In 1860, a year after Charles Darwin published On the Origin of Species, the biologist Thomas H. Huxley, known sometimes as “Darwin’s bulldog,” exemplified the conflict raging between representatives of science and those of religion when he wrote, “extinguished theologians lie about the cradle of every science as the strangled snakes beside that of Hercules; and history records that whenever science and orthodoxy have been fairly opposed, the latter has been forced to retire from the lists, bleeding and crushed if not annihilated; scotched, if not slain.”

Yet this controversy so powerfully stoked by Huxley, which has sometimes caused scholars to see the time as one of outright warfare between irreconcilable groups, belied a complexity of thought that spanned a wide spectrum. On the one side stood religious fundamentalism with its insistence on a literal reading of scripture and submission to institutional authority; on the other stood scientific naturalism with its insistence that only empirical methods were valid routes to knowledge. Yet many thinkers fell somewhere between these extremes. As the historian of science Bernard Lightman explains, since the 1970s scholars “have attempted to build a richer, more nuanced picture of the science-and-religion scene in Victorian Britain, one that is not structured around a narrative of conflict and that does not center on Huxley and his allies.”

Lightman shows that there were numerous groups in Victorian society that embraced both science and religion in a variety of ways, from Arthur Balfour’s arguments that scientific and religious beliefs could be integrated, to the popular science writings of Agnes Clerke and John George Wood, both of whom drew on science in an attempt to show readers the glories of God’s creation. Even Huxley himself was not blindly hostile to all religion; rather, he reserved his animosity for theological and institutional blockades to the independent development of science. He had, he wrote, “a profound religious tendency capable of fanaticism, but tempered by no less profound theological scepticism.” He would have religion, which he viewed as an ethical and emotional phenomenon, cleanly separated from science, which belonged wholly to the intellect.

Among this vast array of conflicts and agreements stood Charles Kingsley, an Anglican clergyman, professor, amateur scientist, socialist reformer, and writer whose thinking exemplified the complexity of the times and reveals a sincere attempt to harmonize his religious convictions with scientific knowledge. Kingsley was born in 1819, the son of a curate who subjected him to a rigorous and frequently brutal education. At twelve, he was sent to a preparatory school in Clifton, where he witnessed violence of the Bristol riots of 1831, during which rioters burned down buildings and were themselves burned to death, an experience that would shape his views on social reform.

It was during his time as a schoolboy, first in Clifton and then in Cornwall, that Kingsley, tutored largely by Charles Alexander Johns, himself a popular writer of natural history, developed an interest in science. This interest followed him throughout his life, expanding during his education at King’s College London and Cambridge and into his work as a curate in Hampshire. He lived in Eversley with his wife and family for the majority of his life, writing novels and articles at a profuse rate while also travelling as a teacher at Queen’s College and later at Cambridge. All the while he maintained his love of the natural world and the sciences.

“He took special delight in rambling among the rocks and plants of the countryside,” writes Richard Kelly in his introduction to Kingsley’s best-known work, The Water-Babies—a children’s fairy tale that follows the transformation of a young chimney sweep named Tom into a fairy-like being inhabiting the rivers and seas—“taking detailed notes on his discoveries. Getting out into nature and marveling at its infinite variety became his life-long passion.” Kingsley also sought out the company of scientists, among them Darwin and Huxley, both of whom corresponded with him.

Kingsley’s interest in science and his position as a clergyman caused him, according to professor of English John C. Hawley, to be “struck by the widening gap between the claims of religion and those of science” and to “attempt a reconciliation before the breach became irreversible.” In seeking this reconciliation, Kingsley rejected both scientific naturalism and religious fundamentalism. He insisted that science be allowed to proceed without being hampered by ideological hangups, and he famously sided with Huxley when Richard Owen attempted to defend humanity’s uniqueness by arguing that humans alone possess the hippocampus minor. As outlined by the scholar of scientific history Piers J. Hale, Kingsley supported Huxley because he believed the scientific evidence was in his favor and that Owen was blinded by ideological motives. Huxley and Kingsley even founded a society to celebrate the former’s victory, a “drinking and dining club that adopted as its aim ‘the promotion of a Thorough and earnest search after scientific truth,’” writes Hale.

Yet Kingsley frequently expressed his distaste for rigid scientific naturalism and its rejection of all intuition and openness to the unknown. He parodies such thinking in The Water-Babies with the figure of Professor Ptthmllnsprts (probably representing Huxley), who, despite being face to face with a fairy-like entity, rejects out of hand the possibility of “any rational or half-rational beings except men,” failing to recognize that he was “a scientific man, and therefore ought to have known that he couldn’t know; and that he was a logician, and therefore ought to have known that he could not prove an universal negative.”

In his rejection of a rigid empiricism, moreover, Kingsley left room for intuitive and imaginative approaches to nature, and indeed to science, and refused to draw a hard line between human and nonhuman experience, instead viewing all creatures as belonging to a spectrum with no sharp boundaries. As the historian Christopher Hamlin writes, “In Kingsley’s continuum, our faculties inhere in greater or lesser degrees in all beings. Whatever its species, we access another’s inner world through imaginative sympathy and observation.”

In rejecting these extremes, Kingsley sought to apply scientific knowledge to theological thinking, and vice versa, finding a synthesis between the two. His views can be summarized as “natural supernaturalism,” an idea popularized by Thomas Carlyle. By this view, all of nature is a revelation of God’s character and intentions; as Richard Kelly writes, “Kingsley came to see in the world about him the unmistakable signature of God.” Similar views weren’t unusual in Anglican theology at the time, moreover, for theologians such as William Paley had argued for intelligent design, that all of creation suggested a divine “watchmaker.” Thus, as Hawley writes, “Kingsley’s theological training, therefore, assured him that the more fully one explored the world, the more likely one would be to discover divine intent.” The influence of Carlyle and Paley is reflected clearly in Kingsley’s 1855 work Glaucus, an account of the biological wonders one finds on sea shores:

Let us believe that, if our eyes were opened, we should fulfil the requirement of Genius, and “see the universal in the particular,” by seeing God’s whole likeness, His whole glory, reflected as in a mirror even in the meanest flower; and that nothing but the dulness [sic] of our simple souls prevents them from seeing day and night in all things, the Lord Jesus Christ fulfilling His own saying, “My Father worketh hitherto, and I work.”

Scientists, as those dedicated to understanding nature, thus undertake to reveal the wonders of God as revealed in his creation, and theologians stand well equipped in interpreting scientific findings. As the scholar of Victorian culture Will Abberley outlines, in early works such as Glaucus, Kingsley was prone to interpret nature in moral terms, to finding symbols of virtue in behaviors revealed through observation, so that bees display industriousness, crabs cleanliness, and so on. Yet the findings of science challenged this way of thinking, and Kingsley grew increasingly uneasy with the deceit and parasitism science uncovered in the natural world. Nevertheless, he insisted on “his authority to interpret nature as a natural theologian alongside secular naturalists” though he turned from the bare facts of the natural world to the overarching laws discovered therein as well as to the scientists who were able to discover them.

It was in evolution in particular that Kingsley was to ground the greater part of his theological interpretation of nature. In his view, evolution revealed a process of transformation that proceeded either “upwards,” to greater levels of sophistication and development, or “downwards,” towards more “degenerate” forms, depending on the degree to which the species in question conforms to moral laws. His views are eloquently set forth in The Water-Babies. The book follows Tom’s moral development, guided by three matriarchal fairies—with political and scientific asides—and the whole can be read as an allegory for the moral principles inhering in evolutionary processes. Indeed, as Mary Wheat Hanawalt told her readers almost a century ago, the book was written “to adapt Darwin’s theory of the natural selection of species for children’s information.”

We find Kingsley early in the book presenting a wide array of scientific, particularly biological, knowledge in order to illustrate his moral, theological interpretation of natural processes.

“Does not each of us, in coming into this world, go through a transformation just as wonderful as that of a sea-egg, or a butterfly?” the book’s narrator asks, “and do not reason and analogy, as well as Scripture, tell us that that transformation is not the last? and that, though what we shall be, we know not, yet we are here but as the crawling caterpillar, and shall be hereafter as the perfect fly.”

The quasi-divine figures of the three fairies represent the forces guiding each species either upwards or downwards. The creative impulses of life towards ever greater fecundity and development are figured by Mother Carey, who tells Tom, “I am not going to trouble myself to make things, my little dear. I sit here and make them make themselves.” This initial impulse or élan vital is then guided by the fairies Mrs. Bedonebyasyoudid and her sister, Mrs. Doasyouwouldbedoneby. These two siblings are described as two sides of a single law, and Mrs. Bedonebyasyoudid tells Tom that her sister “begins where I end, and I begin where she ends; and those who will not listen to her must listen to me.” In other words, those who will not behave morally will be punished, and such punishment arises as a law of nature. Mrs. Bedonebyasyoudid tells Tom, “I cannot help punishing people when they do wrong. … For I work by machinery, just like an engine; and am full of wheels and springs inside; and am wound up very carefully, so that I cannot help going…. I never was made, my child; and I shall go for ever and ever.” This system of rewards and punishments is explicitly related to the evolutionary process, with Mrs. Bedonebyasyoudid stating “if I can turn beasts into men, I can, by the same laws of circumstance, and selection, and competition, turn men into beasts.”

Kingsley neatly summarizes this view of evolution in his story of the Doasyoulikes, which Mrs. Bedonebyasyoudid relates. A group of lazy humans, the Doasyoulikes couldn’t be bothered to learn about their environment and so became subject to natural disasters, famine, and other hardships, with the ultimate result that they degenerated into ape-like creatures. It’s largely their lack of science that results in this degeneration, for, as Hale summarizes, Kingsley believed that “only through an appreciation of natural science—and of natural selection in particular—might individuals, nations, and the species as a whole, hope to continue their onward and upward evolution, from monkeys into men and beyond.” It’s science, in other words, that gives humanity the capacity to discern and fulfill God’s will for human development. Tom, on hearing of the Doasyoulikes, must continue his development by becoming a “son of Epimetheus,” that is, a man of science, dedicated to examining experience through careful observation and experimentation, an act which is symbolized by Tom’s walking backwards for the next stretch of his journey.

Such views of evolution had numerous consequences for Kingsley’s social thought, the most disturbing of which are his racism and advocacy of colonial expansion, for he readily applied his thinking to race and to social development. In his view, which is outlined in disturbing detail by Hale, those peoples that had failed to achieve a high level of “sophistication” were guilty of their own condition and needed a strong hand to guide them, with the Irish and freed slaves particular objects of his contempt. It was for these reasons that Kingsley sided with the governor of Jamaica, Edward John Eyre, when he infamously used violence to put down a peasant rebellion. Similarly, in Madam How and Lady Why, Kingsley accused the inhabitants of Arica, Chile, who had just suffered devastation from an 1868 earthquake, of “tempting God” by not taking the trouble to understand the possibility of cataclysm and to prepare accordingly.

Despite such repulsive assertions, Kingsley’s synthesis of scientific and theological thinking also led him to be one of the great Christian socialists of his day, advocating tirelessly for social reform, especially sanitation. As Hamlin outlines, Kingsley had no patience for the view, prevalent at the time, that suffering arose from natural law and that humanity’s job was to passively await the grace that alone could relieve its pain. He held rather, as Hamlin put it, that “people had no business asking Him [God] to stay the cholera or improve the crop; they should clean cities and fight blights.” Kingsley considered science and technology tools for human betterment given by God so that humanity might align itself with God’s will. In an 1857 letter, Kingsley echoes Mrs. Bedonebyasyou did when he stated that “men can and do resist God’s will… punish themselves by getting into disharmony with their own constitution and that of the universe; just as a wheel in a piece of machinery punishes itself when it gets out of gear.” Failure to conform to such laws creates more than individual suffering, moreover, and much of Kingsley’s calls for social reform were based on a recognition that systems themselves—from labor markets to sewers—can be unjust.

Kingsley’s political views thus display a tension between his desire to alleviate the sufferings of the poor and mistreated and his racist tendency to blame groups for their own poor conditions. Both impulses ultimately derive, however, from his attempts to synthesize science, particularly evolution, with theology. In attempting to chart this middle way, Kingsley drew on a wealth of knowledge and sought to take the best of all disciplines into account in forming an intellectually respectable religious worldview. However we may be inclined to judge the results, his efforts reveal the complexities of the times and cast light on dynamics between science and religion that continue to this day. If nothing else, there is much to be learned from his imaginative openness to the world around him, his efforts to lift up the poor and oppressed, and the generosity with which he attempted to glean in all things, from the greatest of scientific laws to the humblest mollusk, the radiance of a divine glory.

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