The Council Meetings generally convened in the afternoon prior to the General Society Meetings.  After the Council Meetings, Sabine and his cronies would meet for dinner and plan their strategies before the general membership would gather to listen to the presentation of some research topic.  Those members who were excluded from Sabine’s “Dinner Club”  initially lacked the clout to control votes for Council members and consequently, they had little success in promoting Darwin’s election to the Copley.   As more members of the society came from the ranks of middle class professionals, they elected their own to the Council.

Sabine saw the end coming, as Burckhardt reveals in his paper.  Sabine had pulled the strings for two years, but by 1864 he no longer had the votes to prevent Darwin’s selection. 

By the mid-1860’s Huxley and his X-Club (a direct and rather impertinent parody of Sabine’s “47”) saw themselves as essentially stacking the deck in the Council to finally insure the selection of Darwin to receive the Copley.  In fact, the actual vote is not known with certainty.            In addition to the changes in the Royal Society, other societal changes were occurring; and Darwin’s theory became a catalyst in many causes.  Social reform underwent a rather drastic change.  Darwin’s work ultimately came to be seen as the justification for something called the “scientific Charity” movement.  Persons were either fit or unfit for assistance.  The unworthy poor, those who were considered irredeemably lazy, immoral, or feebleminded, were seen to be a menace to the improvement of the race [or species].  Eugenics, lauded by Darwin’s own cousin Francis Galton, was commonly accepted as a method of improving the whole of society.  Only those who were best suited to productive lives should be permitted to reproduce.  Herbert Spencer’s concept of “survival of the fittest” was applied to a wide range of social problems, and became known as Social Darwinism.  The arguments about the social implications of Darwinism continue to this day; although there has been a great deal of reassessment of the ‘cause and effect’ relationship in social issues.  As the social sciences became more professional and more scientific, Darwin’s work undeniably influenced the direction these disciplines took.

In the scientific community, Darwin’s theory enjoyed almost immediate widespread acceptance that continued for nearly three decades.  Darwin’s supporters (including Huxley, Hooker, Lubbock, and many others) accumulated abundant evidence consistent with Darwinian explanations.  However, as the nineteenth century drew to a close, Darwin’s theory of natural selection had fallen out favor, largely because it was predicated on an untenable notion of blending inheritance (Bowler, P. 1983.  The Eclipse of Darwinism: anti-Darwinian evolutionary theories in the decades around 1900. Baltimore MD: Johns Hopkins University Press)..  If units of heredity blend together, then over time varieties would “revert to the mean” and new species could not arise.   With the rediscovery of Mendelian genetics around the turn of the century Darwin’s theory gained an important explanation for the mechanism of hereditary stasis and change.  In contrast to Darwin, Mendel viewed inheritance as ‘particulate’ with discrete and non-blending factors contributed by each parent. The subsequent marriage of Darwin’s evolutionary theory and Mendelian genetics was most fruitful and the conceptual offspring of that union during the 20th century led to the ‘Modern Synthesis’ – the unifying conceptual framework in biology.  Virtually all of the developments in contemporary biology – from DNA to the Human Genome Project, from biodiversity to ecosystems ecology, from animal behavior to evolutionary pyschology – are direct descendants of Darwin’s work.  As Theodosious Dobzhansky famously put it – “Nothing in biology makes sense except in the light of evolution.” 

Gregory Elder (1996) describes five types of religious response to Darwin following the publication of The Origin of Species: religious skepticism, Biblicism, liberalism, imprecision, and sympathy.  The religious skeptics were led in their stance by Darwin’s friend, Thomas Henry Huxley who coined the word agnosticism for their particular position of separation from the orthodox Christianity.  As might be expected during any paradigm shift, the conservative reaction moved even more strenuously back toward orthodoxy, and relied more and more on reference to biblical quotations as a way of refuting Darwin’s challenge.  Although this was not yet the fundamental literalism of the 20^th century, it did involve reaffirmation that the Bible was the revealed word of God and thus not susceptible to question.  In a tactic which has become quite familiar by now, the Biblicists of the 19^th century wrote widely disseminated pamphlets in which were provided biblical responses to the evolutionary challenge.  [No need to really understand the issues, just have the appropriate quotes handy with which to demolish your opponent.]

The liberals, on the other hand, had no difficulty in foregoing a literal interpretation of the Bible, but they held fast to the argument by design.  Their difficulty with Darwin arose because they attempted to fit Darwin’s view of evolution in the old preordained divine design.  As Elder (1996) describes this, they gave up Old Testament literalism, but maintained the truth of New Testament miracles.  In the face of Darwin’s reliance on violence as the means to survival and reproduction, this position foundered for lack of an explanation of how this demonstrated a benevolent divinity.

Many of Darwin’s contemporaries simply avoided the conflict through an imprecision of their thoughts.  Rather than confront the validity of such doctrinal issues as original sin, the fall of mankind, the atonement of Christ; these churchmen retreated behind the position which was stated rather explicitly by one of their members W.H. Watkins, “this theory in its present completion of principle and illustration is the colossal work of a living Englishman, of whom his age and country may well be proud.  I know not whether it is scientifically valid.”

Interestingly, the basis of the sympathetic theological response to Darwin’s challenge came from John Henry Newman, that Anglican academic who converted to Roman Catholicism because of the relentlessness of his logic, and who proved to be a thorn in the ecclesiastical side of the that church for most of the rest of his life.  Even before the publication of On the Origin of Species, Newman published his Essay on the Development of Christian Doctrine.  In this essay, Newman argued that theology is governed by definable historical laws, that doctrine developed and changed over the years, and that of course doctrine evolved because everything else in nature did, too. “The Author of Nature appears deliberate throughout his operations, accomplishing His natural ends by slow successive steps.”  Newman wrote this 14 years before Darwin’s publication! 

Further, in his lectures on The Idea of a University, Newman insisted that theology and all the sciences must be included for the “philosophical harmony” of human thought.  To avoid any scientific evidence, or to be vague in one’s understanding, was to be guilty of the sin of intellectual dishonesty.  Connected to this was Newman’s insistence on the use of the German higher criticism methods to actually defend the scriptures.  He had the particularly useful ability to point out that “doctrines which could not be maintained in the face of modern science had never truly belonged to the Catholic tradition. (Elder,72)

The debate regarding doctrinal differences with evolutionary theory continue today within the Catholic Church. Cardinal Christoph Schönborn of Vienna wrote as recently as July 7, 2005, in an op/ed piece in The New York Times, “Evolution in the sense of common ancestry might be true, but evolution in the neo-Darwinian sense - an unguided, unplanned process of random variation and natural selection - is not.”  And in rebuttal of this statement, Professor Nicola Cabibbo, president of the Pontifical Academy of Sciences, a 78-member panel of distinguished scientists from around the world which advises the pope on scientific matters, stated, “This was the thought of John Paul II -- there is no a priori reason to see a clash between science and religion…This is why John Paul II was not afraid of evolution. How can you be afraid of something that is true? Of course, in understanding the mechanics of evolution we are not at the level of precision and certainty achieved in many aspects of the physical sciences. There's still a lot to be discovered to fill in the gaps in our understanding of life at the scientific level (National Catholic Reporter, July 20, 2005)." 

Back in Darwin's era, in spite of his defection to the Catholic Church, John Henry Newman continued to influence those Anglicans who remained within the English church but supported Darwin’s scientific findings.  In fact he probably influenced the Anglicans more than the Catholics until the Catholic changes of Vatican II.  One of those influenced was the Rev. Charles Kingsley, who is probably best remembered for his novel The Water Babies, a children’s story describing a kind of “evolution of the soul.”  In spite of a personal dislike of Newman, Kingsley was indirectly influenced by him through Newman’s good friend St. George Jackson Mivart.  In another little twist, Mivart was another Catholic who attempted to find the middle road between the evolutionists and the theologians.  In the end he was disowned by Huxley and ex communicated from the Catholic Church!  Kingsley had better luck, partly because he had better social skills, and partly because he was Anglican, not Catholic.  Both men proposed the idea of “Providential Evolution.”

If we take a step back to Darwin’s Origin, it should be remembered that one of the most serious of the gaps in the initial theory is the mechanism by which characteristics are inherited.  Darwin, in his work, relied solely on natural selection to explain the changes in characteristics of a type over time.  Mendel’s work on genetics was published in 1865, but was essentially ignored until 1900.  Because environmentally acquired characteristics cannot be inherited [with some few exceptions] without an understanding of genetic inheritance, probabilities, and mutations, Darwin simply attributed the power to natural selection.  Mivart saw these mutations as the “hand of God.”  When the idea came from Mivart, the Darwinians soundly renounced it.  When Kingsley proposed the same notions, they accepted it: perhaps because Kingsley saw this interpretation, not as a criticism of Darwin, but as a way to embrace Darwin.  Additionally, in his lecture The Theology of the Future, Kingsley openly admitted that the church had made mistakes in its scientific opinions. 

Kingsley’s campaign for “Providential Evolution” began almost immediately after the publication of On the Origin of Species.  Kingsley wrote to Darwin saying “I have 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 into all forms needful… as to believe that He required a fresh act of intervention to supply the lacunas which He Himself had made.  I question whether the former be not the loftier thought.” 

Kingsley seems to have advocated a new kind of liberal Christianity: one focused on good works, progress, health, and an open mind.  He acted as something of a “goodwill ambassador” between the Darwin-Huxley contingent and the established church.  Although he essentially ignored the rather non-Christian message of the Deity’s apparent use of the “survival of the fittest” law; he popularized the belief that an acceptance of the process of evolution could fit consistently within the doctrines of the church. 

Such was Kingsley’s effect that his clerical supporter Frederick Temple, one of the original essayists in Essays and Reviews, was able to have the Anglican Church accept a dramatic change in the understanding of the nature of biblical references.  The Conference agreed to the concept that the Bible contains scientific errors and that critical textual analysis was a viable way to determine the meaning of any text.  Frederick Temple, himself, barely avoided charges of heresy with his contribution to Essays and Reviews, in 1860.  He was clearly associated with the idea of Providential Evolution, and he was made Archbishop of Canterbury [the head of the Anglican church] in 1896, with a singular lack of controversy.  The doctrine had become a part of mainstream Christianity, and providential evolution continues to be advocated by many theologians.  We know that genetics and randomness explain variation, but theologians still see the guiding hand of providence in the results of the randomness.

Darwin died April 19, 1882 at his home, Down House and the family intended to bury him in the local church cemetery.  His cousin Francis Galton, and his good friend John Lubbock, campaigned with the family to convince them to agree to bury Darwin in Westminster Abbey.   On April 26, he was buried in Westminster, near John Hershel and 20 feet away from Sir Isaac Newton.  This public demonstration of Darwin’s stature, had little to do with religious observance and much to do with the recognition that his theory would have consequences as far reaching as those of Newton himself.