RESUMO
Both contemporaries and historians have focused on the high-profile 1874 Belfast Address in which John Tyndall was widely perceived as promulgating atheism. Although some historians have instead interpreted him as a pantheist or an agnostic, it is clear that any such labels do not accurately capture Tyndall's religious position throughout his life. By contrast, this paper seeks to chart Tyndall's religious journey from 1840 (when he was in his late teens) to the autumn of 1848 when he commenced his scientific studies at Marburg. Although he had been imbued with his father's stern conservative Irish Protestantism and opposition to Catholicism, as a youth he seems for a time to have been attracted to Methodism. Later, however, he questioned and rejected his father's religious views and was increasingly drawn to the more spiritual outlook of Ralph Waldo Emerson and Thomas Carlyle, along with a more radical attitude to politics.
RESUMO
The Great Exhibition of 1851 is generally interpreted as a thoroughly secular event that celebrated progress in science, technology, and industry. In contrast to this perception, however, the exhibition was viewed by many contemporaries as a religious event of considerable importance. Although some religious commentators were highly critical of the exhibition and condemned the display of artifacts in the Crystal Palace as giving succor to materialism, others incorporated science and technology into their religious frameworks. Drawing on sermons, tracts, and the religious periodical press, this essay pays close attention to the ways in which science and technology were endowed with providentialist significance and particularly examines the notion of human progress used by a number of Christian writers, especially Congregationalists, who set scientific and technological progress within a teleological religious perspective. This discussion sheds fresh light not only on the Great Exhibition itself but also on the deployment of natural theology in mid-nineteenth-century Britain.
