FREDERICK TEMPLE, The Relations between Religion and Science (1884), Lecture VI, ‘Apparent Collision between Religion and the Doctrine of Evolution’; and Lecture VIII, ‘The Conclusion of the Argument’

Abstract

Frederick Temple had been one of the contributors to Essays and Reviews in 1860, and there was great opposition to his appointment as Bishop of Exeter in 1869. But, like the attempts to prosecute some of the other Essayists, the opposition was not successful and he was consecrated. In 1896, he became Archbishop of Canterbury with hardly a protest, and Owen Chadwick, in The Victorian Church (1966), sees this as marking ‘the final acceptance of the doctrine of evolution among the divines, clergy and leading laity of the established church, at least as a doctrine permissible and respectable in an eminent clergyman’ (Part II, p. 23). Temple had made his acceptance of evolution clear in his Bampton Lectures of 1884, on ‘The Relations between Religion and Science’, and even then his message was generally welcomed, in marked contrast to the reaction to his contribution to Essays and Reviews . The editor of the Memoirs of Archbishop Temple (1906) comments on this change of attitude to Temple's views: The Bampton Lectures , in a sense, are the sequel to the contribution to Essays and Reviews . The lectures, indeed, followed the line of all that he had previously said or written as to the interpretation of the Bible in relation to modern thought. Why, then, was it that former utterances had been judged unsound, and that the Bampton Lectures were recognised as aids to faith? Mainly, no doubt, because during the fourteen years which had intervened between the publication of Essays and Reviews and the delivery of Bishop Temple's Bampton Lectures, not a little of the teaching for which the former had been condemned had come to be regarded as compatible with belief in the Bible as God's revelation. […]