What had begun in the liberty of toleration turned into the love of liberty for its own sake, liberty as a right (this, it will be remembered, was John Locke’s contribution, and was one of the ostensible reasons for the French Revolution). And this was not really achieved, in the leading countries of western Europe, until the years between 1860 and 1890.12 It owed a lot, Chadwick says, to John Stuart Mill, who published his essay On Liberty in the same year that Darwin published On the Origin of Species, 1859. Mill’s investigation of liberty, however, involved what he saw as a new problem. Much influenced by Comte, he was less bothered by the liberties that might be threatened by a tyrannical state, for that was an old and familiar problem. Instead, he was more concerned, in new democracies, with the tyranny of the majority over the individual or the minority, with intellectual coercion. He could see all around him that ‘the people’ were coming to power, and he anticipated that those ‘people’, too often the mob of past ages, would deny others the right to a difference of opinion.13 He thus set about defining the new liberty. ‘The only purpose for which power can be rightfully exercised over any member of a civilised community against his will, is to prevent harm to others. His own good, either physical or moral, is not a sufficient warrant. He cannot rightfully be compelled to do or forbear because it will be better for him to do so, because it will make him happier, because, in the opinion of others, to do so would be wise, or even right.’14 This was more important than it looked because it implied that a free man ‘has the right to be persuaded and convinced’, which is just as important an implication of democracy as ‘one man, one vote’. And it was this which linked liberalism and secularisation. Mill’s essay was the first argument for the full implications of the secular state. The total lack of passion in the text was the way Mill set an example as to how affairs are to be conducted.15
Judging by the way ordinary people spoke and behaved, Chadwick observes that it was during the years 1860–1880 that English society, at least, became ‘secular’.16 One can see this, he says, from the memoirs and novels of the time, which report the reading habits and conversations of the average individual, and show the increased willingness of devout men, say, to form friendships with men who were not devout, ‘to honour them for their sincerity instead of condemning them for their lack of faith’.17 It can be seen too in the role played by the new mass-circulation press.18 The press in fact played a number of roles, one of which was to enflame, to impassion, to polarise the battle of ideas and in so doing turn many citizens – for the first time – into political beings (because they were now informed). This too was a secularising influence, replacing religion with politics as the main intellectual preoccupation of ordinary people. The new profession of journalist became established at much the same time as teachers became distinct from the clergy.19
As literacy expanded, and journalism responded, ideas about liberty went through another twist. Individual liberty, in an economic sense, or applied to conscience or opinion, was discovered to be not the same as true political or psychological liberty. Through the newspapers, people became more than ever aware that industrial development, left to itself, only increased the divide between rich and poor. ‘A doctrine which ended in the slums of great cities could hardly contain all truth.’20 This brought about a profound change in liberal minds – indeed, it began to change the very meaning of liberalism itself, and Chadwick says it marked the beginning of what we may call collectivist thinking, when people began to argue more and more for government interference as the way to improve the general welfare.21 ‘Liberty was henceforth seen more in terms of the society than of the individual; less as freedom from restriction than as a quality of responsible social living in which all men had a chance to share.’22
This new way of thinking made Marxism more attractive, including his fundamental tenet, that religion was untrue, which became another factor in secularisation.23 Marx’s explanation for the continued popularity of religion was of course that it was a symptom of sickness in social life. ‘It enables the patient to bear what otherwise would be unbearable . . .’24 Religion was necessary to capitalist society, he said, to keep the masses in their place: by offering them something in the next life, they would more easily accept their lot in this one.25 Christianity – most religions – accept the existing divisions in society, ‘comfort’ the dispossessed that their misfortune is the just punishment for their sin, or else a trial, the response to which is ennobling or uplifting. Marxism became important not only because of events in the nineteenth century – the Paris Commune, the impact of the Commune upon the International, the German socialists, the growth of a revolutionary party in Russia – which appeared to confirm that what it said was true, but because it too offered a version of the afterlife: revolution, following which justice and bliss would be restored to the world. In offering a secular afterlife, Chadwick argues, Marxism produced an unintended spin-off: socialism and atheism became linked, and religion was politicised.
But Marx was not alone, not by any means. In his Condition of the Working Classes in England in 1844, Engels reported ‘almost universally a total indifference to religion, or at the utmost some trace of Deism too undeveloped to amount to more than mere words, or a vague dread of the words infidel, atheist, etc. . . .’26 Outright atheists were never very common but, in the middle 1850s, across Britain, the first ‘Secular Societies’ were founded. Paradoxically, there was a puritan streak in these groups, many of which were linked with the temperance movement. This appears to have peaked around 1883–1885, one reason being that atheists were given the right to sit in Parliament.27
Another general factor in creating a more secular world was urbanisation itself. Statistics from Germany and France show a fall in church attendance down the decades, with the greater falls occurring in the larger towns, and a parallel fall in ordinations.28 This may have been nothing more than an organisational failure on the part of organised religion but it was important – for it revealed an inability of the churches to adapt themselves quickly enough to the towns. ‘The population of Paris rose by nearly 100 per cent between 1861 and 1905, the number of parishes by about 33 per cent, the number of priests by about 30 per cent.’29
The view that we now have about the Enlightenment, that it was ‘a good thing’, a step forward, a necessary stage in the evolution of the modern world, was not the nineteenth-century view.30 For the Victorians it was the age which ended in the guillotine and the Terror. Thomas Carlyle was just one who thought that Voltaire and his deism were ‘contemptible’. For him, Napoleon was the last great man and Carlyle was proud that his own father had ‘never been visited by doubt’.31 Throughout the Napoleonic period and well on into Queen Victoria’s reign, ‘Men thought the Enlightenment a corpse, a cul-de-sac of ideas, a destructive age overthrowing the intellectual as well as the physical landmarks by which human society may live as a civilised body.’32
Opinions didn’t begin to change until the 1870s. In fact, the very first time that the English word Enlightenment was used to mean Aufklärung dates from 1865, in a book on Hegel by J. H. Stirling. But even here the word is pejorative – and it did not gain a fully favourable meaning until 1889, in Edward Caird’s study of Kant, where there is the first use of the phrase, the ‘Age of Enlightenment’.33 But the man who really rescued the Enlightenment and its secular values from the negative territory to which they had been consigned, was John Morley, a journalist for the Fortnightly Review. It was Morley (who was also an MP) who felt that the British reaction to the excesses of 1789 had been generalised to the philosophes, and that the romantics’ passion for the inner life had combined in what he called a form of philistinism to obscure the real achievements of the eighteenth century. He was stimulated to act, in a series of articles, because he saw about him the church trying to stifle positive science.34