A Short History of Freethought Ancient and Modern, Volume 2 of 2 by J. M. Robertson

trained to suppose that their views were triumphant over all attacks, [1859] and to see in "infidelity" a disease of an ill-informed past; and as the Church had really gained in conventional culture as well as in wealth and prestige in the period of reaction, the power of mere convention to override ideas was still enormous. But through the whole stress of reaction and conservatism, even apart from the positive criticism of creed which from time to time forced its head up, there is a visible play of a new spirit in the most notable of the serious writing of the time. Carlyle undermined orthodoxy even in his asseveration of unreasoned theism; Emerson disturbs it alike when he acclaims mystics and welcomes evolutionary science; and the whole inspiration of Mill's Logic no less than of his Liberty is something alien to the principle of authority. Of Ruskin, again, the same may be asserted in respect of his many searching thrusts at clerical and lay practice, his defence of Colenso, and the obvious disappearance from his later books of the evangelical orthodoxy of the earlier. [1860] Thus the most celebrated writers of serious English prose in the latter half of the century were in a measure associated with the spirit of critical thought on matters religious. In a much stronger degree the same thing may be predicated finally of the writer who in the field of English belles lettres, apart from fiction, came nearest them in fame and influence. Matthew Arnold, passing insensibly from the English attitude of academic orthodoxy to that of the humanist for whom Christ is but an admirable teacher and God a "Something not ourselves which makes for righteousness," became for the England of his later years the favourite pilot across the bar between supernaturalism and naturalism. Only in England, perhaps, could his curious gospel of church-going and Bible-reading atheism have prospered, but there it prospered exceedingly. Alike as poet and as essayist, even when essaying to disparage Colenso or to confute the Germans where they jostled his predilection for the Fourth Gospel, he was a disintegrator of tradition, and, in his dogmatic way, a dissolver of dogmatism. When, therefore, beside the four names just mentioned the British public placed those of the philosophers Spencer, Lewes, and Mill, and the scientists Darwin, Huxley, Clifford, and Tyndall, they could not but recognize that the mind of the age was divorced from the nominal faith of the Church.