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Rainfall, Plagues, and the Prince of Wales: A Chapter in the Conflict of Religion and Science

Published online by Cambridge University Press:  16 January 2014

Frank M. Turner
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Extract

In July, 1872, one of the most curious articles in the history of British journalism appeared in the much respected Contemporary Review. The anonymous essay, entitled “The ‘Prayer for the Sick’ — Hints Towards a Serious Attempt to Estimate Its Value,” challenged the Christians of the nation to conduct an experiment to determine the physical efficacy of prayer. A letter from the physicist John Tyndall, controversial professor at the Royal Institution, introduced the proposal, the author of which was later identified as Henry Thompson, an eminent London surgeon.

Thompson admitted that few prayers were actually open to scientific or quantitative investigation. However, the prayers for the sick in the Book of Common Prayer appeared to constitute a set of petitions “from a study of which the absolute calculable value of prayer … can almost certainly be ascertained.” These fell into two categories — general prayers said every Sunday and specific prayers offered for particular individuals. Thompson desired no one to be deprived of the benefits afforded by general prayers.

But I ask that one single ward or hospital, under the care of first-rate physicians and surgeons, containing certain numbers of patients afflicted with those diseases which have been best studied, and of which the mortality rates are best known, whether the diseases are those which are treated by medical or by surgical remedies, should be, during a period of not less, say, than three or five years, made the object of special prayer by the whole body of the faithful, and that, at the end of that time, the mortality rates should be compared with the past rates, and also with that of other leading hospitals, similarly well managed, during the same period.

Type
Research Article
Information
Journal of British Studies , Volume 13 , Issue 2 , May 1974 , pp. 46 - 65
Copyright
Copyright © North American Conference of British Studies 1974

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References

1. “The ‘Prayer for the Sick’—Hints Towards a Serious Attempt to Estimate Its Value,” Contemporary Review, XX (1872), 205–10Google Scholar. Authorship is attributed to Henry Thompson in the British Museum Catalogue and in Cope, Zachary, The Versatile Victorian, Being the Life of Sir Henry Thompson (London, 1951), p. 108Google Scholar.

2. “The ‘Prayer for the Sick,’” Contemporary Review, XX, 207, 210Google Scholar.

3. The major documents of the debate in addition to the initial proposal are the following: Littledale, Richard Frederick, “The Rationale of Prayer,” Contemporary Review, XX (1872), 430–54Google Scholar; Galton, Francis, “Statistical Inquiries into the Efficacy of Prayer,” Fortnightly Review, XVIII (1872), 125–35Google Scholar; Spectator, VL (1872), 846–47, 879–80, 974–75, 1011–13, 1038–39, 1042–44, 1073, 1104–07, 1139Google Scholar; Thompson, H. (anon.), Tyndall, John, McCosh, James, “On Prayer,” Contemporary Review, XX (1872), 763–82Google Scholar; Guardian, XXVII (1872), 1145, 1173, 1201–02Google Scholar; Knight, William A., “The Function of Prayer in the Economy of the Universe,” Contemporary Review, XXI (1873), 183–98Google Scholar; Duke of Argyle, “Prayer: The Two Spheres—Are They Two?” Contemporary Review, XXI (1873), 464–73Google Scholar; Knight, William A., “Prayer: ‘The Two Spheres’: They Are Two,” Contemporary Review, XII (1873), 20–24Google Scholar. See also, Romanes, George John, Christian Prayer and General Laws being the Burney Prize Essay for the year 1873, with an Appendix, The Physical Efficacy of Prayer (London, 1874)Google Scholar; Onslow, Phipps, The Reasonableness of Prayer (London, n.d.)Google Scholar; Newman, F. W., The Controversy about Prayer (London, 1873)Google Scholar; Jellett, John H., The Efficacy of Prayer (London, 1878)Google Scholar; Bickwith, C. A., “The Prayer-Gauge Debate,” in The Schaff-Herzog Encyclopedia of Religious Knowledge, ed. Jackson, Samuel Macauley (New York and London, 1911), IX, 157–58Google Scholar; D'Arcy, Charles Frederick, “Prayer (Christian, Theological),” in Encyclopedia of Religion and Ethics, ed. Hastings, James (Edinburgh, 1918), X, 175Google Scholar; Brown, Alan, The Metaphysical Society: Victorian Minds in Conflict, 1869–1881 (New York, 1947), pp. 177–80Google Scholar; Irvine, William, Apes, Angels, and Victorians (New York, 1955), p. 256Google Scholar. The debate also roused interest in the United States where Tyndall toured in late 1872 with the infamy of the proposal he had introduced preceding him. See Means, John O. (ed.), The Prayer Gauge Debate (Boston, 1876)Google Scholar.

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6. The nineteenth-century religious pamphlet collection at Pusey House, Oxford, includes a number of sermons and tracts on prayer, pestilence, and harvests. One that most clearly illustrates the role of the church and prayer in time of crisis is Louisa Gulliford or Recollections of the Cholera in 1849 by a Clergyman (Luton, 1863)Google Scholar. See also, Handlist of Proclamations Issued by Royal and Other Constitutional Authorities 1714-1910 in Bibliotheca Lindesiana, VIII (Wingus, 1913), pp. 307–08, 310, 314, 414, 462, 490, 492, 555Google Scholar.

7. Henry Fitzroy for Lord Palmerston to the Moderator of the Presbytery of Edinburgh, October 19, 1853, in Ashley, Evelyn, The Life and Correspondence of Henry John Temple, Viscount Palmerston (London, 1879), II, 265–66Google Scholar. For a discussion of the midcentury theory of disease that lay behind Palmerston's note, see Lambert, Royston, Sir John Simon, 1816-1904, and English Social Administration (London, 1963), pp. 48–56Google Scholar.

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9. Quoted in Gutch, Charles, The Gloomy Summer; or God's Threatened Chastisement Deserved for National and Individual Sins (London, 1860), p. 4Google Scholar.

10. Ibid., p. 4.

11. Ibid., pp. 11-15.

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20. Mullett, Charles F., “The Cattle Distemper in Mid-Eighteenth-Century England,” Agricultural History, XX (1946), 144–65Google Scholar. The Handlist of Proclamations includes no prayers for cattle or for the landed interest during the eighteenth century.

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22. Pall Mall Gazette, Oct. 10, 1865, p. 9Google Scholar. The Times on Oct. 12, 1865, briefly entered the fray by devoting one-and-a-half columns to a castigation of Cardinal Cullen's pastoral letter that had blamed the cattle plague on the skeptical spirit of the age. The Times accused the Irish cardinal of equating the march of intellect, the demise of war, the growth of liberal states, and the independence of the working class with “the anti-Christian phenomena of the latter days.” In a blatantly anti-sacerdotal and anti-Catholic spirit the paper spoke of “something pathetic in the unswerving faith which can look abroad in a world like our own and believe that modern society can ever again be reduced to a state of religious pupilage.” The paper made no comment on the prayer from Lambeth palace. Times, Oct. 12, 1865 p. 9Google Scholar.

23. Pall Mall Gazette, Oct. 14, 1865, p. 3Google Scholar; Spectator, XXXVIII, Oct. 14, 1865, 1140Google Scholar.

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33. Times, March 21, 1866, p. 5Google Scholar. Stanley may also have been guided by the suggestion of the propriety of the Lord's Prayer in Savage, Marmion, “Religion and Philosophy Reconciled,” Fortnightly Review, III (1866), 474–76Google Scholar. For a response to the question of prayer similar to Stanley's but from a nonconformist minister, see Dawson, George, On Humiliation and Fast Days (Birmingham, 1866)Google Scholar.

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42. Ibid., p. 809.

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44. Ibid., p. 276.

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50. Galton, , “Statistical Inquiries into the Efficacy of Prayer,” Fortnightly Review, XVIII, 127Google Scholar. Galton had originally offered the article to the Contemporary Review. James Knowles turned it down explaining, “I am afraid that after all my courage is not greater than Grove's. You will think that editors are a ‘feeble folk,’ and so perhaps they are, but it is certain that our constituents (who are largely clergymen) must not be tried much further just now by proposals following Tyndall's friend's on prayer—and of similar bold—or as you yourself say, ‘audacious character.’” Pearson, Karl, The Life, Letters and Labours of Francis Galton (Cambridge, 1924), II, 131Google Scholar.

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