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Darwin’s Church*

Published online by Cambridge University Press:  04 January 2016

Paul White
Paul White*
Affiliation:
University of Cambridge
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Extract

From the war of nature, from famine and death … endless forms most beautiful and most wonderful have been, and are being, evolved.

(Charles Darwin, On the Origin of Species)

Much has been made of the roots of Darwinian theory in the work of Thomas Malthus, who argued for the inevitability of strife, suffering and death following on the scarcity of resources and the tendency of populations to multiply without limit. It has been noted that a Malthusian pessimism about human nature re-emerged in the 1830s, darkening the political discussions surrounding the welfare of the poor, and informing the legislation of the Poor Laws in those crucial years in which Darwin formulated his natural selection theory. Historians have also focussed on the harshness of the social Darwinism that was taken up by theorists later in the century, in contrast to the more optimistic, Lamarckian evolution of Herbert Spencer, Peter Kropotkin and others. Yet in the closing passage of Origin of Species, Darwin extended his famous metaphor of the entangled bank, offering a form of redemption through struggle toward higher forms of life.

Type
Research Article
Information
Studies in Church History , Volume 46: God’s Bounty? The Churches and the Natural World , 2010 , pp. 333 - 352
Copyright
Copyright © Ecclesiastical History Society 2010

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Footnotes

*

I would like to acknowledge my indebtedness to Elizabeth Smith for research on Darwin’s involvement in the parish church of Downe, and to the ground-breaking scholarship of James Moore on Darwin and religion.

References

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24 Letter to Ernst Haeckel, 12 April [1867] (Correspondence, ed. Burkhardt, Smith et al., 15: 219).

25 Letter from Leo Lesquereux, 14 December 1864 (ibid. 12: 463).

26 Letter to J. D. Hooker, 19 January [1865] (ibid. 13: 29).

27 On religious belief and practice in the Darwin and Wedgwood families, see Keynes, Randal, Annie’s Box: Charles Darwin, His Daughter, and Human Evolution (London, 2001).Google Scholar

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30 Letter from E. A. Darwin, 18 August [1832] (ibid. 1: 258).

31 Letter to W. D. Fox, [9–12 August 1835] (ibid. 1: 460).

32 Charles Darwin’s Notebooks, 1836–1844, ed. Barrett, Paul et al. (Cambridge, 1987)Google Scholar; letters from Emma Wedgwood, [21–22 November 1838], [23 January 1839], and [c. February 1839] (Correspondence, ed. Burkhardt, Smith et al., 4: 122, 169, 173). See also Darwin’s retrospective account in Autobiography, 85–96, and Moore, James, ‘Of Love and Death:Why Darwin “Gave Up Christianity”’, in idem, ed., History, Humanity, and Evolution (Cambridge, 1989), 195–229.Google ScholarPubMed

33 See Keynes, Annie’s Box, 113–22, 222.

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37 Letter 7776, to J. B. Innes, 29 May [1871] (Darwin Correspondence Project, <http://www.darwinproject.ac.uk/>, accessed 4 January 2009).

38 Letter 11768, from J. B. Innes, 1 December 1878 (Darwin Correspondence Project, http://www.darwinproject.ac.uk/>, accessed 4 January 2009).

39 Letter to J. B. Innes, 1 September [1863] (Correspondence, ed. Burkhardt, Smith et al., 11:616).

40 Letter from S.J. O’H. Horsman, 2 June [1868] (ibid. 16: 556).

41 Letter to J. B. Innes, 15 June [1868] (ibid. 16: 581).

42 Letter to J. B. Innes, 1 December 1868 (ibid. 16: 871).

43 Letter to J. B. Innes, 10 December 1868 (ibid. 16: 888).

44 Letter from J. B. Innes, 18 December 1868 (ibid. 16: 901).

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48 Letter 9122, from Darwin to the Down School Board, [November-December 1873] (Darwin Correspondence Project, <http://www.darwinproject.ac.uk/>, accessed 4 January 2009); Letter from G. S. Ffinden to Emma Darwin, 24 December 1873, cited in Moore,’Darwin of Down’, 471.

49 Letter from Emma Darwin to Innes, J. B., in Stecher, R. M., ‘The Darwin-Innes Letters: The Correspondence of an Evolutionist with his Vicar, 1848—1884’, Annals of Science 17 (1961), 201–58, at 239.Google Scholar

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51 Ibid.

52 Knight, Nineteenth-Century Church, 70–74.

53 Moore,’Darwin of Down’, 473.

54 Letter 12879, to J. W. C. Fegan, [December 1880 – February 1881] (Darwin Correspondence Project, <http://www.darwinproject.ac.uk/>, accessed 4 January 2009).

55 Moore,’Darwin of Down’, 473.

56 Farrar, R., The Life of Frederick Farrar (London, 1904), 109 Google Scholar. See the account of the burial in Desmond and Moore, Darwin, 664—77.

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