As Darwin had anticipated, and what may have caused his considerable ill health
for many years, the reaction from the Church and the Establishment was hostile. The
first problem was that natural selection left no place for Divine Purpose or Divine
Intervention. The second problem was that even though Darwin had studiously
avoided the subject, in the end the debate always came around to the relationship
between man and ape. His ‘theory’ was decried in the grand cathedrals and the village
churches across Britain. The treatise ‘The Darwinian Theory Examined’, published by
Bickers and Son, takes this criticism to the extreme:
Vast numbers of virtuous vestrymen frighten the old women of their parishes with the
mere mention of his name ... his conspiracy against the peace of the British matron is so
diabolical that even the bishops sometimes thunder against him, and a good number of
people of an old-fashioned way of thinking have a conviction that he ought, either in this
world or another, to be burned.Darwin sent a copy of On the Origin of Species to Robert FitzRoy in recognition of
the opportunity granted him by being chosen to sail with him on the Beagle. Over the
years, and certainly after his marriage, FitzRoy had become even more fundamentalist
in his religious beliefs and the idea that he had provided the vehicle for Darwin’s
theory was a complete anathema to him. He hated the book and wrote back, ‘My
dear old friend, I, at least, cannot find anything “ennobling” in the thought of being
a descendant of even the most ancient Ape’ and he seized upon every opportunity to
denounce the Origin and its author.
In Rome, Darwin was accused of heresy. Pope Pius IX placed the book on the
Index Expurgatorius, which meant that no Catholic could read it. In Britain Cardinal
Manning organized a society to fight this new, ‘so-called science, which declares there
is no God and that Adam was an ape’. The Bishop of Oxford charged that ‘the concept
of natural selection attempts to limit the power of God, the Bible and dishonours
nature – was Darwin proposing that Queen Victoria was related to an ape?’ Darwin’s
former mentor, the Reverend Adam Sedgwick, wrote a scathing review that appeared
in The Spectator in which he expressed his detestation of the theory, and wrote to
Darwin:
I have read your book with more pain than pleasure. Parts of it I admired greatly; parts of it I
laughed until my sides were almost sore, other parts I read with absolute sorrow, because I think
them utterly false and grievously mischievous. – You have deserted – after a start in that tram-
road of solid physical truth – the true path of induction ... There is a moral or metaphysical part
of nature as well as a physical. A man who denies this is deep in the mire of folly.Charles Darwin – On the Origin of Species 179