Accounts of the religious debates sparked by the theory of evolution
tend, almost
inevitably, to focus on the late nineteenth century. Darwinism is treated
as a symbol of the
scientific naturalism that so traumatized Victorian thought. Modern accounts
have shown,
however, that religious thinkers were in the end able to take on board
an evolutionism
purged of its most materialistic tendencies. We tend to assume that in
Britain, at least, the
arguments had largely died down by the end of the nineteenth century. Led
by Aubrey
Moore, the Anglican Church made its accommodation, and Moore's contribution
of an
essay to the volume Lux mundi, edited by Charles Gore in 1889,
symbolized the ability of
even the conservative Anglo-Catholic wing of the Church to move in the
direction of
modernization. In America, of course, the compromise broke down with the
rise of
Fundamentalism in the early twentieth century, but most British commentators
saw the
‘Scopes trial’ of 1925 as a strange transatlantic phenomenon
that was unlikely to have a
parallel in their own country.