King of Shrewsbury

Submitted by Alan Marsden on Tue, 18/03/2025 - 00:00

Yesterday morn, I left my home at 6.10am to catch a bus to Preston and a train to Salop. Arriving in the county town, Shrewsbury, by 9.45am, I shared a pot of tea with a former colleague and did what I like to do best: inspect ancient churches. The town of Shrewsbury is most attractive, and seems to be less spoilt than most of our other cities. Narrow, cobbled streets and black and white, timbered buildings seem two-a-penny, while the town’s churches seem to be routinely unlocked so visitors may observe the curios within. A room at The Bull, which is located down one of the aforementioned, twisting lanes, proves to be perfectly comfortable. Doubtless, my brief visit will provide a wealth of themes and places about which to write in the coming months.

Outside the town’s library, which is naturally housed in a grand, four-hundred-year-old building, sits our old friend Charles Darwin, suitably enthroned. Shrewsbury is where the great prophet was born and it enjoys honouring him, even lending his name to its primary indoor shopping mall. Though baptised an Anglican, his mother took him to worship at the town’s Unitarian chapel. Unitarians’ rejection of the Bible and the gospel was taken to its logical conclusion by its young participant in later life.

Darwin enthroned attracts numerous people to pay court, some even aspiring to touch his sacred feet. He sits on his high chair, surveying the land which was so affected and influenced by his conclusions. Darwinism provided thoughtful people with respectable and intellectually acceptable reasons to reject the existence of God and the value of the Bible. While Darwin did not describe himself as an atheist, and seemed to have veered between some kind of loose theism and agnosticism (not knowing if there is a God), this might have been caused by his fear of ‘coming out’ in such a Christian environment as Victorian Britain. His teachings did for atheism what syringes loaded with heroin have done for addicts: emboldened, pleasured and satisfied.

So if this statue came to life or was allowed to be possessed by Darwin’s spirit, what would it think of Britain all those years after the general acceptance his ideas? The decline of Christianity, the unprecedented closure of churches, and the frantic determination of bishops and theologians to be seen acknowledging his theories as doctrines and dogmas of the faith: all this, I think, he would find quite gratifying. On the other hand, the appalling regard we have for the weakest form of life (unborn children), the aggressive political ideologies and eastern religions which compete to fill Christianity’s void, the rates of depression, mental illness and suicide, must surely have appalled him (or not, if he thought them all the means of bumping off the weak). Darwin’s legacy is one of spiritual decay and inner emptiness. The great statue looks proud and contented, an intellectual king of all he surveys, but the man Charles Darwin, who still lives outside the body, may well be meditating otherwise and drawing different conclusions.

Shrewsbury is lovely, and its churches fine, but the influence of one of its greatest sons deadens hearts and minds to God’s truth in this town as it does elsewhere. Charles Darwin is still alive, albeit in another place, and so, too, the God whom his theories and disciples would attempt to suppress.