The Lion and the Cross: Early Christianity in Victorian Novels by Royal W. Rhodes (review)

BOOK REVIEWS 263 role substance and conviction. But these points do not detract from the book's real value as a social history of the formation of an ultramontane clergy in one region of Germany. It should serve as an inspiration and an essential reference point for further comparative studies. Raymond C. Sun Washington State University The Lion and the Cross: Early Christianity in Victorian Novels. By Royal W Rhodes. [Studies in Victorian Life and Literature.] (Columbus: Ohio State University Press. 1995. Pp. x, 400. $49.50.) Neither in the middle eighteenth century nor in the middle twentieth century would eminent churchmen think of spending their time writing novels.Yet in the Victorian age novels were published by an Archbishop of Westminster (Wiseman), the leading Catholic theologian (Newman), the Anglican Dean of Westminster (Farrar), one of the few best preachers (Boyd Carpenter), and Kingsley, who was soon to be chosen one of the chief professors of history. Beneath , or around, these eminent names was a host of minor novelists, usually second rate or worse, with one exception, CharlotteYonge, who in two or possibly three novels bore comparison with the Brontes or George Eliot. This tribe of writers wrote historical novels about religion, not usually for entertainment only, but with a moral intention, to edify, or instruct, or warn. In the new world of near-national literacy the novel was accepted, and not despised, as a rightful instrument of popular education. Apart from Charlotte Yonge only two of them could write, in the sense of being taken seriously by literature. These were the stout antagonists Newman and Kingsley. Even the novels from the pens ofthese two are now readable only by persons who want to know about the Victorian age. Callista is much more interesting because of Newman than because of Callista. Its defect is that it is not only quiet but pallid. Hypatia is very interesting because of Kingsley's extraordinary mentality and for a time it carries even a modern reader along by its biffs and bumps and zing; yet a modern reader tires of gusto after a time. Its defect is that it is not only unquiet, but overcolored and strident. Into this pool ofwriting Royal W. Rhodes plunged with courage and plunges the reader in such a way as to make him see in all this theVictorian attitudes to the early Christian Church. (The Lion in the title comes from a romantic picture of the arena where a group of Christians wait in prayer for death.) The results of the book are ofvalue.Very few of these historical novels aim only to create a historical sensibility about the past. One or two of them seem only to want to display learning. (Wiseman's Fabiola is open to that charge though plainly he also wanted to teach about rites and ceremonies in a popular way.) Almost all have a point to make about the present—for toleration, or against celibacy of the clergy, or for democracy as Christian, or against an excess of dogma, or in 264 BOOK REVIEWS favor of creeds, or to seek out true explanations for the roots of conversion, or to praise the life of the countryside against the tainted ways of the city, or to prove that faith in God does not depend on believing in miracles. One of the commonest is the assertion of the divine rights of the Church against the State. The catacombs appear but not largely. The Fathers appear but they are select— Cyprian especially,Augustine next, the Alexandrians not at all. One or two show the new state of knowledge, as after the publication of Lightfoot's Apostolic Fathers . Our author has not exhausted this field ofwriting which is unfathomable. But he is an original guide into its importance. Owen Chadwick Cambridge University William Crolly: Archbishop of Armagh, 1835-49. By Ambrose Macaulay. (Blackrock, Co. Dublin, Ireland: Four Courts Press. 1994. Pp. xiii, 481. $45.00.) A controversy among Irish prelates in 1995 over the propriety of even discussing change in the requirement of clerical celibacy led several commentators to remark that not since the 1840's had members of the hierarchy so assailed one another's views...