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After reading The Origin of Species, Sedgwick candidly wrote to Darwin

Exactly. Sedgewick was a pious evangelical and a critic of (what he deemed) "materialist science" throughout his life. And yet he still rejected YEC and rejected the "scriptural geologists" (the YECs of the day) as unscientific. This is why I cited him (and others) as historical evidence against GourmetDan's claim that rejection of YEC is based on a "metaphysical" and evolutionary bias. Sedqewick's bias was all in the other direction, yet the scientific evidence compelled him.

Here's a snippet from an essay on Sedgewick by John M. Lynch that contains some more interesting quotes:

While Sedgwick had originally been a believer in a young Earth and in 'Flood' or 'Mosaic' geology, he recanted this view in his 1831 address as President of the Geological Society. He termed flood geology 'a philosophic heresy' and felt that Mosaic geologists 'committed the folly and sin of dogmatizing on matters they have not personally examined' (Sedgwick 1831, 313). This recantation illustrates his lifelong view that scientists should not use religion as the handmaid of geology or theologians the facts of science to prove their theological premises. Sedgwick became a ‘Gap theorist’, a believer in a period between the first and second verses of Genesis which corresponded to the geological record as observed. As he said at the 1844 British Association for Advancement of Science meeting while defending geology against the literalism of William Cockburn, the second verse 'may perhaps describe the condition of the earth after one of the many catastrophes by which its former structure had been broken up, and of which we can, on its present surface, find so many traces' (Clark & Hughes, II, 79 - 80). Conflicts between science and religion were not to be solved by
'shifting and shuffling the solid strata of the earth, or dealing them out in such as way as to play the game of an ignorant and dishonest hypothesis – not by shutting our eyes to the facts, or denying the evidence of our senses; but by patient investigation carried out in the sincere love of truth and by learning to reject every consequence not warranted by direct physical evidence.' (Discourse 111)
While his views on the age of the Earth changed radically, his opposition to transmutation remained constant throughout his life. This aside, Sedgwick clearly cannot be seen in the same mould as the Scriptural geologists who opposed scientific investigation, citing the primacy of the Word over observations in the natural world. As he said while clutching a Bible - 'Who is the greatest unbeliever? Is it not the man who, professing to hold that this book contains the Word of God, is afraid to look into the other volume, lest it should contradict it?' (Clark & Hughes, II, 582). Sedgwick would have little time with many modern opponents of evolution (particularly in the United States) who use biblical verse to override geological observation.