Bishop Samuel Wilberforce

I have presided over Convocation, reformed the diocese of Oxford, and trained more clergy than any bishop of my generation. History will remember me only for a single moment of mockery that backfired. Let this be a lesson in how quickly a lifetime of work is erased by a single well-remembered mistake.

Preaching is the most dangerous art because the audience trusts you before you have earned it. A bishop who abuses that trust — who thunders certainties he has not examined — is not a shepherd but a conductor of comfortable noise. I have been both at different stages of my career.

The principle of natural selection is not a mere detail in natural history; it reaches into the whole account of man's place in creation. If species are mutable, if man is continuous with the animals, then the question is not only scientific but theological. I opposed Darwin because I believed the consequences were immense. On that point, at least, I was...

Mr Darwin has produced a hypothesis — ingenious, painstaking, and utterly without sufficient evidence. To say that species transform into new species by the cumulative action of small accidents is not science. It is a story dressed in the vocabulary of science.

I asked Huxley whether it was through his grandfather or his grandmother that he claimed descent from a monkey. He replied with such devastating calm that the audience gasped. I had expected a debate. I received an education. My error was confusing wit for argument.

Christianity calls men not merely to admire virtue, but to practice it. Public principle is not proved by eloquent feeling, but by conduct when interest, fashion, and convenience pull the other way.

I mean not to accuse any one, but to take the shame upon myself, in common indeed with the whole Parliament of Great Britain, for having suffered this horrid trade to be carried on under their authority. When we know the facts, we cannot plead innocence by silence.

The Church has no quarrel with science. Our quarrel is with materialism disguised as science — the assumption that what cannot be weighed or measured does not exist. Gravity was not invented by Newton. It was discovered. The question is who placed it there.

My father gave his life to abolishing the slave trade. I have spent mine asking what that sacrifice was for. Abolition without education, without land, without civil equality, is a gift of freedom to men left in a cage made of economic necessity. We are not finished with what my father began.