“A Seat at the Table: Publishers, Periodicals, and the Agendas of Science and Religion”

Sylvia Nickerson (York University)

This paper will examine how two British publishers—Alexander Macmillan (1818-96) and John Murray (1808-92)—either opened up or closed down debates on topics intersecting science and religion in the periodicals they published. In both the politically conservative Quarterly Review (1809) as well as the liberal monthly The Academy (1869), publisher John Murray attempted to limit debate on the question of Christianity, evolution and their reconciliation. While the Quarterly negatively reviewed authors whose science challenged traditional Christian world-views, The Academy aspired to cover both science and theology while representing “no party in Religion or Politics”. Edited by Charles Appleton, The Academy broke convention from the Quarterly in several ways, and the diversity of views Appleton sought to represent proved too controversial for Murray, who dumped it in 1870 after refusing to publish a review of the anonymous book, The Jesus of History (1869). Alexander Macmillan, by contrast, encouraged heterogeneous perspectives within his periodicals Macmillan’s Magazine (1859) and later, Nature (1869). Developed out of Macmillan’s social scene in London, Macmillan’s Magazine, edited by Charles Masson (and closely managed by Macmillan), translated the debate and discussion around the publisher’s table into print. On the pressing topics of liberalizing Anglicanism and modernizing British society, Macmillan gave science a seat at the table, with Macmillan’s Magazine and Nature representing a range of perspectives from scientific authors who advocated atheistic to religious views of evolution in book and periodical form.

“A Failed Reconciliation: J. W. Draper, A. D. White, and the Reception of their Historical Narratives in the Periodical Press”

James Ungureanu (The University of Queensland)

Historians of science usually trace the origins of the “conflict thesis,” the notion that science and religion have been in a constant state of “conflict” or “warfare,” to two nineteenth-century works—John William Draper’s History of the Conflict between Religion and Science (1874) and Andrew Dickson White’s A History of the Warfare of Science with Theology in Christendom (1896). While these two works have been designated by historians as founding the conflict thesis, there has been little research on how contemporaries responded to these historical narratives. This paper examines the early reception of these narratives by considering the extensive commentary they received in British and American periodicals from 1875 to 1900. Examining a selection of this material reveals three key aspects of this reception. First, more religiously liberal readers welcomed these narratives as genuine attempts at reconciling science and religion. Second, the more religiously orthodox, while also recognizing their conciliatory intentions, nevertheless accused Draper and White of instigating conflict. Finally, a younger generation, who were further removed from the kind of religious upbringing Draper and White enjoyed, appropriated their narratives to demonstrate that religion had always been in conflict with science. Thus this paper aims to show that while Draper and White had a more nuanced position about the history of science and religion than has been contended by the secondary literature, their religiously liberal views had the unintended consequence of creating in the minds of their contemporaries and later generations the belief that science and religion have been and are at war.

“Debating the Deeper Harmonies of Science and Religion in the Victorian Periodical Press: The Reception of J. R. Seeley’s Natural Religion (1882)”

Ian Hesketh (The University of Queensland)

While much has been written about late nineteenth-century narratives that promoted an inevitable clash between science and religion—thereby producing the so-called conflict thesis—less well known is the fact that these narratives competed directly with studies that promoted a theme of harmony and reconciliation. One such narrative was the anonymous Natural Religion (1882), the long-awaited sequel to the sensational Ecce Homo (1865), written by the Cambridge historian John Robert Seeley. Whereas in the earlier controversial study, Seeley sought to modernize Christianity through an historical analysis of Jesus Christ’s humanity, in Natural Religion he sought to make apparent what he called the “deeper harmonies of science and religion.” He did so by situating Christianity within a larger history of religious and scientific thought, one that presented a naturalized Christianity as the necessary next stage in the progressive development of English civilization. Natural Religion is therefore a wonderful illustration of how some liberal religious thinkers sought to engender a reconciliation between science and religion at a time when the conflict thesis was just emerging. At the same time, the reception of the book in the periodical press shows just how difficult it was to establish any sort of consensus concerning the construction of a modernized and scientific Christianity. Moreover, while Natural Religion gained a large readership because it was written “by the author of Ecce Homo,” its connection to its much more enthusiastic and orthodox predecessor meant that it could only fail to meet the high expectations of its many readers.