Darwin’s daughter, Henrietta Litchfield, was with her father at his deathbed and insisted that Lady Hope had not even visited him during his last illness. This was preposterous, and quickly dismissed as such. In 1915 the evangelist Elizabeth Cotton, better known as Lady Hope of Carriden, declared that the great scientist, readying himself for the end in April 1882, had repudiated his life’s work (“How I wish I had not expressed my theory of evolution as I have done”) and asked her to gather an audience so he could “speak to them of Christ Jesus and His salvation”. Indeed, the faithful have form when it comes to falsifying deathbed conversions – notoriously so in the case of Darwin. In this respect the trail was blazed by the world’s great religions, which routinely claim recruits among the dying.
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