He then mentioned Coleridge, who ‘made trial of his age, and succeeded in interest-
ing its genius in the cause of Catholic truth’; Southey’s fiction; and Wordsworth’s
philosophical meditation. He thus anticipates Mill on Wordsworth’s culture of the
feelings, and the role assigned to imaginative literature by Matthew Arnold. A central
passage of the Apologia is from ‘Position of My Mind Since 1845’:
To consider the world in its length and breadth, its various history, the many races of
man, their starts, their fortunes, their mutual alienation, their conflicts; and then their
ways, habits, governments, forms of worship; their enterprises, their aimless courses,
their random achievements and acquirements, the impotent conclusion of long-standing
facts, the tokens so faint and broken, of a superintending design, the blind evolution of
what turn out to be great powers or truth, the progress of things, as if from unreasoning
elements, not towards final causes, the greatness and littleness of man, his far-reaching
aims, his short duration, the curtain hung over his futurity, the disappointments of life,
the defeat of good, the success of evil, physical pain, mental anguish, the prevalence and
intensity of sin, the pervading idolatries, the corruptions, the dreary hopeless irreligion,
that condition of the whole race, so fearfully yet exactly described in the Apostle’s words,
‘having no hope and without God in the world’ – all this is a vision to dizzy and appall;
and inflicts upon the mind the sense of a profound mystery which is absolutely beyond
human solution.
What shall be said to this heart-piercing, reason-bewildering fact? I can only answer
that either there is no Creator, or this living society of men is in a true sense discarded
from His presence .... And so I argue about the world – ifthere be a God, since there is a
God, the human race is implicated in some terrible aboriginal calamity. It is out of joint
with the purposes of its Creator. This is a fact, a fact as true to me as the fact of its
existence; and thus the doctrine of what is theologically called original sin becomes to
me almost as certain as that the world exists, and as the existence of God .... Supposing
then it to be the Will of the Creator to interfere in human affairs, and to make provision
for retaining in the world a knowledge of Himself, so definite and distinct as to be proof
against the energy of human scepticism ....This last is the argument which leads him to belief in the teaching authority of the
Catholic Church.
Charles Darwin
In The Voyage of the Beagle (1845),Charles Darwin(1809–1882) recounts his expe-
rience as ship’s naturalist on an expedition to South America in 1831–6. Like poets
from Wordsworth to Thomas Hardy, he felt he was ‘superior to the common run of
men in noticing things which easily escape attention, and in observing them care-
fully’. Observation led to the theory systematically demonstrated in The Origin of
Species (1859), that species evolve by retaining the characteristics of their most
successful members.
The Descent of Man (1871) assembled new evidence for the old idea that humans
descend from apes; Darwin wrote cautiously but had a great effect. Geology had
shown the earth to be millions of years old. The ‘Higher Criticism’, as it was called to
distinguish it from textual criticism, doubted the historical basis of supernatural
events in scripture. Geology, evolution and scientific history combined to show that
the Bible was not scientific history. Many British Protestants had both an empirical
model of truth and an implicit faith in the literal truth of the Bible. These two simple
notions were now in conflict. If the accounts of Creation in Genesis were neither
scientific nor historical, could they be true? If not, was the New Testament true?
THE VICTORIAN AGE 271