Victoria Institute - Heyday and Decline

Heyday and Decline

The Victoria Institute enjoyed considerable success in the late nineteenth century, with membership (including several members of the Royal Society) reaching a high point of 1,246 in 1897, but quickly plummeted to less than one third of that figure in the first two decades of the twentieth century. James Clerk Maxwell was repeatedly invited to join the institute, including in writing in 1875, but, although he was a devout evangelical Christian, he turned down the invitations, due the institute's narrow outlook and conservatism. Only a few prominent scientists who were Evangelicals joined it.

Prominent Canadian creationist (and long-standing institute member) George McCready Price, attended meetings regularly while living in London between 1924 and 1928, but his views failed to persuade the membership.

In 1927 it appointed prominent electrical engineer and physicist John Ambrose Fleming as its president. Fleming's 1935 presidential address, on his views on anthropology and the Bible, provoked commentary from leading London newspapers and a lengthy reply from anatomist and anthropologist Arthur Keith.

Though it was anti-evolution at first, the institute joined the theistic evolution camp by the 1920s. Its library and study centre were destroyed in World War II by bombs, and J.W. Haas, Jr. noted in 1990 that it therefore had little recent influence on the British scene other than through its journal Faith and Thought (The Journal of the Transactions of the Victoria Institute became Faith and Thought in 1958, which, in turn, merged with the Christians in Science Newsletter to become Science and Christian Belief in 1989).