Darwin at Cambridge

When Charles Darwin's father sent him to Cambridge University, at the beginning he was convinced to become a clergyman. Therefore, he believed in Bible and God as he writes "Accordingly I read with care Pearson on the Creed and a few other books on divinity; and as I did not then in the least doubt the strict and literal truth of every word in the Bible, I soon persuaded myself that our Creed must be fully accepted." When he was at Cambridge he read John Bird Sumner's Evidences of Christianity. In his book Sumner stated that people do not have the right to reject Bible and Christianity. Sumner says "Jesus religion was wonderfully suitable to our ideas of happiness in this and the next world and there was no other way of explaining the series of evidence and probability." Thus, Darwin was persuaded by Sumner's ideas and could not deny the authority of Bible and Jesus. In Darwin's second year in Cambridge, Richard Carlile and Robert Taylor who were denying the existence of God visited the university of Cambridge and affected their religious thoughts. These two people were imprisoned later for blasphemy. Despite of Carlile and Taylor's influence at university, Darwin remebered them as Devil's Chaplain.