Fr dear Fr: Did Charles Darwin know that his theories about Evolution in the human race would make some people in America and England eventually end up losing their faith in God?

My first sermon in a parish in the broad expanses and riverbeds of the Aylesbury Vale that extends from Olney to the north to Beaconsfield to the south, I had occasion to preach a very short one, in which I told the altar serviettes that that Sunday I was going to preach the shortest sermon in the History of Christianity, and they laughed, and I told them I would keep it to just three words, to which they also laughed, used to long sermons on philosophy in that parish. But then I ascended the pulpit and declaimed it, just three words, "Charles Darwin prayed" - and closed my notebook rather solemnly, bowed to the people in the congregation and the serviettes, and then walked very slowly back to me sedilla liturgica in the sanctuary proper. Shock around the parish, an atheist icon apparently praying, so it was definitely a smalltown country parish of some victorian persuasion. In those days anglicanism was strong.

After the Sunday Eucharist, I retired to my boudoir under a barrage of questions, and there I reached out for my collection of philosophy books, including a selection of books written by Charles Darwin. Running my fingers along the books, I selected my old favourite that I liked to read in the summer months when the passion for travel in those days was high - this was long before the wasting scourges of Covid corona - and the book I selected was the Voyage. This book reads like an Adventure, as Judi Dench once said in the movie A Room with, and like her own epitpah for her husband, "you have bereft me of all words", the Voyage reminded me of my own adventures on ships sailing around the Med on ships like the SS Hyperion, like a tale from a Vinland Saga. Very nice. This chiefly to collect flora and fauna for my own victorianesque collection of pressed flowers and the like including one pressed flower from the slopes of Mount Tabor in Israel which I pressed into a Novum Testamentum, 26th edition a real find, and there it remains to this day. A nice memento of a sacred bloom, but yes, the Voyage of the Beagle is my favourite. A lovely read. And why mention it - what does it tell us?

In the pages of the Voyage of the Beagle, Charles owns up to praying as he set sail with Capt Fitzroy on this ship, mindful of his mission to test out strange new worlds of flora and fauna, to go before others, to boldly go where no victorian had been before, and in that book he prints his prayers that he spoke to God to guide him on his way to find the meaning of life on this world. So in his own mind, whatever others say on the old fashioned anglican Christian side, he was embarking on a spiritual queste to find the meaning of life. To discover God's mysterious designs in Evolution - that was his intent and that is how we should view the matter - allowing the author of the Origin and the Voyage to defend himself from these absurd posthumous claims of atheism. He did not intend that people of simple basic fundamentalist protestant belief should lose their faith in God - he saw himself as a willing coworker to the good God in revealing the designs of the world in Evolution. The rest is history. Charles Darwin prayed, period.