In the context of this book, perhaps the telegraph is worth singling out from these other inventions. The idea of using electricity as a means of signalling had been conceived around 1750 but the first functioning telegraph had been set up by Francis Ronalds, in his garden in Hammersmith in London, in 1816. Charles Wheatstone, professor of experimental philosophy at King’s College, London, and the man who had first measured the speed of electricity (wrongly), was the first to realise that the ohm, a measure of resistance, was an important concept in telegraphy and, together with his colleague Fothergill Cooke, took out the first patent in 1837. Almost as important as the technical details of telegraphy was Wheatstone and Cooke’s idea to string the wires alongside the newly built railways. This helped ensure the rapid spread of the telegraph, though the much-publicised capture of John Tawell, who was arrested in London after fleeing a murder scene in Slough, thanks to the telegraph, hardly did any harm. Samuel Morse’s code played its part, of course, and Morse was one of several Americans pushing for a transatlantic cable. The laying of this cable was an epic adventure that lies outside the scope of this book. While the cables were being laid, many had high hopes that the more speedy communication they would permit would prove an aid to world peace, by keeping statesmen in closer touch with one another. This hope proved vain, but the transatlantic cable, achieved in 1866, made its mark quickly in commercial terms. And, as Gillian Cookson has written in The Cable: The Wire that Changed the World, ‘From this moment began a sense of shared experience, a convergence of cultures, between the two English-speaking nations.’95
35
Enemies of the Cross and the Qur
ʾ
an – the End of the Soul
In 1842, George Eliot, the English novelist, stopped going to church. Her doubts over Christianity had begun early but she had been deeply influenced by David Friedrich Strauss’s book The Life of Jesus, Critically Examined, which as we have seen was published in Germany in the middle 1830s and which she had rendered into English. In her rather tortured translation, Strauss had concluded ‘There is little of which we can say for certain that it took place, and of all to which the faith of the Church especially attaches itself, the miraculous and supernatural matter in the facts and destinies of Jesus, it is far more certain that it did not take place.’1 In much the same way, when Tennyson read Lyell’s Principles of Geology in 1836 he was troubled, as so many were, by Lyell’s interpretation of the fossil evidence, that ‘the inhabitants of the globe, like all other parts of it, are subject to change. It is not only the individual that perishes, but whole species’.2
The sad, slow, but inexorable loss of faith in the nineteenth century by so many people, prominent or otherwise, has been explored by the writer A. N. Wilson. His survey of Eliot, Tennyson, Hardy, Carlyle, Swinburne, James Anthony Froude, Arthur Clough, Tolstoy, Herbert Spencer, Samuel Butler, John Ruskin and Edmund Gosse confirms what others have said, that the loss of faith, the ‘death of God’, was not only an intellectual change but an emotional conversion as well. Specific books and arguments made a difference but there was also a change in the general climate of opinion, the cumulative unsettling effect of one thing, then another, often quite different.3 When Francis Galton, Darwin’s step-cousin, circulated a questionnaire to 189 Fellows of the Royal Society in 1874, inquiring after their religious affiliation, he was surprised by the answers he received. Seventy per cent described themselves as members of the established churches and while some said that they had no religious affiliation, many others were Nonconformist of one stripe or another – Wesleyan, Catholic, or some other form of organised Church. Asked in the same questionnaire if their religious upbringing had in any way had a deterrent effect on their careers in science, nearly 90 per cent replied ‘None at all.’4 Among those who, as late as 1874, still believed in a deity may be included Michael Faraday, John Herschel, James Joule, James Clerk Maxwell and William Thomson (Lord Kelvin). Wilson shows that there were almost as many reasons as there were people for the loss of faith, where it occurred. Some were much more convinced than others that God was dead, while ‘some managed to be both anti-God and anti-science at the same time’.5
Unlike the intellectual battles fought over unbelief in the sixteenth and seventeenth centuries, in the nineteenth there were many more issues that the faithful had to deal with, over and above the doubts raised about the literal truth of the Bible, say, or the implausibility of the miracles. Wilson locates the change of atmosphere as beginning in the late eighteenth century. The atheism of the French philosophes of the Enlightenment was one factor but in Britain, he says, there were two books which did more than any other to undermine faith. These were Edward Gibbon’s The History of the Decline and Fall of the Roman Empire, published in three instalments between 1776 and 1788, and David Hume’s Dialogues Concerning Natural Religion, published in 1779, three years after his death. Gibbon offered no important metaphysical or theological arguments, says Wilson.6 Instead, ‘Gibbon was (is) destructive of faith . . . in his blithe revelation, on page after page, of the sheer contemptibility, not only of the Christian heroes, but of their “highest” ideals. It is not merely in the repeated and hilarious identification of individual Christian wickedness that Gibbon reaches his target. Rather it is in his whole attitude, which resolutely refuses to be impressed by the Christian contribution to “civilisation”.’7 It was Gibbon’s constant contrast between ‘the evident wisdom’ of pre-Christian cultures and the superstitious and irrational anachronisms and barbarisms of the early Christians that had such an effect on readers.8
Hume’s critique of ‘mind’ and order in the universe was discussed in an earlier chapter (see here), as was Kant’s argument that such concepts as God, Soul and Immortality can never be proved.9 If these matters might be characterised as ‘deep background’ to the general loss of faith, there were other factors specific to the nineteenth century. The historian Owen Chadwick divided these into ‘the social’ and ‘the intellectual’. Among them he includes liberalism, Marx, anticlericalism and the ‘working class mentality’.
Liberalism, says Chadwick, dominated the nineteenth century.10 But it was a protean word, he admits, one that in origin simply meant free, free from restraint. In the later Reformation it came to mean too free, licentious or anarchic. This is how men such as John Henry Newman understood it, in the mid-1800s. But liberalism, like it or not, owed much to Christianity. In dividing Europe by religion, the Reformation invited – eventually – a toleration, but Christianity at one level had always sought for a religion of the heart, rather than the mere celebration of rites, a reverence for individual conscience which, in the end, and fatally, says Chadwick, weakened the desire for sheer conformity. ‘Christian conscience was [thus] the force which began to make Europe “secular”; that is, to allow many religions or no religion in a state.’11