Truth and Hypocrisy in Victorian England

The Lord Christ Vs Bentham and Darwin

There are few things more distasteful than the pseudo-Christianity which predominated amongst the Victorian elites.  Many practised the appearance of faith, whilst privately despising it.  This was not always the case: the Great Awakening took hold amongst the gentry and elites and many were truly converted.  They devoted themselves to working for the poor and the downtrodden.  

Anthony Ashley-Cooper was the 7th Earl of Shaftesbury.  He remains a wonderful exemplar of an aristocrat committed to Christ.  He spent his adult life seeking to bring the Christian faith to the most needy.  He was a staunch campaigner against slavery.  He started an organization called Ragged Schools.  According to historian, A.N. Wilson

Ashley's entire motive for establishing Ragged Schools, rescuing women and children from their servitude in mines and factories, was based on the premise that God Himself had chosen to come to Earth as a poor person of no reputation, thereby not merely redeeming the human race from sin, but teaching it that every child born into the world is made in God's image and likeness, every child has dignity and worth, and rights.  Remove the truth of Christianity and, for a Christian of Ashley's generation, you have destroyed the very reason for believing in virtue itself.  The Benthamite jungle has triumphed.  [A. N. Wilson, The Victorians (London: Arrow/Random House, 2002),    p.167f]

But so many of the English aristocracy regarded themselves as "smarter than the average bear."  Unbelief was the preserve of sophisticated, educated, and superior people.
  Wilson continues

Unbelief had been taken for granted among the sophisticated Whiggish upper crust which Lord Ashley knew well and which he found so detestable.  The Queen herself had been given in marriage to Prince Albert by the most Whiggish of her uncles, the Duke of Sussex, a bibliophile with a huge collection of bibles.  In the margin of his The Book of Common Prayer, this royal duke had drawn a fatal hand, pointing at the Athanasian Creed, with the comment, "I don't believe a word of it."

The Christianity of so many of the upper classes was of the lukewarm variety which maintained the outward displays, while privately sneering in unbelief.  They excelled in the lukewarmedness which brought the indictment of our Lord upon the Church of Laodicea:

I know your works: you are neither cold nor hot.  Would that you were either cold or hot! So because you are lukewarm and neither hot nor cold, I will spit you out of my mouth.  For you say, I am rich, I have prosperity, and I need nothing, not realizing that you are wretched, pitiable, poor, blind and naked."  [Revelation 3: 15-18].

Lord Ashley, himself, described the death scene of one of the aristocratic Unbelievers in the following manner, according to historian Wilson:

Ashley's description of the death of  Lord Melbourne (his wife's uncle) in 1848 prepares us for how horrible the Darwinian vision of humanity was for a Christian man.  "He died and gave no sign at all; all without was coldness and indifference; God only can discover what was within.  Those who stood around his bed were either ignorant or thoughtless . . . . It was not the death of a heathen; he would have had an image or a ceremony.  It was the death of an animal."  [Ibid., p. 168.]

Yet God did not leave England without witness.   Lord Ashley took his place in the ranks of the wealthy aristocratic men and women who lived dedicated and faithful lives of service to Christ and mankind.

Here is Charles Haddon Spurgeon's memorial delivered from the Metropolitan Tabernacle pulpit three days after the death of Lord Ashley--an encomium far from atheistic Darwinian coldness and indifference:

During the past week the church of God, and the world at large, have sustained a very serious loss. In the taking home to himself by our gracious Lord of the Earl of Shaftesbury, we have, in my judgment, lost the best man of the age. I do not know whom I should place second, but I certainly should put him first—far beyond all other servants of God within my knowledge—for usefulness and influence.

 He was a man most true in his personal piety, as I know from having enjoyed his private friendship; a man most firm in his faith in the gospel of our Lord Jesus Christ; a man intensely active in the cause of God and truth. Take him whichever way you please, he was admirable: he was faithful to God in all his house, fulfilling both the first and second commands of the law in fervent love to God, and hearty love to man.

He occupied his high position with singleness of purpose and immovable steadfastness: where shall we find his equal? If it is not possible that he was absolutely perfect, it is equally impossible for me to mention a single fault; for I saw none. He exhibited scriptural perfection, inasmuch as he was sincere, true, and consecrated. Those things which have been regarded as faults by the loose thinkers of this age are prime virtues in my esteem. They called him narrow; and in this they bear unconscious testimony to his loyalty to truth. I rejoiced greatly in his integrity, his fearlessness, his adherence to principle, in a day when revelation is questioned, the gospel explained away, and human thought set up as the idol of the hour.

He felt that there was a vital and eternal difference between truth and error; consequently, he did not act or talk as if there was much to be said on either side, and, therefore, no one could be quite sure. We shall not know for many a year how much we miss in missing him; how great an anchor he was to this drifting generation, and how great a stimulus he was to every movement for the benefit of the poor. Both man and beast may unite in mourning him: he was the friend of every living thing.

He lived for the oppressed; he lived for London; he lived for the nation; he lived still more for God. He has finished his course; and though we do not lay him to sleep in the grave with the sorrow of those that have no hope, yet we cannot but mourn that a great man and a prince has fallen this day in Israel.

Surely, the righteous are taken away from the evil to come, and we are left to struggle on under increasing difficulties.  [“Departed Saints Yet Living.” The Metropolitan Tabernacle Pulpit Sermons. Vol. 31. London: Passmore & Alabaster, 1885. 541–542]