ABSTRACT
Each age fashions nature in its own image. In the nineteenth century, the English naturalist Charles Darwin (1809-82) recast the living world in the image of competitive, industrial Britain. He abandoned the Bible as a scientific authority and explained the origin of living things by divinely ordained natural laws. Once destined for the church, he became the high priest of a new secular order, proclaiming a struggling, progressive, and law-bound nature to a struggling, improving, and law-abiding society. For his devotion to science and his exemplary life, he received England’s highest religious honor when scientists joined churchmen and politicians of all parties to inter his mortal remains in Westminster Abbey.
