How a German-born scientist helped steal the Sabbath from Sydney's Christians.
For three long months in 1874, Sydney watched enthralled as the city's most prominent Darwinian " the German-born naturalist Johann "Gerard' Krefft " sat barricaded in his office in the Australian Museum. Krefft was facing trumped-up charges of drunkenness, faking attendance figures and allowing the sale of dirty postcards.
Krefft had arrived in Sydney in 1860 just months after Darwin's Origin of the Species had been published and was soon appointed head of the newly opened Australian Museum near Hyde Park.
Krefft had strong opinions. An internationally regarded scientist, he was an outspoken supporter of Charles Darwin's explosive theories, with whom he exchanged a long correspondence.
Krefft was finally crushed by a greedy Museum trustee who employed the services of two prize-fighters to break down the door and carry Krefft " still in his chair " out into the street. The reign of Sydney's top evolutionist had been brought to an inglorious end. But the Darwinians would win the real war.
Far from being a colonial backwater, by the 1870s Sydney was the bustling capital of a prosperous, booming colony. The wealth and pride of the 200,000 citizens would be fittingly celebrated at the 1879 International Exhibition, held at the purpose-built Garden Palace in the Botanical Gardens. The massive dome of the Palace " as large as St Paul's Cathedral, London " capped a stunning temple to the new gods of science and progress. It would dwarf the city until it mysteriously burned to ground three years later.
International trade brought new ideas and secularists, spiritualists and intellectual free thinkers emerged to challenge the credibility of Sydney's churches. Secular intellectual movements such as the Sunday Free Discussion Society rejected religion and promoted science as the only path to human happiness. At free thought lectures, with controversial titles like "Bible Pap for Bible Suckling', the supposed "inconsistencies' in the Bible were exposed, the harshness of the Old Testament ridiculed and the doctrine of substitutionary atonement pilloried. Spiritualists added to the array of vocal opponents to biblical Christianity, challenging original sin and the existence of hell. In their place spiritualists advocated human progression to perfection.
Central to the attacks on the Bible was the growing influence of Darwinianism. Darwinianism was perceived as "disproving' the Fall, thereby calling into question the need for a Saviour. While many of the attacks were crude, they fuelled the growing level of anti-church sentiment. Among the more educated these new ideas promoted doubts and fuelled the arguments of secularists who wanted to break the church's monopoly over Sundays.
At the local level, Sydney Anglican ministers had the better of the contest. The real opponent was not the anti-clerical orators in public halls but the growing mass of respectable literature flooding into the colony from England and read by parishioners. Best-selling novels such as George Eliot's Middlemarch were designed to ridicule evangelical Christians.
The Sabbath
The Sabbath was increasingly used as a day of leisure rather than ritual observance. The opening of the Australian Museum on Sundays to "educate' the masses about scientific advances was a key turning point. But it was also encouraged by the growing public transport infrastructure, including the running of trains and steamers on Sundays and the use of theatres by Darwinians like Krefft for secular lectures. These developments met with increasing opposition from clergy who were disturbed by the trend. Flaunting the Sabbath was a challenge to the Christian idea of society. While church opposition staved off any legislative changes, the existing laws were ignored and churches begrudgingly accepted the new social pattern.
A moral reform movement in NSW called for the enforcement of Sabbath observance. Its political campaign led to early success with a ban on Sunday trading. More far reaching was the impact on Australian culture. Factories operated six days a week, and workers who only had Sundays for relaxation began to resent the church's monopolising the day. Secularist magazine, the Bulletin, caricatured clerics as black-coated, finger-waving parsons, imposing puritanical values on disdainful workers. So the church's opposition only served to alienate the majority of people from hearing the gospel.
All this is not to say churches were emptying during this period. Quite the reverse. In the 1880s churchgoing was at its colonial peak. At this time between 40 and 45 per cent of Australians attended church regularly.
Despite apparent numerical strength, the church had moved from being at the centre of power to the fringe, competing for status, influence and privilege with secularists. The liberal-secular view of society had become mainstream and would begin to bear fruit in the next generation. With the social disruption of the Great War, the secular mindset would see the percentage of church goers halve in the 50 years to 1940.
Adapted by Jeremy Halcrow from:
T Foster, A Vision for the Mission and Message of the Australian Church After Christendom, 2005
D Griffin, Museums and Leadership on ABC radio 9/4/2000
S Judd and K Cable, Sydney Anglicans, AIO, 1987
WJ Lawton, The Better Time to Be: Utopian Attitudes to Society Among Sydney Anglicans, 1885 to 1914, UNSW Press, 1990