by Simon Heffer
In The Water-Babies the author creates a universe based on Christianity: Grimes, the chimney-sweep who abuses Tom, also falls in the river, but he goes to hell. Tom seeks to effect the man’s rescue, despite the evil Grimes did to him: and Grimes is duly given an opportunity for redemption. It is the type of world Dr Arnold described to his charges. Kingsley did not doubt the nature and purpose of heaven: the world of the water-babies, which serves as his metaphor for heaven, was filled with
all the little children whom the good fairies take to, because their cruel mothers and fathers will not; all who are untaught and brought up heathens, and all who come to grief by ill-usage or ignorance or neglect; all the little children who are overlaid, or given gin when they are young, or are let to drink out of hot kettles, or to fall into the fire; all the little children in alleys and courts, and tumbledown cottages, who die by fever, and cholera, and measles, and scarlatina, and nasty complaints which no-one has any business to have, and which no-one will have someday, when folks have common sense; and all the little children who have been killed by cruel masters, and wicked soldiers.67
Yet there is another dimension to the book that illustrates Kingsley’s radicalism, and his willingness to embrace the intellectual currents that would precipitate the modern world and advance the secularism that challenged Kingsley’s most deeply held beliefs. The Water-Babies satirises the response to On the Origin of Species, a book Kingsley read before its publication, and which he had welcomed. Writing to Darwin in November 1859, days before publication, Kingsley professed he had ‘long since, from watching the crossing of domesticated animals and plants, learnt to disbelieve the dogma of the permanence of species.’ More to the point, he had ‘learnt to see that it is just as noble a conception of Deity, to believe that He created primal forms capable of self development into all forms needful pro tempore and pro loco, as to believe that He required a fresh act of intervention to supply the lacunas which He Himself had made.’68
The Church of England’s relationship with science in the nineteenth century and before can be gauged by its refusal, until the late 1820s, to countenance the teaching of geology in the universities. Kingsley uses his invention of the water-baby to highlight the need, in evaluating scientific claims, to rely solely on evidence. In answer to the statement ‘but there are no such things as water babies’, Kingsley replies: ‘How do you know that? Have you been there to see? And if you had been there to see, and had seen none, that would not prove that there were none.’69 He states: ‘Wise men know that their business is to examine what is, and not to settle what is not.’70 Kingsley was strongly partisan for Darwin, as shown by his ridiculing of Richard Owen’s attempt to refute the idea of human evolution from apes. Owen had said the hippocampus minor in men proved they could not be descended from simians. Kingsley said there was a ‘hippopotamus test’ that showed whether an ancestor could have been an ape: he called the lobe the ‘hippopotamus major’.71
Evolution is embraced. ‘If he says that it is too strange a transformation for a land-baby to turn into a water-baby, ask him if he has ever heard of the transformation of Syllis, or the Distomas, or the common jelly-fish,’ Kingsley directs his readers to ask a sceptic.72 Mrs Bedonebyasyoudid announces that she may have the power ‘to make beasts into men, by circumstance, and selection, and competition’.73 Evolution brings with it a moral consideration: ‘Whatever their ancestors were, men they are; and I advise them to behave as such, and act accordingly.’ The sanction for not doing so is that Mrs Bedonebyasyoudid would turn a man back into a beast. And for Kingsley, inevitably, there is a further stage in the evolutionary process beyond what happens on earth. Tom ‘went downward into the water; but we, I hope, shall go upward to a very different place.’74 Kingsley tells the tale, but his imagination has been expanded by what Darwin made possible, the clergyman’s ultimate tribute to the scientist. As Darwin, quoting Kingsley, noted in the preface to the third edition of On the Origin of Species in 1861, ‘a celebrated author and divine has written to me that “he has gradually learnt to see that it is just as noble a conception of the Deity to believe that He created a few original forms capable of self-development into other needful forms, as to believe that He required a fresh act of creation to supply the voids caused by the action of His laws”.’75
Kingsley was not the only clergyman to support Darwin’s views, or to talk of the importance of scientific inquiry. The headmaster of Rugby, Frederick Temple, who would later become Bishop of Exeter and of London, gave a sermon at the June 1860 meeting in Oxford encouraging theologians to celebrate the strengths of scientific research rather than seek out what they saw to be its weaknesses. God was, he reminded his audience, responsible for science just as for the Bible. The journey further into secularism and rationalism had, however, begun. When Darwin published The Descent of Man in 1871, and introduced into the evolutionary picture mankind itself, the confrontation would become more intense and open. Adam and Eve would be written out of the script, and replaced, as man’s ancestors, by apes. That something such as this would happen was apparent not merely from the publication of On the Origin of Species, but from the earlier work of Lyell and Lamarck.
Darwin’s works, as they were disseminated among scientists across Europe, spread a message of secularism that it had not been his intention to advance. As Chadwick has put it:
Not many men would read The Origin, or understand it if they read it. The secularising force was not Darwin the author of the book, or of several books. It was Darwin the symbol, Darwin the name which stood for a process, the name which was heard from one side to the other in the polemics of secularist platforms or journals, an imaginary Darwin, a vague Darwin, without the comfortable homely substantial outlines of the real naturalist of a Kentish village, but however imaginary and however vague still bearing a direct relationship to a scientific achievement, which few quite understood, the truth of which many doubted, but which everyone, without knowing quite what it was, knew to be a scientific achievement of the first magnitude.76
The battle between theists and atheists would continue into our own times. Himmelfarb reflected that, after the intellectual upheaval caused by Darwin, ‘the final irony is to have the old stereotypes, of an enlightened science and a bigoted religion, replaced by new ones: a “scientific naturalism” that was dogmatic, narrow-minded, jealous of its newly-acquired authority, lacking social vision and emotional depth; and a “spiritualism” that was imaginative, open-minded, compassionate, receptive to new forms of consciousness and speculation.’77 This may well overstate the case: but the role Christianity played in society would hereafter decline further, egged on by Nietzsche. The process had, however, been initiated by Coleridge in his homage to Kant, then continued by Carlyle in his obeisance to Goethe and Schiller. It was developed by disciples of Carlyle, such as Clough, long before Darwin had spoken, and incidentally pursued by freethinkers such as Mill. The stir caused by the Oxford Movement had had its corrosive effect too.
Religion would remain a public doctrine in British society, shored up by an established Church and by a monarch who was supreme governor of that Church. However, its personal applications would become less frequent and more discreet. It would soon be peculiar for a public figure to do what John Bright did in a speech in Birmingham in October 1858, when he returned to the political fray after a long and serious illness. ‘In remembrance of all this,’ he said, ‘is it wrong in me to acknowledge here, in the presence of you all, with reverent and thankful heart, the signal favour which has been extended to me by the great Supreme?’78 One twentieth-century commentator referred to this display as ‘nauseating’, but it is quite likely that Bright said what he did entirely unselfconsciously.79
VI
The Christian churches were in some respects their own worst enemies in this era of change. John Ruskin, in his diary on 25 August 1850, showed how his generation were losing patience with methods of worship, in his case after enduring a long and tedious sermon in Edinbu
rgh. ‘Really I believe the only good of such sermons is the self-denial exercised in hearing them. How wrong our whole system is . . . . sitting patiently under a piece of dead Talk which would not be endured for one instant if it regarded any real business of life and is only endured because Christianity is not considered business at all. I wonder how St Paul would have liked being shown up into a box and told that he might talk about Christ till lunchtime – if he would do it decorously.’80
Some of his illustrious contemporaries, however, retained an unquestioning and uncomplaining devotion. Florence Nightingale, writing in October 1868 to condole with an acquaintance on the loss of a mutual friend’s second child in a short space of time, said:
‘Father, thy will be done’ – I have had occasion – this year in particular, when I lost the best and dearest of my pupils – to learn how hard it is to say this from the heart. But I have often had cause before. I have survived nearly all my fellow-workers.
But we know that their death is only given to reward the troubles they have suffered for the love of God. The fruit, tho’ still in its bloom, was ripe for Him to gather. What cause have we, who loved them truly, to weep as dead those who live with Him in the land of the living? . . . the more we loved them, the more we ought to rejoice . . . to comfort ourselves for their deaths, let us think of our own.81
Yet this was the age that caused Owen Chadwick to write that ‘contemporaries were agreed that the tone of society in England was more “secular”. By that they meant the atmosphere of middle-class conversation; the kind of books which you could find on a drawing-room table, the contents of the magazines to which educated men subscribed whether they were religious or irreligious, the appearance of anti-Christian books on bookstalls at the railway station, the willingness of devout men to meet undevout men in society and to honour them for their sincerity instead of condemning them for their lack of faith.’82
One educated man who dealt in a matter-of-fact way with his own departure from devotion was James Fitzjames Stephen, who would become an eminent judge via a career as a controversial journalist, writing in the reviews. He had long wrestled with Christian practice and religion. In the 1840s he had disputed for months with his friend George Kitchin (who became Dean of Winchester) about the meaning of baptism. By 1870 he was writing to his brother Leslie that Newman was an ‘old idiot’, that Stanley was guilty of ‘idiocy’, and that he felt that ‘a curse has descended upon the religious world of all denominations’.83 Newman ‘and his God Almighty’ were especially in his sights: ‘It is difficult to say whether the man himself, or the creature of his imagination, is the greater fool.’
His father, Sir James Stephen, had had a similar conversation with Carlyle in 1853, after Carlyle had said that ‘the Church of England was nothing else than a vast machinery for maintaining religious decorums’.84 Stephen had been shocked that Carlyle thought they shared a view of religion: and wrote him a long letter saying it was not so. Carlyle had, however, disturbed him, just as he had disturbed other, younger intellectuals before him. Stephen admitted he had often felt he had ‘difficulties’, but had ‘so seldom avowed them’.85
Until his mid-thirties, in the 1860s, Fitzjames Stephen had continued to believe God ordered all things. His belief then declined, as the secular influences on the masses – newspapers and their ability to participate in representative politics – were steering them away from religion too. He wrote to Lady Grant Duff in the spring of 1875 that:
Religious anniversaries . . . I never was taught at any time to attach the least importance to any of them . . . Easter and Christmas never were more than names to me, when I believed most fully in Christianity. As to the balance of good and evil in the Christian religion, which you suggest as a subject for a sermon, I was so much taken with the notion that I actually wrote last Sunday morning some pages of an imaginary sermon on the text ‘what think ye of Christ?’ I put it in the fire before I had got very far . . . I think in a few words that Christ was made the symbol of the yearning of the people of that age, after an ideal which they perceived was not, and could not be realised in this present world, which never had been realised, which has had its merits and its defects, and has been twisted into a thousand shapes, to suit the temper of the times, and which now I think be dis-onified [obsolete], and left to rest in peace. I come to bury Jesus, not to praise him – might be the motto of such a humour. 86
He told her how he and his wife brought up their children:
we take them to church, and hold family prayers, which my wife reads. We have always told them that they must believe in God, in duty towards God, and a future state, and as opportunities afford, we have made them understand, and when they became old enough, say at 10 or thereabouts, we have told them – I have told them in the very plainest words – that our object in our religious teaching had been to give them feelings of reverence and a sense of duty to God, that we had taken the only means in our power to do so, but that those means were very imperfect; that a great part of what they heard in church, and read in the Bible, was not true, and that much of the teaching founded upon it by clergymen and others was most immoral and dangerous. I have never let any of my children be confirmed or take the sacrament, and have taken occasion to explain my views when confirmation was suggested to them. I have also made them read books which would show them historically what theology has done.
This diet had included Motley, Froude and Gibbon – ‘and I am very much mistaken if after that anyone will ever get much theology in their heads.’ He added: ‘There is no harm in teaching children what is not true’, and set out an Aristotelian creed: ‘What is good? I can only say as Aristotle does. Fortitude – temperance – benevolence and justice are good.’ By 1879 he was telling the same correspondent that he had just been reading his copy of the Spectator, which was ‘the nearest approach that I ever make now, except on circuit, to going to church.’87 The same year he wrote to Lord Lytton that his own disbelief was now profound, but he was concerned that the disease was spreading to those who lacked his own intellectual and moral fortitude and therefore could cope with this difficulty less well than he could. ‘I feel much alarmed at the spread of my own opinions. I do not doubt their truth but I greatly doubt the capacity of people in general to bear them.’88
He outlined his views on religion more specifically to his children in a long, unfinished letter found and copied out in her neat hand by his wife after his death. It appears to have been written between 1872 and 1876, and so is contemporaneous with his masterpiece, Liberty, Equality, Fraternity. He told his children his ideas were meant for them ‘as you reach the age at which such matters are apt to press heavily on the minds of all thoughtful persons’, and said that ‘a great part of my life has been spent in forming them’.89 That last remark is unquestionably true. This apologia pro vita sua is entitled The Nature of Belief.90
Stephen wrote that ‘I do not think it possible to separate a man’s opinions on religious questions from the rest of his opinions’, a view he had in common with Dr Arnold, though not for the same reasons. After a long disquisition on scepticism and common sense (‘there is an important sense of the word sceptical, in which no man can be less sceptical than I’) he advised them on the importance of reasoning on probabilities. He commended Mill’s system of logic: for all their political differences, they had rationalism in common. ‘Memory’, he told them, ‘therefore enters more or less into all our opinions and beliefs – but of all things memory is the most fallible.’
He talked of the limitations of knowledge, of language, and of the observations of the laws of nature. All this seems to be leading up to a rationalist dismissal of faith, consistent with much in his letters and other writings. However, the letter ends in mid-air. Perhaps he was too busy on the Bench to finish it; perhaps he never had the ruthlessness to impose, even by accident, his views on his children in this way; or perhaps he simply discussed it with them. The least likely explanation is that he had changed his mind and com
e back into the arms of God. He discounted the notion that secularism was a mass intellectual movement, since his view was that most people were uneducated and therefore incapable of participating in such a thing. Instead, there was ‘a body of singers able to drown all discords and to force the vast unmusical mass to listen to them.’91 Stephen had to admit defeat in the face of this assault by the masses: ‘To oppose Mr Mill’s simple principle about liberty to such powers as these is like blowing against a hurricane with a pair of bellows.’92
It is ironic Stephen should have ended, on matters theological, in roughly the same place as his bête noire, Mill. In the years before his death in 1873 Mill went further than ever to profess scepticism about religion, if not his atheism. He supported Charles Bradlaugh, the atheist who, when asked to take the oath as an MP, refused; and he subscribed to his various campaigns. When a candidate for parliament, Mill found his enemies used his supposed atheism as a stick with which to beat him. He expressed in the autumn of 1868 ‘a determination, on principle, to answer no questions respecting my religious belief, because I would not give any encouragement to a practice the effect of which would be that when no objection could be made to a candidate either on the ground of character or of political opinions, his opponents would endeavour to extract from himself materials for raising a religious prejudice against him.’93 To those who said his support for Bradlaugh proved the point, he referred them to one of the arguments in On Liberty, namely that ‘atheists, as well as the professors of any, even the worst religions, may be and often are, good men, estimable and valuable in all the relations of life, and are entitled like all other persons to be judged by their actions (“By their fruits ye shall know them” are the words of Christ) and not by their speculative opinions.’94
