Please use the correct attribution in any followup, the credit belongs to Simon:
----------------------Simon Yates' original follows-----------------------
A few more details on the spread of the story and its subsequent
rebuttal, taken from the book "The Survival of Charles Darwin:
a Biography of a Man and an Idea" by Ronald W. Clark, published
by Weidenfeld & Nicholson, 1985 (p. 199)
`Shortly after his death, Lady Hope addressed a gathering of
young men and women at the educational establishment founded by
the evangelist Dwight Lyman Moody at Northfield, Massachusetts.
She had, she maintained, visited Darwin on his deathbed. He had
been reading the Epistle to the Hebrews, had asked for the local
Sunday school to sing in a summerhouse on the grounds, and had
confessed: "How I wish I had not expressed my theory of evolution
as I have done." He went on, she said, to say that he would like
her to gather a congregation since he "would like to speak to
them of Christ Jesus and His salvation, being in a state where
he was eagerly savouring the heavenly anticipation of bliss."
`With Moody's encouragement, Lady Hope's story was printed in the
Boston _Watchman Examiner_. The story spread, and the claims
were republished as late as October 1955 in the _Reformation
Review_ and in the _Monthly Record of the Free Church of
Scotland_ in February 1957. These attempts to fudge Darwin's
story had already been exposed for what they were, first by his
daughter Henrietta after they had been revived in 1922. "I was
present at his deathbed," she wrote in the _Christian_ for
February 23, 1922. "Lady Hope was not present during his last
illness, or any illness. I believe he never even saw her, but
in any case she had no influence over him in any department of
thought or belief. He never recanted any of his scientific
views, either then or earlier. We think the story of his
conversion was fabricated in the U.S.A. . . . The whole story has
no foundation whatever."'
(Ellipsis is in the book)
Clark's source for Lady Hope's supposed quotations of Darwin is
given as "Down, the Home of the Darwins: The Story of a House and
the People Who Lived There" by Sir Hedley Atkins KBE, published
by Phillimore for the Royal College of Surgeons of England, 1974.
Henrietta's rebuttal is referenced more fully as: Mrs R B
Litchfield, "Charles Darwin's Death-Bed: Story of Conversion
Denied," _The Christian_, February 23, 1922, p. 12.
>Nike