“Lady Hope” (Elizabeth Reid Cotton)

1842–1922 · British evangelist & temperance writer

Elizabeth Reid Cotton became Lady Hope through her 1877 marriage to Admiral Sir James Hope. A prominent evangelist active in the temperance movement, she is remembered chiefly for the “Lady Hope story” — her 1915 claim to have visited a dying Charles Darwin and heard him lament his theory and turn to the Bible. The words she put in Darwin’s mouth, including this quote, are her invention; Darwin’s family flatly denied she was ever at his bedside.

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1 quote we’ve traced

“I was a young man with uninformed ideas. I threw out queries, suggestions, wondering all the time over everything; and to my astonishment the ideas took like wildfire. People made a religion of them”

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