Until the last two or three decades, historians tended to see the'crisis of faith'in Victorian England in relatively simple terms. They regarded it as an intellectual and emotional upheaval, stemming from challenges to the historicity of the Bible, discoveries in geology and biology, and concerns about morality, or rather, the apparent lack of it, in nature. Science and religion, more precisely science and theology, were deemed to be'in conflict', the battle lines clearly drawn, and for some time, the Victorian champions of science and unbelief seemed to carry the day with the historians. In more recent years, however, scholars with perhaps a deeper sense of the continuity of ideas, or greater sensitivity to the role of religion, have pointed out that Darwinian evolution was rooted in the Christian culture of the day, that science and belief were not inevitably antagonistic, and that advocates of science were not necessarily hostile to religion. They noted as well that doubters often harboured deeply religious yearnings and sometimes found their way back to faith, and they insisted that the'decline of religion'was neither predetermined nor an automatic consequence of scientific'progress'. Some have suggested that the great Victorian warriors who fought for'science and truth'have received more than adequate honours, and that agnosticism, so devastating on the attack, posed disturbing philosophical problems for science as well as faith. On reflection it seemed that the forces of religion were remarkably skilful in parrying the threat from naturalism. Though many Victorians themselves were convinced that they were embattled over questions of science and belief, scholars now argue that not only is it difficult to make sharp distinctions between scientists and theologians in their response to these issues, but that the very notion of a conflict over ideas is itself an oversimplification. They maintain that the antagonisms which arose among intellectuals were less motivated by religious differences than by a mixture of complex, often unselfconscious