Science and Religion


Book Description

Science and Religion assesses the impact of social, political and intellectual change upon Anglican circles, with reference to Oxford University in the decades that followed the French Revolution and the Napoleonic wars. More particularly, the career of Baden Powell, father of the more famous founder of the Boy Scout movement, offers material for an important case-study in intellectual and political reorientation: his early militancy in right-wing Anglican movements slowly turned to a more tolerant attitude towards radical theological, philosophical and scientific trends. During the 1840s and 1850s, Baden Powell became a fearless proponent of new dialogues in transcendentalism in theology, positivism in philosophy, and pre-Darwinian evolutionary theories in biology. He was for instance the first prominent Anglican to express full support for Darwin's Origin of Species. Analysis of his many publications, and of his interaction with such contemporaries as Richard Whately, John Henry and Francis Newman, Robert Chambers, William Benjamin Carpenter, George Henry Lewes and George Eliot, reveals hitherto unnoticed dimensions of mid-nineteenth-century British intellectual and social life.










God and Progress


Book Description

Exploring the rich relationship between historical thought and religious debate in Victorian culture, God and Progress offers a unique and authoritative account of intellectual change in nineteenth-century Britain. The volume recovers a twofold process in which the growth of progressive ideas of history transformed British Protestant traditions, as religious debate, in turn, profoundly shaped Victorian ideas of history. It adopts a remarkably wide contextual perspective, embracing believers and unbelievers, Anglicans and nonconformists, and writers from different parts of the British Isles, fully situating British debates in relation to their European and especially German Idealist surroundings. The Victorian intellectual mainstream came to terms with religious diversity, changing ethical sensibilities, and new kinds of knowledge by encouraging providential, spiritualized, and developmental understandings of human time. A secular counter-culture simultaneously disturbed this complex consensus, grounding progress in appeals to scientific advances and the retreat of metaphysics. God and Progress thus explores the ways in which divisions within British liberalism were fundamentally related to differences over the past, present, and future of religion. It also demonstrates that religious debate powered the process by which historicism acquired cultural authority in Victorian national life, and later began to lose it. The study reconstructs the ways in which theological dynamics, often relegated to the margins of nineteenth-century British intellectual history, effectively forged its leading patterns.




The Limits of Religious Thought Examined in Eight Lectures; Preached Before the University of Oxford, in the Year M. Dccc. Lviii, on the Foundation of T


Book Description

This historic book may have numerous typos and missing text. Purchasers can usually download a free scanned copy of the original book (without typos) from the publisher. Not indexed. Not illustrated. 1859 edition. Excerpt: ... The limits of religious thought examined in eight lectures Henry Longueville Mansel EXTRACT FROM THE LAST WILL AND TESTAMENT OF THE EEV. JOHN BAMPTON: CANON OF SALISBURY. * "I give and bequeath my Lands and Estates to the Chancellor, Masters, and Scholars of the University of Oxford for ever, to have 5 and to hold all and singular the said Lands or Estates upon trust, and to the intents and purposes hereinafter mentioned; that is to say, I will and appoint that the Vice-Chancellor of the University of Oxford for the time being shall take and receive all the rents, issues, and profits thereof, and (after all taxes, reparations, and necessary deductions made) that he pay all the remainder to the endowment of eight Divinity Lecture Sermons, to be established for ever in the said University, and to be performed in the manner following: "I direct and appoint, that, upon the first Tuesday in Easter Term, a Lecturer be yearly chosen by the Heads of Colleges only, and by no others, in the room adjoining to the Printing-House, between the hours of ten in the morning and two in the afternoon, to preach eight Divinity Lecture Sermons, the year following, at St. Mary's in Oxford, between the commencement of the last month in Lent Term, and the end of the third week in Act Term. "Also I direct and appoint, that the eight Divinity Lecture Sermons shall be preached upon either of the following Subjects--to confirm and establish the Christian Faith, and to confute all heretics and schismatics--upon the divine authority of the holy Scriptures--upon the authority of the writings of the primitive Fathers, as to the faith and practice of the primitive Church--upon the Divinity of our Lord and Saviour Jesus Christ--upon the Div




The Limits of Religious Thought Examined in Eight Lectures


Book Description

The Bampton lectures at Oxford, founded by the bequest of John Bampton in order to examine ideas from Christian theology, have taken place regularly since 1780. In 1858 the philosopher Henry Longueville Mansel delivered the set of eight lectures reissued in this volume. Mansel expresses the view - influenced by Kant and Hamilton - that the human mind is 'conditioned' and that human knowledge is strictly limited to the finite. Humans cannot attain any positive conception of the nature of the 'Absolute and Infinite Being' with certainty. We only have an imperfect representation of God and the divine through their analogy to finite things. And yet, God exists. Mansel asserts that God cannot be understood by reason but should be accepted by faith. His book ignited a bitter controversy with the Christian socialist theologian Frederick Maurice, and remains of interest to historians of philosophy and theology to this day.