certain that it did not take place.'1 In much the same way, when Tennyson read Lyell's Principles of Geology in 1836 he was troubled, as so many were, by Lyell's interpretation of the fossil evidence, that 'the inhabitants of the globe, like all other parts of it, are subject to change. It is not only the individual that perishes, but whole species.'2 The sad, slow, but inexorable loss of faith in the nineteenth century by so many people, prominent or otherwise, has been explored by the writer A. N. Wilson. His survey of Eliot, Tennyson, Hardy, Carlyle, Swinburne, James Anthony Froude, Arthur Clough, Tolstoy, Herbert Spencer, Samuel Butler, John Ruskin and Edmund Gosse confirms what others have said, that the loss of faith, the 'death of God', was not only an intellectual change but an emotional conversion as well. Specific books and arguments made a difference but there was also a change in the general climate of opinion, the cumulative unsettling effect of one thing, then another, often quite different.3 When Francis Galton, Darwin's step-cousin, circulated a questionnaire to 189 Fellows of the Royal Society in 1874, inquiring after their religious affiliation, he was surprised by the answers he received. Seventy per cent described themselves as members of the established churches and while some said that they had no religious affiliation, many others were Nonconformist of one stripe or another-Wesleyan, Catholic, or some other form of organised church. Asked in the same questionnaire if their religious upbringing had in any way had a deterrent effect on their careers in science, nearly 90 per cent replied 'None at all.'4 Among those who, as late as 1874, still believed in a deity may be included Michael Faraday, John Herschel, James Joule, James Clerk Maxwell and William Thomson (Lord Kelvin). Wilson shows that there were almost as many reasons as there were people for the loss of faith, where it occurred. Some were much more convinced than others that God was dead, while 'some managed to be both anti-God and anti-science at the same time'.5 Unlike the intellectual battles fought over unbelief in the sixteenth and seventeenth centuries, in the nineteenth there were many more issues that the faithful had to deal with, over and above the doubts raised about the literal truth of the Bible, say, or the implausibility of the miracles. Wilson locates the change of atmosphere as beginning in the late eighteenth century. The atheism of the French philosophes of the Enlightenment was one factor but in Britain, he says, there were two books which did more than any other to undermine faith. These were Edward Gibbon's The History of the Decline and Fall of the Roman Empire , published in three instalments between 1776 and 1788, and David Hume's Dialogues Concerning Natural Religion , published in 1779, three years after his death. Gibbon offered no important metaphysical or theological arguments, says Wilson.6 Instead, 'Gibbon was (is) destructive of faith...in his blithe revelation, on page after page, of the sheer contemptibility, not only of the Christian heroes, but of their "highest" ideals. It is not merely in the repeated and hilarious identification of individual Christian wickedness that Gibbon reaches his target. Rather it is in his whole attitude, which resolutely refuses to be impressed by the Christian contribution to "civilisation".'7 It was Gibbon's constant contrast between 'the evident wisdom' of pre-Christian cultures and the superstitious and irrational anachronisms and barbarisms of the early Christians that had such an effect on readers.8 Hume's critique of 'mind' and order in the universe was discussed in an earlier chapter (see above, pages 538-539), as was Kant's argument that such concepts as God, Soul and Immortality can never be proved.9 If these matters might be characterised as 'deep background' to the general loss of faith, there were other factors specific to the nineteenth century. The historian Owen Chadwick divided these into 'the social' and 'the intellectual'. Among them he includes liberalism, Marx, anticlericalism and the 'working class mentality'. Liberalism, says Chadwick, dominated the nineteenth century.10 But it was a protean word, he admits, one that in origin simply meant free, free from restraint. In the later Reformation it came to mean too free, licentious or anarchic. This is how men such as John Henry Newman understood it, in the mid-1800s. But liberalism, like it or not, owed much to Christianity. Individing Europeby religion, the Reformation invited-eventually-a toleration, but Christianity at one level had always sought for a religion of the heart, rather than the mere celebration of rites, a reverence for individual conscience which, in the end, and fatally, says Chadwick, weakened the desire for sheer conformity. 'Christian conscience was [thus] the force which began to make Europe "secular"; that is, to allow many religions or no religion in a state.'11
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 and1890.12 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