Conflict and Crisis in the Religious Life of Late Victorian England (review)

Herbert Schlossberg's brilliant and learned book, dedicated to the late distinguished scholar Josef L. Altholz, is not a study of Victorian religious practice as measured by, for example, the statistics of participation in religious institutions, but a survey of the ebb and flow of Victorian religious conviction and controversy, centering upon the conflict between what the author calls "orthodoxy" and "liberalism" (10), the latter being primarily defined as the separation of Christian morality from Christian doctrine. The elusiveness of this subject, a survey of opinion, as the book declares, lies in the difficulty of deciding what is representative. Yet through the depth and range of his reading in both primary and secondary sources of the period, Schlossberg shows the centrality of religious debate, and demonstrates the paradox that reactions against orthodoxy—the very departures from religious belief, as in the scientific debates over Charles Darwin—put questions of faith at the heart of intellectual enquiry; the mind of the period seemed to be nowhere more deeply obsessed with Christianity than in the very act of rejecting it.

The author's recognition of complexity is evident throughout. While charting the decay of evangelicalism, its strand of anti-intellectualism, and its cultural aridity and timidity, he acknowledges its enormous influence and achievement, its development of a liberal dimension, and its dimension of self-criticism. The waning of the Nonconformist spirit, once associated with an atonement-based and sometimes Calvinist theology, accompanied a drift towards liberalism and the incarnational Anglican High Churchmanship that came to dominate the Church of England as the Victorian era drew to its close. The warfare of Church with Chapel, of evangelicals with High Churchmen, and of extremists of all traditions with a more moderate centre, was a hallmark both of the religious vigour and the religious weakness of the era. The practical outcome was a necessary common toleration, the Church of England notably failing in all attempts to force a credal or liturgical standard on its members.

More widely, there was a "diffusive" religion (211), claiming to be Christian, strong on elevated emotion and weak on theological dogma. There was a vogue for the scientific positivism of Auguste Comte and his disciples and their "Church of Humanity" as an alternative to Christianity (255), as well as a limited number of atheists and a much larger body of agnostics. By the end of the Victorian era, the author concludes, the scientism that achieved its victories through Darwin and T. H. Huxley was undermined by a growing sense that it could not be based simply on philosophical naturalism or materialism. Indeed, Schlossberg's final chapter closely approaches G. K. Chesterton's observation that by the Edwardian era the forces of religion and irreligion had fought themselves to a standstill, with agnosticism still making use of religious language as if uncertain of itself.

The difficulty of the general exclusion of Roman Catholicism from this discussion is that while Schlossberg refers to the acutest critic of liberalism in its various forms, John Henry Newman, he ignores the primacy of Rome as the ultimate resort of relief from religious doubt. There is also a scattering of minor errors inescapable in such a wide-ranging work. It is now widely disputed that, as the Victorians alleged, the eighteenth-century Church was in decline. There are a few misspelled proper names—Wilfrid Ward and Stewart Headlam, and the Deanship of "Carlyle" (187). Given that Samuel Butler was the son of an Anglican canon, he had little experience of nonconformity. His novel The Way of All Flesh (1903) is about an Anglican upbringing. Thomas Paine was an anti-Christian deist, not an atheist as is implied.

There is, however, no doubt that this is a most lively and stimulating work of interpretative summary and synthesis by a master of the subject. Schlossberg demonstrates the continuing domination of the nineteenth-century mind by religious issues and problems; he is to be...