticism which had broken over Germany was setting towards our own shores, nor was it long, indeed, before it reached them … three works in succession arrested the attention even of those who paid least heed to theological controversy. I mean Essays and Reviews, Charles Darwin's Origin of Species, and Bishop Colenso's Criticisms on the Pentateuch. (Ch. 47)
The main concern of the Essayists was not, however, with science, but with German Biblical Criticism (as Butler implies), though one of them, Baden Powell, welcomed Darwin's theory in passing. Goodwin's Essay is the only one to deal with science at length. But the new Biblical Criticism was important for the relation of science to religion in two ways: first, for these liberal churchmen, the substitution of a historical for a literal reading of the Bible meant that their religion had nothing to fear from scientific discoveries that seemed to contradict the Bible.
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