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Who really said it

Let Us Hope Darwinism is Not True, But If It is, Let Us Pray It Does Not Become Widely Known

Not Charles Darwin — a Victorian anecdote told about him Robert Forman Horton 1855–1934 · the anecdote’s earliest documented teller
Disputed Free to reuse (1893 passage)

Darwin never wrote or said this — the line is a reaction against his theory, put in the mouth of an unnamed listener. The earliest appearance known to Quote Investigator ↗ is in the English preacher R. F. Horton’s 1893 Yale lectures, where “a timid and decorous spinster” says something rather different: “Let us hope it is not true, or if it is, let us hush it up.” The familiar “let us pray it does not become widely known” wording, and every named speaker attached to it since, arrived decades later.

Last verified 1 Sep 2026 · how we verify · spot an error?

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Disputed credit — copy with the correction

“Let Us Hope Darwinism is Not True, But If It is, Let Us Pray It Does Not Become Widely Known” Apocryphal — not Charles Darwin. The earliest documented form is "Let us hope it is not true, or if it is, let us hush it up," spoken by an unnamed "timid and decorous spinster" in Robert F. Horton, Verbum Dei: The Yale Lectures on Preaching, 1893 (New York and London: Macmillan & Co., 1893), page 132. The familiar "let us pray it does not become widely known" wording, and the "Bishop of Worcester's wife" attribution, are later additions with no primary source. Via Quotle.info.

The slide-ready mistake: crediting this to Charles Darwin. Use the credit shown above instead.

Can you use it?

Free to use in the US — but only the 1893 Horton sentence, “Let us hope it is not true, or if it is, let us hush it up,” which was published well before the 1931 cutoff and needs no permission. The familiar modern wording, “let us pray it does not become widely known,” is an anonymous later mutation with no identifiable author or fixed source, so no rights status can be asserted for it. Quote the 1893 sentence if you need cleared text — and do not credit either form to Darwin.

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In context

Evoking the world of Robert Forman Horton — English Congregational minister · Yale Lyman Beecher lecturer, 1893. Theme: "Let Us Hope Darwinism is Not True, But If It is, Let Us Pray It Does Not Become Widely Known". Atmospheric and restrained, cinematic directional light, a muted period-appropriate palette, fine grain and texture. Compose with generous empty space for the quote and a small credit line. No lettering in the image itself.

Minimalist

Minimalist editorial slide for the quote "Let Us Hope Darwinism is Not True, But If It is, Let Us Pray It Does Not Become Widely Known". Clean background, a single muted accent color, generous negative space, subtle paper or linen texture, no literal illustration — let the words carry it. Reserve clear space for a serif quote and a small credit line. No lettering in the image itself.

Provenance

Where the trail actually starts

Earliest documented in
Verbum Dei: The Yale Lectures on Preaching, 1893
Author
Robert F. Horton (1855–1934), English Congregational minister
Published
New York and London: Macmillan & Co., 1893 — page 132
Speaker
“a timid and decorous spinster” — unnamed, undated, never identified

The Church swarms with people who have no spiritual sinew, and whose lungs cannot breathe the invigorating air of Truth: they take up the cry of that timid and decorous spinster who, on hearing an exposition of the Darwinian theory that men are descended from apes, said, “Let us hope it is not true, or if it is, let us hush it up.” Verbum Dei, page 132

Read in the scanned Macmillan first edition. Note what is not here: no bishop, no wife, no Oxford, no 1860 — and not the famous “let us pray it does not become widely known” wording. Horton is using the line as a jab at preachers who avoid uncomfortable scholarship, not reporting an event.

Scanned first edition, 1893
Read Verbum Dei (1893) at the Internet Archive
Quote Investigator’s full citation chronology, 1893–2007

How we verified this

  • 1893 — The earliest version known to Quote Investigator appears in R. F. Horton’s Yale lectures, published as Verbum Dei. A “timid and decorous spinster” says, “Let us hope it is not true, or if it is, let us hush it up.” Confirmed on page 132 of the scanned first edition ↗.
  • 1924 — The wording most people know today surfaces. QI records Hugh Crichton-Miller’s The New Psychology and the Preacher giving an “old lady” the line “let us pray that it may not become widely known” ↗.
  • 1941 — A named person is attached for the first time: per QI, M. F. Ashley Montagu writes in The Journal of Heredity of “the wife of the Canon of Worcester Cathedral.” That citation is QI’s. Montagu told the story again in his 1942 book Man’s Most Dangerous Myth, where, as Riley Black notes for National Geographic, he supplied no reference ↗.
  • 1977 — Leakey and Lewin’s Origins promotes her to the Bishop of Worcester’s wife and fixes the scene in June 1860 — a date and a speaker that appear in no earlier telling QI could find ↗.
Public domain

The passage quoted above is from Verbum Dei: The Yale Lectures on Preaching, 1893, published by Macmillan & Co. in New York and London in 1893 — comfortably before 1931, and therefore public domain in the United States. One honest caveat: the popular modern wording (“let us pray it does not become widely known”) is not Horton’s. It is an anonymous later mutation of the anecdote with no identifiable author or fixed source, so no rights status can be asserted for that form of the sentence.

Rights status is our research, not legal advice — and copyright varies by country and edition. For commercial or published use, confirm with the rightsholder. See terms.

Fact-check

Everyone this has been pinned on

This is not a quote with one misattribution — it is a quote with a century of them. Because the speaker was anonymous from the very first telling, each retelling was free to supply a name, and each new name was repeated as fact. Searchers often arrive asking whether Darwin himself said it — he did not, and no specialist source records the line as a Darwin attribution: it is an objection to his work, not a statement of it.

Charles Darwin Backwards

The remark is a reaction to hearing Darwin’s theory expounded, not a statement of it. In the 1893 text ↗ the speaker is a listener recoiling from “the Darwinian theory that men are descended from apes.” Even Wikiquote’s list of Darwin misattributions ↗ does not include it.

The wife of the Bishop of Worcester Most repeated

Quote Investigator records this version entering print in Richard Leakey and Roger Lewin’s Origins (1977), which dates the remark to June 1860. The anecdote itself is first documented in 1893 with no named speaker, no date and no place ↗.

The wife of a Canon of Worcester Cathedral

Per QI, the first identifiable person attached to the story appears in M. F. Ashley Montagu’s August 1941 piece in The Journal of Heredity — that citation is QI’s. Montagu repeated the anecdote in his 1942 book Man’s Most Dangerous Myth, and, writing for National Geographic, Riley Black notes that he gave no reference for it ↗.

The wife of Samuel Wilberforce Doesn’t fit

QI records this attribution in The Altruistic Species (2007). It also collides with the Worcester versions: Wilberforce was Bishop of Oxford, and it was Huxley he sparred with at the 1860 Oxford meeting ↗.

The Bishop of Birmingham’s wife

QI notes that Nicholas Humphrey’s Leaps of Faith (1996) names this speaker and relocates the episode to the 1880s rather than 1860 ↗ — a different diocese and a different decade from the Worcester tellings.

No one has produced a Victorian source for any of it. Quote Investigator found no trace of the remark in the 1860s, 1870s or 1880s ↗ and judges it apocryphal; the trail begins with an unnamed woman in a preacher’s 1893 lecture, and every name added since was added by someone who was not there.

Context

Why this one keeps travelling

It is a perfect story, which is the problem. A comfortable Victorian lady hears that human beings descend from apes and, rather than argue, simply hopes the news can be suppressed — a whole worldview collapsing into one line of polite panic. Anecdotes that good rarely need a source to survive.

What the record actually shows is a joke slowly acquiring a cast. In 1893 the speaker is a nameless “timid and decorous spinster” in a preacher’s lecture about intellectual cowardice in the pulpit. Over the following century, as Quote Investigator documents ↗, she becomes a society lady, an old woman, a canon’s wife, a bishop’s wife, and finally a specific bishop’s wife at a specific 1860 debate — gaining precision at every retelling while never gaining a citation.

The anecdote got more specific the further it travelled from anything anyone had witnessed.

How the wording itself changed

The two halves of the quote have different histories. Horton’s 1893 punchline is “let us hush it up” — blunt, and about censorship. Quote Investigator records the modern “let us pray that it may not become widely known” phrasing appearing in Hugh Crichton-Miller’s The New Psychology and the Preacher in 1924, attributed to an “old lady.”

Names arrive later still. QI notes that the first identifiable attribution comes in an August 1941 article by M. F. Ashley Montagu in The Journal of Heredity, naming “the wife of the Canon of Worcester Cathedral.” Writing for National Geographic, Riley Black (published in 2009 under her former byline, Brian Switek) independently traced the story’s popular takeoff to Montagu, pointing to his 1942 book Man’s Most Dangerous Myth and noting that Montagu supplied no reference at all ↗.

The promotion from canon’s wife to bishop’s wife happens in 1977, when Richard Leakey and Roger Lewin’s Origins assigns it to the wife of the Bishop of Worcester and dates it to June 1860 — more than eight decades after Horton first told it without a date at all.

Explore

Filed under

More provenance-checked quotes on the same theme, each with its reuse status.

Truth Doubt Knowledge

Go further

Dig deeper

Trusted places to keep pulling the thread — primary archives, fact-checks, and scholarship. We show how we used each one before you leave.

Quote Origin: Let Us Hope Darwinism is Not Truequoteinvestigator.com

The authoritative tracing. Twenty-plus dated citations from 1893 to 2007, showing the speaker mutate from an unnamed spinster to Samuel Wilberforce’s wife, and concluding the tale is apocryphal.
Verbum Dei: The Yale Lectures on Preaching, 1893archive.org

Scanned Macmillan first edition of Horton’s lectures. The anecdote is on page 132, in the lecture on the Bible and the Word of God.
Darwin and the Bishop’s Wifenationalgeographic.com

Riley Black’s independent dig, which traces the story’s popularity to Ashley Montagu around 1942 and notes no original source was ever given.
1860 Oxford evolution debateen.wikipedia.org

The event the quote is usually pinned to — 30 June 1860 at the Oxford University Museum. Samuel Wilberforce was Bishop of Oxford, and no such remark is recorded.
Robert Forman Hortonen.wikipedia.org

Biography of the minister whose 1893 Yale lectures contain the earliest known version of the anecdote.
Charles Darwin — Misattributeden.wikiquote.org

Wikiquote’s catalogue of quotes falsely pinned on Darwin. Notably, this line is not among them — no specialist source records it as something Darwin himself was supposed to have said.

Earliest documented teller

So who actually told this story?

Robert Forman Horton

1855–1934 · English Congregational minister · Yale Lyman Beecher lecturer, 1893

Horton was an English Congregational minister who served Lyndhurst Road Congregational Church in Hampstead for fifty years, and who delivered the Lyman Beecher lectures at Yale in 1893 ↗. Those lectures were published the same year as Verbum Dei, and on page 132 he reaches for a one-line joke about people who would rather not know an uncomfortable truth. He gives the speaker no name, no date and no place — which is exactly why Quote Investigator suggests he may have invented her as a rhetorical device rather than reported her. Everything the quote later became grew out of that unsourced aside.

For writers & researchers

Cite this

Earliest documented source

Robert F. Horton, Verbum Dei: The Yale Lectures on Preaching, 1893 (New York and London: Macmillan & Co., 1893), 132. Earliest appearance of the anecdote known to Quote Investigator; the speaker is unnamed and the familiar modern wording is a later mutation.

This verification page

Quotle.info. “Who really said ‘Let Us Hope Darwinism is Not True, But If It is, Let Us Pray It Does Not Become Widely Known’?” Last verified 1 Sep 2026. https://quotle.info/who-said/let-us-hope-darwinism-is-not-true-but-if-it-is-let-us-pray/

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