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Culture and religion in 1860's England

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In Catholicism, reaction against higher criticism and the liberal movement in Europe

The Christian Mission, later renamed The Salvation Army, is co-founded by William and Catherine Booth in London, England in 1865.

The Church of England scientific establishment, including Darwin’s old Cambridge tutors Sedgwick and Henslow, reacted against the book, though it was well received by liberal clergymen who interpreted natural selection as an instrument of God's design, with the cleric Charles Kingsley seeing it as "just as noble a conception of Deity".[113] In 1860, the publication of Essays and Reviews by seven liberal Anglican theologians diverted clerical attention from Darwin, with its ideas including higher criticism attacked by church authorities as heresy. It included Baden Powell's argument that miracles broke God’s laws, so belief in them was atheistic, and his praise for “Mr Darwin’s masterly volume [supporting] the grand principle of the self-evolving powers of nature”.[114]

The most famous confrontation took place at the public 1860 Oxford evolution debate during a meeting of the British Association for the Advancement of Science. Professor John William Draper delivered a long lecture about Darwin and social progress. The Bishop of Oxford Samuel Wilberforce, who was not opposed to transmutation, then argued against Darwin's explanation. In the ensuing debate Joseph Hooker argued strongly for Darwin and Thomas Huxley established himself as “Darwin’s bulldog” – the fiercest defender of evolutionary theory on the Victorian stage. Both sides came away feeling victorious, but Huxley went on to make much of his claim that on being asked by Wilberforce whether he was descended from monkeys on his grandfather’s side or his grandmother’s side, Huxley muttered: “The Lord has delivered him into my hands” and replied that he “would rather be descended from an ape than from a cultivated man who used his gifts of culture and eloquence in the service of prejudice and falsehood”.[115] Huxley portrayed a polarisation between religion and science and used Darwinism to campaign against the authority of the clergy in education.[113]

Darwin’s illness kept him away from the public debates, though he read eagerly about them and mustered support through correspondence. Asa Gray persuaded a publisher in the United States to pay royalties, and Darwin imported and distributed Gray’s pamphlet Natural Selection is not inconsistent with Natural Theology.[116] In Britain, friends including Hooker[117] and Lyell[118] took part in the scientific debates which Huxley pugnaciously led to overturn the dominance of clergymen and aristocratic amateurs under Owen in favour of a new generation of professional scientists. Owen mistakenly claimed certain anatomical differences between ape and human brains, and accused Huxley of advocating “Ape Origin of Man”. Huxley gladly did just that, and his campaign over two years was devastatingly successful in ousting Owen and the “old guard”.[119] Darwin’s friends formed The X Club and helped to gain him the honour of the Royal Society’s Copley Medal in 1864.[118]