At the inaugural meeting of the British Association for the Advancement of Science (BA) at York in 1831, the president, the Reverend W.V. Harcourt, proclaimed that the discussion of ‘religious and political topics’ was forbidden; nothing, it was suggested, would be ‘more destructive’ to the fledgling association than their introduction.Footnote 1 However, prohibiting the discussion of religious topics from the association had no effect beyond the confines of official functions. And, from the earliest meetings of the British Association, it became customary for local and visiting preachers and men of science to sermonize on science, religion and the association in the churches and halls of the host town or city around the time of the visit. There was no official British Association sermon, and the association did not endorse the range of Sunday activities that surrounded it. But still, the Sunday of the British Association meeting – when all official business was suspended and members were free to engage in various acts of worship – is an indelible part of the history of the association. Its importance was secured, particularly, after the organizers of the week-long ‘parliament of science’ more rigidly adopted a Wednesday-to-Wednesday format, leaving Sunday as the mid-point in the association's week.
This paper focuses on the 1870s, the decade most implicated in the ‘conflict thesis’ – the idea of eternal warfare between science and religion. As Geoffrey Cantor has argued, it was in the 1870s that conflict ‘took root’ and ‘science became a weapon to be wielded in public attacks on religion’.Footnote 2 Implicated, too, in the ‘conflict thesis’ is John Tyndall's infamous ‘Belfast Address’ to the 1874 meeting of the British Association. Tyndall's perceived scientific materialism was viewed as an attack on the fundamental tenets of Christianity and shook ‘contemporaries in a manner almost incomprehensible today’.Footnote 3 Much discussion of the association in the 1870s is dominated by reflection on Tyndall's remarks and, according to Ann Hopper, his address created an ‘air of suspicion and sense of unease’ that surrounded the association and ‘lingered for years’, affecting ‘their public image.’Footnote 4
Little attention, however, has been paid to the sermons preached at the association – who was preaching, what they were saying and to what audience. This paper addresses this imbalance and focuses on the range of sermons preached in connection with the British Association meetings in the 1870s. In particular, attention is given to the differing views on the relationship between science and religion in the homiletic record, and the rhetoric of ‘science–religion conflict’ following John Tyndall's 1874 ‘Belfast Address’. The paper concludes with some general remarks on the implications the sermons have for any general thesis of nineteenth-century secularization.
Science and sermons: preaching in Victorian Britain
The age of Queen Victorian was the ‘golden age of preaching’, with Hammond estimating that over fifty thousand sermons were preached every week within the Established Church alone.Footnote 5 The Baptist minister Charles Spurgeon's Sunday sermon was published weekly, reportedly selling 25,000 copies at a time.Footnote 6 Sermons, and pulpit culture, played an important role in the social and religious life of the Victorians.Footnote 7 Yet comparatively little attention has been given to the study of sermons in the context of science.Footnote 8 Certainly, the vast array of sermons preached at the British Association has received no attention, with the exception of the association's 1860 and 1874 meetings.Footnote 9 Thomas Henry Huxley recognized the cultural power of the sermon, naming his collection of essays, addresses and reviews ‘Lay Sermons’, aware that the ‘double meaning was provocative’. He even took advantage in the late 1860s of the influence of Sunday pulpits, extolling the ‘wonders of science’ and instilling a new reverence in the working class in his Sabbath sermons at Covent Garden.Footnote 10
The record of sermons preached at the British Association, from 1831, is fragmentary, although the number of surviving accounts increases significantly from the mid-1850s, and there are several published accounts for each year.Footnote 11 This study draws largely on published accounts between 1870 and 1879, and where gaps in the homiletic record exist they have been filled with coverage from local and national newspapers. However, as the homiletic literature of 1874 refers almost exclusively to Tyndall's ‘Belfast Address’ this has been excluded from the analysis.Footnote 12 In the 1870s Anglican preachers dominate the record, although Unitarians are particularly prominent, followed by Congregationalists, Presbyterians, Baptists and Methodists (see Table 1).Footnote 13 Catholic sermons directly addressing the British Association are rare, and this is consistent with Wolffe and Sheetz-Nguyen's studies; published accounts are scarce, but where present they are usually political or ‘take a defensive posture’ to explain Catholic doctrine.Footnote 14 The first sermon to be easily identified as Catholic was addressed to the British Association at the 1897 Toronto meeting.Footnote 15
Table 1. The number of available sermons preached during the British Association meetings of 1870–1879, excluding 1874
The religious geography of nineteenth-century Britain impacted upon who, or what, was preached during the British Association meeting.Footnote 16 For example, different regions had distinct preaching cultures.Footnote 17 But, more significantly, space, or local cultures, were decisive in shaping homilies, as the content of sermons was often inflected by the character of the host town or city, with many preachers featuring prominent local men of science or notable local discoveries in their homilies.Footnote 18 Sermons also reflected temporal trends, from commentary on the most recent utterances of the British Association president to, more commonly, advances or controversies in science.Footnote 19
In the nineteenth century, a preacher's denomination impacted the style, and content, of a sermon. Nonconformist ministries, broadly, placed greater emphasis on exposition of the Gospels, positioning the homily at the heart of the service.Footnote 20 Scots Presbyterians, too, placed much greater emphasis on the preaching of the Word over any other sacraments.Footnote 21 In contrast, unlike the Nonconformist or Presbyterian pulpit, preaching in the Established Church was more formally regulated, especially after the introduction of the 1874 Public Regulation Act which sought to moderate ritualism in the Church.Footnote 22 In the Anglican tradition the sermon marked the transition between the ‘preparation’ and ‘consecration’ of the Eucharist, and was subservient to it. Yet, despite these subtle differences, preaching was generally the most important role for many ministers.Footnote 23
Christiane d'Haussy has shown that sermons satisfied both religious and secular functions.Footnote 24 On the one hand, the religious role of sermons involved proclamation, instruction and (re)confirmation of God's Word to the congregation. On the other, sermons provided political and social instruction, or even entertainment.Footnote 25 However, imparting religious truths – teaching – was perhaps the most important function of any sermon. Certainly, sermons preached at the British Association were almost always didactic, instructing the congregation on the relationship between science and religion.
Sermons preached at the association not only reflected the attitudes and beliefs of preachers but were ‘responsive to the expectations and sensibilities of those listening’.Footnote 26 This was not a normal Sunday service, as considerably more time was invested in preparation of a sermon that was to be preached at the association than on the average Sunday.Footnote 27 Owen Chadwick's description of the rustic country parish, or even George Eliot's country congregation, ‘of quiet perceptions, undiseased by hypothesis’, are quite different settings to that of the annual convocation of the ‘parliament of science’.Footnote 28 The preachers who sermonized to the members of the British Association knew their audience; they were aware that their discourses would be widely published and digested.
Further, the pulpit provided an opportunity for preachers to broaden their reputation – either locally or nationally. Charles Pritchard, for example, became known as the association ‘chaplain’ given his frequent appearance in the Sunday pulpits during BA meetings.Footnote 29 The pulpit also provided an important opportunity for preachers to discourse on their view of the relationship between science and religion to some of the leading figures in British science. This was a rare chance: the association's peripatetic cycle was lengthy and return visits limited.
The significance attached to the sermons meant that, while there is no evidence that the British Association had an official sermon, the distinction between official and unofficial is difficult to discern. For example, the 1875 BA president, Sir John Hawkshaw, privately requested the publication of Henry Crosskey's sermon, preached during the 1875 Bristol meeting of the BA.Footnote 30 Also, members of the association were often invited to preach in the local pulpits.Footnote 31 And, at times when services were attended by leading members of the association, or indeed preached by leading members, such as William Dallinger's discourse at the 1884 Montreal meeting of the British Association, the local press could not easily distinguish between the British Association and private views, of a leading member, made public.Footnote 32 In the eyes of the local press, this was ‘the British Association on its knees’.Footnote 33 For example, at the infamous 1860 Oxford meeting, the Broad Churchman Frederick Temple preached a sermon to the members of the association, loosely in support of evolution.Footnote 34 However, Temple's sermon was not officially authorized by the association, although the ‘High Church’ Christian Remembrancer responded to it as if it was.Footnote 35
The British Association Devotional Meeting, too, blurred the line between official association business and associated religious activity. This was not, in any sense, an official service, nor were the sermon or prayers offered sanctioned by the association. But, beginning in the 1860s, an invitation would be extended to BA members and the public, via a circular delivered during the meeting, or as an invitation sent every year, without fail, to the association's secretary.Footnote 36 Organized by John Hall Gladstone, the Christian educationalist and chemist, who attended over fifty British Association gatherings, the meetings were evangelical in tone.Footnote 37 The Devotional was non-denominational and attended by various leading members and local secretaries, including Balfour, Gladstone and the Canadian John William Dawson; members were frequently leafleted during the sections and in the refreshment rooms.Footnote 38 Thus the boundaries between what was official and what was considered official were not always clear, certainly in the eyes of the public.
The sermons come in a range of formats, including individually published sermons, reports in local and national newspapers and reviews in periodicals, as well as personal reminisces, including diary entries and letters. Documentation of sermons preached at the association, therefore, extends from quite complete accounts to brief descriptions. On top of this, unless explicit in the title, for example Drummond's The Union and Reciprocal Influences of Science and Religion: A Discourse, Occasioned by the Meeting of the British Association in Dublin, or indicated by the press in their coverage, it is difficult to identify sermons that specifically address the British Association.Footnote 39 All of this makes defining the conditions for a particular discourse to be considered a sermon preached ‘at’ the British Association difficult.Footnote 40 Broadly, those under consideration were preached in the week preceding, the week during, or the week immediately following the visit of the association to a host town or city, and directly address the association's visit or prominent scientific issues. However, this definition is contingent on, and subject to, the particularities of each meeting.
The local press usually carried advertisements explicitly promoting upcoming services.Footnote 41 Frequently these adverts drew attention to the most prestigious services of the day, and often reflected the services that were best attended. This is important. Although sermons were preached in various local churches, halls and meeting rooms of the host city, some venues were more prominent than others. For example, in 1871 the Glasgow divinity professor, John Caird, addressed at the High Kirk of Edinburgh – the Mother Church of Presbyterianism – a congregation ‘largely made up of members of the Association’.Footnote 42 Similarly, it is reported that at Brighton the Devotional Meeting was held at the magnificent Royal Pavilion – the same venue in which W.B. Carpenter gave his Presidential Address – and this, too, was ‘very well attended’ by members of the association.Footnote 43 However, beyond merely advertising the association's visit or the sermons preached at the BA, the provincial press, at the time of any meeting, often provided an exhaustive list of the services and preachers who spoke on topics related to the association. This varied by city, but is often the most profitable means by which to explore the religious discourse preached at the association.Footnote 44
With this in mind, it is pertinent to turn to the content of the sermons and outline the varying views on the relationship between science and religion, before exploring the ‘rhetoric of conflict’ in the 1870s and the broad reaction to Tyndall.
Sermons preached at the association: relating science and religion
John Tyndall's 1874 ‘Belfast Address’ was shocking, not only in its perceived materialism, but in the assertion that all religious ‘schemes and systems’ must ‘submit to the control of science’.Footnote 45 Explicit in Tyndall's pronouncement was an attempt to ‘police the boundaries between science and religion’.Footnote 46 However, Tyndall's view on the relationship between science and religion was antithetical to that held by many of those who preached at the association in the 1870s. This is important. As Brooke and Cantor have argued, religious beliefs materialize ‘in the discussion of scientific methodology’, or in the acceptance of a theory, or in the reaction to science more broadly. As such, an awareness of how these preachers related science and religion is crucial in understanding their later reaction to Tyndall's address, and the British Association more broadly, in the 1870s.Footnote 47
However, this is not without difficulty. Brooke, again, has warned against discussing science and religion in ‘essentialist terms’ that obfuscate understanding by ‘importing anachronistic boundaries’.Footnote 48 For many, science and religion were not discrete entities; the ‘sacred and the secular’ were in unison.Footnote 49 Discussion, then, of the relationship between science and religion is not wholly appropriate, especially in cases where the individuals did not recognize any separation. But at the same time, many of the preachers did discuss science and religion in discrete terms, before commenting on how they were or were not related; insight into these views is important. Mindful of this caveat, it is appropriate to turn to the sermons preached at the association in the 1870s, and analyse the different ways in which science–religion relations were configured.
Often a preacher's view on the relationship between science and religion was evident from the opening page of the published account, as the sermons, regardless of denomination, were always framed by a didactic biblical passage. This reflected the pedagogical purpose of the sermons; the authors intended to instruct the congregation on science–religion relations.Footnote 50 In his survey of memorial sermons in the nineteenth century, Wolffe notes the preference for Old Testament texts in ministering to the congregation on a particular theological point.Footnote 51 This broadly accords with the sermons preached at the British Association in the 1870s, with selections from the Book of Psalms dominating.
Frequently, the preacher would also use the opening passage to structure his discourse, often rhetorically linking the beginning with the end, and relate science to religion. A suitable example is the 1870 sermon of the Reverend Abraham Hume, honorary local secretary for the association, who quoted Psalm 100:24, 25, ‘O Lord, how manifold are thy works! In wisdom hast thou made them all; the earth is full of thy riches. So is the great and wide sea, wherein are things creeping innumerable.’Footnote 52 Hume used the passage to argue that ‘God's works’ – ‘God's books’ of nature and Scripture – both reveal him, and are allies.Footnote 53 More explicit, the Anglican Charles Coombe, speaking at the 1879 Sheffield meeting, used Acts 7:26 with Psalm 34:3, ‘Sirs, ye are brethren; why do ye wrong one to another? O magnify the Lord with me, and let us exalt His name together.’Footnote 54 Coombe employed the texts, five years after Tyndall's address, to argue against antagonism between science and religion; in his eyes both should stop ‘maligning, biting and devouring’ each other as they were closely related.Footnote 55
However, beyond the focus on individual accounts, it is possible to map three broad configurations of science–religion relations evident in the sermons examined here. These three ‘positions’ on the relationship between science and religion are dominant in the record throughout the 1870s.
First, for some, the relationship between science and religion was underpinned by the idea that they were essentially separate entities. As an example, the Anglican vicar of All Saints’, Bradford, Henry Leach, viewed science and religion as belonging to two exclusive spheres – one concerned with theology, the other the physical world.Footnote 56 Leach separated science and religion, and acknowledged conflict as an outcome as he recognized that ‘discords’ between the two are to be expected ‘when the different spheres of science and religion and the limited nature of our human faculties are taken into account’.Footnote 57 Both spheres were ultimately concerned with separate ideas, methods and questions. This, we might suggest, approximates to Ian Barbour's ‘independence’ strategy, which he characterizes as a loose movement that upheld the Bible as a divine, but fallible, record, and which was also suspicious of natural theology as a way of knowing God – as ‘it relies on human reason’.Footnote 58 One could not learn about God from nature. Lightman has identified this particular view with liberal Anglicans in the later half of the nineteenth century who utilized it as a strategy to protect religion from the incursions of science and vice versa.Footnote 59 Curiously, Leach was the only preacher in the sermons of the 1870s to explicitly identify with this position, despite the association's close historical connection to this view.Footnote 60
Unitarians, too, played an important role in the history of the British Association in the nineteenth century and had much in common with liberal Anglicans. Throughout the sermons preached at the association in the 1870s, many of the Unitarian preachers espoused a science–religion position similar to that of Leach. Yet, crucially, there were subtle differences that set them apart. Speaking in 1870, for example, the itinerant preacher Charles Wicksteed, part of the ‘new school’ in English Unitarianism, was content to separate science and religion into the spheres of physical and spiritual knowledge as they were different modes of God's voices, and should not be judged against each other.Footnote 61 However, where many liberal Anglicans maintained that science could know nothing of God, Wicksteed asserted that we ‘fear to trust the voices separately’ – as nature, too, was divine. For many Unitarians, science and religion were different forms of divine knowledge of God.
Taking this farther, the Unitarian-socialist William Sharman in 1877 Plymouth, in the context of conflict, noted that there was no need for reconciliation between science and religion as, ultimately, ‘the service of science has been the service of God’. Science uncovered the fundamental truth that ‘God is law’ and there was little want for a dogmatic, ‘outworn theory of magical Christianity’.Footnote 62 This accords with much of the work on Unitarians and science in the nineteenth century, which has shown a broad trend in Unitarianism for ultimate belief in divine law, lingering respect for natural theology, and, as Webb notes, a commitment to the ‘objective and external authority of science and criticism’.Footnote 63
In contrast to the liberal Anglicans and the Unitarians, a number of preachers maintained that science and religion were integrated as inextricably linked forms of knowledge. This approaches something like Ian Barbour's ‘integrationist’ model, which rejects the idea of separate magisteria for science and religion – the two-spheres approach.Footnote 64
As an example, the Reverends Thornton and Hume argued that there was no scriptural warrant to study either God's Works or His Word without reference to the other, as the Book of Revelation and the Book of Nature were divine and part of the same great truth.Footnote 65 Science and its conclusions ‘had to be limited by religion’.Footnote 66 In the same sense, the Anglican Reverend Samuel Potter, in an ‘able sermon’, commented that science independent of religion was ‘power without guidance’, and a ‘profound mistake’.Footnote 67 Separating science and religion was dangerous as, according to the Methodist preacher and theologian William Burt Pope, nature was only a partial revelation and God's personality could not be known, except through Revelation.Footnote 68 Revelation was crucial, as it could provide a fuller interpretation of nature and, more importantly, offer salvation where nature could not.Footnote 69 Christian knowledge was joined, but superior, to science and could lay ‘a bridle on the headstrong passions which are so strong as urgent to hurry us to sin’.Footnote 70
But, returning to Brooke and Cantor, how did the views of the Unitarians, liberal Anglicans or ‘integrationists’ affect their reaction to either science or the association?Footnote 71 For the ‘integrators’, the unity of science and religion, broadly, tempered the extent to which they would permit the use of speculation in science; many expressed the views that ‘physical and experimental science’, the inductive sciences – the theories of Darwin – had sought to ‘destroy religion’.Footnote 72 Take, for example, the Lord Bishop of Chichester, a High Churchman, preaching at the association in 1872, who argued that it would be ‘retrograde’ for a believer to ‘get his ideas of religion from speculation and experiment’ as neither nature nor science could ‘interpret the Bible, for they were not intended to do so, but the Bible could throw a marvellous light on nature’.Footnote 73 Speaking in 1875 the Anglican Robert Main, astronomer at the Radcliffe Observatory, also noted that speculative science was dangerous, and if science was modest it would not reach ‘beyond its province’.Footnote 74
The ‘integrationist’ position was antithetical to that expressed by the liberal Anglicans, the Unitarians or, more broadly, the scientific naturalists.Footnote 75 The ‘integrationists’ were also perhaps the fiercest critics of Tyndall. In contrast, the Unitarians were, loosely, more permissive of ‘speculative science’. At Bristol, for example, the Unitarian Henry William Crosskey, active BA member and geologist, critiqued theologians who were ‘busily twisting and ingeniously contorting phrases in the vain attempt to combine opinions they have imagined to be religious’; facts, he argued, were ‘divine’ and stood alone.Footnote 76 Science was unbounded, as it was just another form of divine knowledge. The liberal Anglican Henry Leach, too, encouraged unlimited speculation and progress through science; men of science should freely explore the ‘boundless region’ before them.Footnote 77
These three ‘positional’ readings from the sermons preached at the association – or indeed the labels attached – are not absolute, but reflect the relative degree of emphasis that each group of preachers placed on the relationship between science and religion. Often these views, and the rhetoric used to frame them, are rather more fluid, contingent on time and place.Footnote 78 But they do have value, and are useful in mapping the broad views on the configuration of science–religion relations in the literature. And, as stated, an awareness of how preachers viewed the relationship between science and religion aids understanding of their reactions to science and the association in the 1870s – this includes Tyndall's ‘Belfast Address’. With this in mind, it is appropriate to turn to the issue of conflict in the context of the sermons preached at the British Association in the 1870s. Particular attention is given to the rhetoric of science–religion conflict and the impact of Tyndall on the association.
Science, religion and sermons: the rhetoric of conflict
Conspicuous, as a topic, in many of the sermons preached at the association in 1870 is acknowledgement, at least in some form, of antagonism between science and religion. Yet, at the same time, the sermons share a common refutation of an essential conflict between science and religion; rather, any antagonism is seen as essentially false and temporary and not representative of the relationship between science and religion. Where instances of antagonism occurred, responsibility was attributed to a range of factors and individuals. Crucially, these factors shifted over time and a notable feature of the literature is that the tone of discourse relating to science–religion antagonism – the rhetoric – changes throughout the decade, especially in response to Tyndall's ‘Belfast Address’. There is perhaps value in Mrs Whitefield's proclamation, in George Bernard Shaw's Man and Superman, that ‘nothing has been right since that speech that Professor Tyndall made at Belfast’.Footnote 79 Some carefully selected examples will help explain.
A defining feature of ‘conflict rhetoric’ in the early 1870s, before Tyndall's 1874 attack, was the practice of preachers explaining any science–religion antagonism as a function of a range of factors – including human error, inept theology, overeagerness, a lack of full knowledge of both science and religion, or inattention to the ‘varieties of God's voices’. For example, in 1870 Liverpool the Anglican Reverend Hume, ardent educationalist, noted that where the results of science ‘appear at variance’ with Revelation then there is a need for ‘caution’ and ‘re-examination of the ground on both sides, and for clearing away the false human inferences which, by a mixture of boldness and perseverance, we often attach to true premises.’Footnote 80 This call for patience, and awareness of human error, was common.
Inept theology, ‘setting Book against Book’, was how the moderate Reverend Thornton, Pantonian Professor of Theology at Glenalmond, framed any perceived antagonism between science and religion:Footnote 81
inconsistencies between the two vanish before the beam of holier light, and prove to be but the mere antagonism of imperfect thesis, or the shadows cast by the mountain-tops of Divine power and love into the deep valleys of human waywardness and human ignorance.Footnote 82
What was necessary, according to Thornton, was study of what ‘revelation really says’ and a search for ‘what nature really says’.Footnote 83 Conflict, too, was also framed in the context of overeagerness on the part of men of science in their dogmatic pursuit of the results of science. At the 1872 British Association Devotional Meeting, for example, the congregation were reminded that all investigations must be conducted in a ‘reverent and humble tone’, with awareness that the pursuit of knowledge should not be so important as to ‘lose sight’ of personal religion; it was, after all, ‘best to walk by faith and not sight’.Footnote 84
Henry Leach of All Saint's, Bradford, too, in 1873, framed difficulties between science and religion within the context of man's insufficient knowledge of nature and God. Antagonism was to be expected, and one should not ‘conceal or exaggerate’ this, as the ‘partial nature of our human knowledge’ made it inevitable.Footnote 85 The Unitarian Wicksteed attributed the ‘want of sympathy which is so often said to exist between the man of religion and the man of science’ to the ‘imperception of the number and varieties of God's voices’.Footnote 86 Similarly, Paxton Hood, a liberal Congregationalist, noted that between the professors of theology and religion and the professors and teachers of science there is ‘hostility’. Yet ‘there need not be’; although both have been ‘intolerant’ and uttered ‘strange and unworthy sentiments’ there are, echoing Wicksteed, ‘many ways of looking at the great House of Nature’.Footnote 87 Conflict, in both instances, was conceived as the result of inattention to the different modes of God's Word; proponents of any antagonism were not paying attention to what God was saying in his Word and Works.
However, the way of attributing blame for science–religion antagonism – explained as the result of human error, bad theology, overeagerness, insufficient knowledge or inattention to the ‘varieties of God's voices’ – loses currency after 1874. After Tyndall's ‘Belfast Address’ the tone of the sermons changes, and crucially, in contrast to the pre-Tyndall association, there is a tendency for preachers to level accusation for promoting science–religion conflict at a distinct group, or groups, particularly the scientific naturalists.Footnote 88 Several examples, spanning the second half of the decade, will help elucidate this point.
At the 1875 Bristol meeting, the first post-Tyndall association gathering, the rhetoric firmly places the responsibility for promoting a science–religion conflict in the hands of a distinct section of the scientific community. First, at the Devotional Meeting – attended, we are told, by ‘many of the leading scientific men’ – J.H. Gladstone attacked ‘infidel writers and infidel preachers’ who maintained that science and revelation were opposed to one another, utilizing Galton's English Men of Science (1874) to refute the idea that ‘the majority of scientific men are unbelievers’.Footnote 89 Similarly, the language used in the sermons by the Reverends George Deane and Robert Main is also revealing. Any perceived conflict, according to Deane, a Congregationalist preaching to a packed congregation, was the result of the pernicious influence of a dangerous school of thought, comprising ‘superficial thinkers who will accept as proved facts the speculations, and inchoate theories, and general vagaries of scientific theory’.Footnote 90 And in Main's eyes these dangerous speculators were ‘infidels’ and as dangerous as the ‘soul-destroying doctrines of materialistic Epicurism’.Footnote 91 More forceful, the conservative Anglican Reverend Witherby directly attacked the scientific naturalists; it was ‘sadly true’ that many ‘advanced students of nature’ were ‘backwards in the school of revelation’.Footnote 92 And these most learned philosophers were, ‘if not atheists, yet atheistical’, and Tyndall and Huxley especially ‘were decidedly opposed to the notion of God’.Footnote 93
Charles Reichel, professor of ecclesiastical history in the University of Dublin, despaired that never, perhaps, ‘since men began to think’ was ‘there such a crisis as that which seems impending’.Footnote 94 Reichel framed conflict as not between science and religion, but between Christianity and the blank face of atheism, ‘which is becoming fashionable’. The worship of nature, in his eyes, ‘whether scientific, or aesthetic, or voluptuous, is the death's head of annihilation’.Footnote 95 Reichel's attack was firmly aimed at the perceived proponents of ‘pantheistic materialism’, the scientific naturalists who deny the ‘possibility of any actual knowledge’ of God.Footnote 96
Pearson, an Anglican and fellow of St John's, Cambridge, admitted that one did not have to ‘travel far in order to find assertions of absolute materialism’ and hostility to religion.Footnote 97 Christian men could be forgiven for suspicion of science when men of science ‘confuse their own inferences with nature's facts’, when they were dogmatic, or their exclusive attention to a ‘special class of inquiries’ makes them slow to give weight to ‘considerations which lie outside’.Footnote 98 Again, Pearson's suspicion – and the language used – was targeted at the biologists and ‘professors of materialism’ who – without empirical basis – claim that life is ‘but dots of animated jelly’ without giving consideration to the ‘whence, and why, and whither’.Footnote 99
Also Samuel Potter, speaking in 1879 Sheffield, rejected the idea that the British Association was hostile to religion, or that there was a fundamental collision between the ‘odium theologicum’ and ‘odium scientificum’. Rather, Potter, vicar of Hollis Croft, castigated ‘scientific philosophy’, which, in this ‘sceptical age’, was being substituted for true religion. Potter framed conflict within the context of antagonism from the scientific naturalists, with particular concern shown towards the pernicious influence of the ancestors of Lucretius – the Darwinists – the face of ‘modern scepticism’, or ‘unbelief done up in a new dress.’Footnote 100
The incumbent vicar of St Thomas's, Sheffield, and former Cambridge fellow, Charles Coombe, too, refuted a broader conflict between science and religion and echoed Potter and Pearson in noting that any antagonism between science and religion was firmly attributed to a limited number of particular advocates of science.Footnote 101 The ‘lamentations uttered of late by [these] distinguished materialists’ and atheists were vacuous. And, to prove Coombe's point, he quotes George Romanes and his confession that the loss of God has meant that the ‘universe has lost its soul of loveliness’.Footnote 102 The Unitarian Eli Fay refuted Herbert Spencer and John William Draper and their descant on the conflict between science and religion. In Fay's eyes, antagonism was the result of the injurious influence of ‘materialistic tendencies’.Footnote 103
The propensity for preachers to level accusation at a distinct group, or groups, after 1874 in the sermon record is further confirmed by a rudimentary analysis of shifts in labelling. Throughout, labels used to describe the antagonists include ‘dogmatic scientists’, ‘materialists’, ‘atheists’ and, on only one occasion ‘agnostics’ – although this is not directly in the context of according blame.Footnote 104 These labels, it is argued, were used interchangeably, and Huxley and, especially, Tyndall were common targets for criticism. In the available sermons after 1874 the most common labels, or individuals, used in connection with science–religion antagonism include ‘materialists’ (fourteen), atheists/unbelievers (seven), Tyndall and Huxley (eleven) or even Lucretius (four). In contrast, the sermons prior to Tyndall's ‘Belfast Address’ feature these terms much less – ‘atheist’ (three), ‘pantheist’ (two) and ‘materialists’ (two). Importantly, more often the use of these terms in the pre-Tyndall era is largely in the context of broader society, and not necessarily directed at scientists involved in promoting a conflict. The Methodist W.B. Pope, in 1873, for example, rejects the ‘theory of materialism’ which has, of late, been ‘devised among the manifold mediations of men's hearts’; similarly, he shows concern that ‘one of the strangest perversions of man's baffled thought has been the theory that identifies God with His universe’, pantheism.Footnote 105 Yet a thorough exegesis reveals that he is discussing not conflict, but the tendency in science to try and explain all ‘by natural laws’.Footnote 106
Given the influence Tyndall's ‘Belfast Address’ had on the ‘conflict’ discourse around the association, what effect did this have on the reputation of the association? Ann Hopper, speaking in the context of the association in the 1880s, has argued that Tyndall's address ‘lingered for years’ and affected the public image of the association.Footnote 107 Yet the stance adopted by the preachers towards the association, and the rhetoric they used, does not reflect this. Rather, throughout the sermon record in the 1870s, in the context of hostility to religion, the British Association was without exception received favourably; little criticism is ever directed at the association as a body. More often, any criticism is apportioned to the ‘the eccentricities of individual cultivators of science’, of which, in terms of their potentially hostile views, ‘we can say nothing’.Footnote 108 Perhaps this is unsurprising; the association's reputation for ‘holidaymaking’ by ‘men of leisure and long purses’ may have tempered more direct criticism by individuals, keen for their town or city to take advantage of the economic opportunities afforded by the visit.Footnote 109
Yet it is noteworthy that for one Anglican it was difficult to imagine that a body hostile to religion would be associated with the ‘flower of our population … intellectual research, moral worth and social position’.Footnote 110 The association was praised not only for ‘enlarging and defining our conception of the wonderful creations of God’, but, as one Presbyterian noted, for ‘unfolding the behaviour of the material universe’.Footnote 111 The panegyric character of the sermons, favourable to the association as a body, was sustained throughout the decade.Footnote 112
The work of the association, however, was not alone in receiving praise. W.B. Pope in 1873, for example, explicitly commended the association for its practice of turning aside, ‘on the Lord's Day of its working week, to sanctify its scientific pursuits and results by bringing them to the House of God’.Footnote 113 However, Pope added an addendum, regretting that this Sunday was not ‘formally’ set aside as a religious day in the programme of the association.Footnote 114
This rhetoric, which portrays the association in a positive light, is important. For one, it demonstrates that the preachers who sermonized at the association deliberately differentiated between the association and the antagonistic statements of some of its members. This is further proof that responsibility for propagating antagonistic science–religion rhetoric was identified with a particular group, and not with the association as a whole. Also, the benevolent attitude to the association in the 1870s in the record of sermons contrasts greatly with views of the association in the 1830s and 1840s. In these early decades the association was attacked by John Bowden, under John Henry Newman's advice, for embracing natural theology, while the Anglican dean of York, William Cockburn, critiqued the association's ‘liberal’ attitude to Scripture.Footnote 115 Thus by the 1870s, certainly in the material studied here, religious attitudes had shifted, and the association was seen, broadly, as an institution favourable to religions and religious groups.
Concluding remarks
Two arguments have been made in this paper. First, attention has been drawn to the rich cultural value of the sermons preached to the British Association's members in the nineteenth century. I have argued that the sermons preached at the British Association provide a unique body of views on the relationship between science and religion across denominations, time and space. Although individual encounters with sermons attached to the association have been well covered in the literature, broader engagements with the homiletic material, or the culture of preaching in the context of nineteenth-century science, are conspicuous by their absence. Attention to this material, therefore, has the potential to enrich and sharpen understanding of the Victorians at the interface of science, religion and preaching.
Second, the 1870s were a crucial decade for both the British Association and the ‘conflict thesis’, which, according to Cantor, gained currency and momentum in the 1870s.Footnote 116 Despite this assertion, the sermons preached at the association are valuable in revealing a broad objection to an essential conflict between science and religion throughout the 1870s. Crucially, perceived conflict between science and religion was explained as an outcome of a number of factors, from inept theology to human error or overeagerness. However, after Tyndall's 1874 ‘Belfast Address’ more direct responsibility for propagating the rhetoric of science–religion antagonism was firmly laid at a certain group. This group was described using a number of labels, but largely ‘materialists’ or ‘atheists’, with emphasis on the role of individuals including Huxley and Tyndall. This accords with the work of both Frank Turner and Bernard Lightman, who have shown that the ‘scientific naturalists’ were just one group among many vying for cultural control and definition of science.Footnote 117 At the same time the material reappropriates Tyndall. Although his ‘Belfast Address’ was an important event in the 1870s, Hopper's assertion that Tyndall's address created an ‘air of suspicion and sense of unease’ that surrounded the association does not fully capture the particularities of the situation. Again, as the homiletic literature reveals, Tyndall was only one perceived antagonist amongst a larger group. Further, Hopper's second claim that the ‘Belfast Address’ ‘lingered for years’ and affected the ‘public image’ of the association needs to be refined.Footnote 118 Without exception, the association was viewed as a positive brand, with criticism reserved for individuals or groups within the association, and not the body itself.
Finally, it is worthwhile to return to the range of Sunday activities that took place during the British Association meeting. This day, it is argued, is crucial to understanding science–religion relations within the association in the nineteenth century. Secularization, which Brooke defines as ‘the displacement of religious authority and control by civic powers and the loss of beliefs characteristic of religious tradition’, is a term that can be readily applied to science in the 1870s.Footnote 119 With Turner noting that although it was not ‘inevitable, unproblematic or systematically steady’, there is no doubt that the ‘secularization of English and British culture occurred’.Footnote 120 Yet the explanatory power of a ‘secularization thesis’ is diminished in the context of the vast number of Sunday sermons preached at the association. There are a number of problems that need to be resolved.
First, Victorian culture was arguably no less religious in the 1870s than it had been before. As Stewart Brown notes, Britain was a ‘fundamentally Christian nation’ and people ‘attended church Sunday after Sunday, heard sermons, read the Bible’ and sang hymns in their millions.Footnote 121 Similarly, many Victorian scientists were no less religious. The ‘North British Physicists’, brought to our attention by Crosbie Smith, are particularly prominent examples of religiously motivated scientists.Footnote 122 Yet at the same time Harcourt's ‘middle way’ – political and religious neutrality – was sustained and the association forbade religious discussion in sections and, at least rhetorically, in Presidential Addresses. Famously, the association forbade Reverend Watt's paper, a call for peace and cooperation between science and theology, in the Biology Section of the association's meeting in Belfast.Footnote 123
So how is the apparent contradiction solved between a diverse but religious scientific community on the one hand and an exclusion of religion from the association on the other? How did the association appease the religious element of its members within the structure of the meeting, without compromising Harcourt's negotiated via media? This problem is resolved if one considers the range of Sunday activities that took place during the British Association meeting as a ‘spatial’ solution to the ‘association problem’. By spatializing, or segregating, the practice of religious beliefs or metaphysical claims to distinct areas of the public sphere, the association could both fulfil rhetorical duty to neutrality and simultaneously serve the religious needs of its members.
Further evidence is provided by the fact that although the association did not officially endorse the Sunday activities of the British Association, it also did not compromise them. The formal Wednesday-to-Wednesday pattern ensured that Sunday was free from any official association functions, giving its members the opportunity to worship privately. Also, a thorough but necessarily incomplete perusal of the record suggests that over twice as many sermons preached at the association are available for the 1860s and the 1870s than for both the 1850s and the 1880s.Footnote 124 This accords with the broad time period for Turner's general thesis of secularization, and suggests that as the battle for cultural control intensified, the homiletic community attached to the association reciprocated.Footnote 125 Thus spatialization, not a monolithic process of secularization, not only solves the difficulty of an ill-fitting general thesis of secularization, but explains why the vast record of sermons preached at the association contours the Victorian crisis of faith and contest for cultural authority. The connection between science and secularization, as Brooke has recently shown, is rarely ‘simple’.Footnote 126
In conclusion, a focus on the array of sermons preached at the British Association not only expands understanding of the dynamics of an association meeting in the 1870s, but draws attention to the importance of preaching and religious praxis in the lives of the association's members. But more than that, the sermons provide an understanding of the association beyond that of the ‘conflict thesis’ in which Tyndall's ‘Belfast Address’ is implicated. Importantly, a consideration of the association, and how they dealt with the diverse religious culture of the Victorians – by tolerating, but not officially supporting, the Sunday sermons – draws attention to just one institutional response to the challenge of this dynamic ‘secularizing’ age.
