"This ecclesiastical hostility to an idea that blatantly opposed the Creation account in Genesis was not altogether unexpected by Darwin and his ‘managers’, Charles Lyell and Joseph Hooker. So they eagerly sought a prominent clergyman who knew something of science to promote their cause. They found one in the Rev. Charles Kingsley. Kingsley was an amateur naturalist who had been ordained as an Anglican curate in 1842, and two years later as a priest. He was a founding member of the Christian Socialist movement; he was becoming known as a writer of novels that promoted the cause of the poor, and even better known for his historical novels, e.g. Hypatia (1853) and Westward Ho (1855). In 1859, he was appointed Chaplain to Queen Victoria.
Darwin sent Kingsley a copy of the first edition of his Origin. Kingsley, in his letter of thanks, was
fulsome in his praise. ‘All I have seen of it awes me,’ he wrote, ‘both from the heap of facts and the prestige of your name, and also with the clear intuition, that if you be right, I must give up much that I have believed and written.’ This apparently posed no problem to him, for he went on to say that he was now free from the ‘superstition’ that God needed a fresh act of creation for each type of creature.
Darwin was so delighted at receiving this endorsement from an Anglican prelate that he hastily added part of Kingsley’s letter to the last chapter of the second edition of the Origin, published just two months later, as follows:
In 1867, Kingsley publicly declared his belief that man was descended from apes and that the world was millions of years old,........It is not surprising that Kingsley’s rejection of the account of creation in Genesis and his acceptance of the theory of evolution in its place led him to espouse racist views. If people groups had evolved their various characteristics during long periods of isolation, one could now view some as being less evolved, and thus less human, than others. In a book of sermons, Kingsley wrote: ‘The Black People of Australia, exactly the same race as the African Negro, cannot take in the Gospel … All attempts to bring them to a knowledge of the true God have as yet failed utterly … Poor brutes in human shape … they must perish off the face of the earth like brute beasts.'
For his support of the Darwinists, Kingsley was elected a Fellow of the Geological Society in 1863, seconded by Charles Lyell. He was made Canon of Westminster Abbey in 1873 and, after his death in 1875, a marble bust was placed on a window sill there, a short distance from where Darwin was interred in 1882. How ironic that two men whose writings have helped undermine the Genesis foundation of the Christian faith are thus honoured in one of the most famous churches in the world!"
CMI
Darwin sent Kingsley a copy of the first edition of his Origin. Kingsley, in his letter of thanks, was
Darwin was so delighted at receiving this endorsement from an Anglican prelate that he hastily added part of Kingsley’s letter to the last chapter of the second edition of the Origin, published just two months later, as follows:
‘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 and needful forms, as to believe that He required a fresh act of creation to supply the voids caused by the action of His laws.”’In 1863, Kingsley wrote The Water Babies, a curious children’s book in which there are various allusions to evolution, e.g. Tom (a human child who has become an amphibian with gills and now lives in the water) approaches Mother Carey, a synonym for Mother Nature, and says, ‘I heard, ma’am, that you were always busy making new beasts out of old.’ She replies, ‘I am not going to trouble myself to make things … I sit here and make them make themselves.’7 In another chapter, there is a tongue-in-cheek story about a race of men whose generations gradually change into apes. Kingsley has the fairy say: ‘Folks say now that I can make beasts into men, by circumstance, and selection, and competition, and so forth … if I can turn beasts into men, I can, by the same laws of circumstance, and selection, and competition, turn men into beasts.
In 1867, Kingsley publicly declared his belief that man was descended from apes and that the world was millions of years old,........It is not surprising that Kingsley’s rejection of the account of creation in Genesis and his acceptance of the theory of evolution in its place led him to espouse racist views. If people groups had evolved their various characteristics during long periods of isolation, one could now view some as being less evolved, and thus less human, than others. In a book of sermons, Kingsley wrote: ‘The Black People of Australia, exactly the same race as the African Negro, cannot take in the Gospel … All attempts to bring them to a knowledge of the true God have as yet failed utterly … Poor brutes in human shape … they must perish off the face of the earth like brute beasts.'
For his support of the Darwinists, Kingsley was elected a Fellow of the Geological Society in 1863, seconded by Charles Lyell. He was made Canon of Westminster Abbey in 1873 and, after his death in 1875, a marble bust was placed on a window sill there, a short distance from where Darwin was interred in 1882. How ironic that two men whose writings have helped undermine the Genesis foundation of the Christian faith are thus honoured in one of the most famous churches in the world!"
CMI
And hath made of one blood all nations of men for to dwell on all the face of the earth,
Acts 17:26
