It is an agreeable irony that T. H. Huxley, the incubus of late- Victorian theology, concluded his pioneering essay, ‘On the reception of the “Origin of Species”’, with an allusion to the biblical metaphor of wine and wineskins. It is at once more ironic and less agreeable that in this context he obliquely credited the ‘happy ingenuity’ of his generation for discovering that the new Darwinian wine was of the same vintage as older causo-mechanical explanations of natural phenomena, and thus that older theological bottles, ‘rightly viewed’, had been made expressly to contain it. Less agreeable, this latter irony, because it violates most of the preconceptions which, until quite recently, have been fostered by accounts of Christian responses to Darwin in the later nineteenth century.