TELL ME YOUR ZEITGEIST AND I'LL COOK UP A SCIENCE TO MATCH (via Ed Bush):

Evolution myths: a review of Morse Peckham, editor, CHARLES DARWIN'S ORIGIN OF SPECIES & Frederick Burkhardt and Duncan Porter, editors, THE CORRESPONDENCE OF CHARLES DARWIN Volume 14: 1866 (Jim Endersby, 3/14/07, Times Literary Supplement)

The Victorian "crisis of faith" predated the Origin by many years; Tennyson found himself stretching "lame hands of faith" when confronted by "nature red in tooth and claw" in 1850, almost a decade before Darwin went public. When Nature gave voice in Tennyson's In Memoriam, instead of demonstrating the existence and beneficence of the creator, she expressed complete indifference for species, the "types" of living things: "'So careful of the type?' but no. / From scarped cliff and quarried stone / She cries, 'A thousand types are gone: / I care for nothing, all shall go'".

It was the fossilized evidence of extinct species, entombed in the cliffs (until the quarrying, mining, railway building and canal cutting of the Industrial Revolution revealed them) that led men like Tennyson to doubt that "God was love indeed". These were doubts that he, and many of his contemporaries, had harboured at least since the 1830s, when Charles Lyell's geological theories gave them a glimpse of the terrifying vastness of time. An ancient Earth was not inherently disturbing, but the fossil record made it clear that for most of its long history, the Earth had been uninhabited by people. If, as the Bible claimed, this planet had been made as a habitation for humanity, why had its creator taken so long to get the tenants in? And if God was such a great designer, why was almost everything he'd designed now extinct?

Not only did Darwin fail to shatter a universal faith, the Origin's appearance was actually greeted with enthusiasm by some churchmen. When the Revd Charles Kingsley (of Water Babies fame) wrote to thank Darwin for his complimentary copy of the Origin, he noted that although he'd not yet had time to read it, he had already "gradually learnt to see that it is just as noble a conception of Deity, to believe that he created primal forms capable of self development" as it was "to believe that He required a fresh act of intervention to supply the lacunas which he himself had made". Natural history was a popular pastime for country clergymen (the ministry, indeed, had been Darwin's planned career, until the Beagle opportunity came along) and those, like Kingsley, who spent their spare time gathering seaweeds or butterflies, were primed to see the force of Darwin's arguments. It seemed that Darwin had done for beetles and pigeons what Newton had done for planets; replacing a hands-on deity (who seemed to be forever tinkering with the ill-designed machinery he'd made) with an exalted conception of a divine artificer who had devised natural laws so delicately balanced that they would run forever.