1. J. Anthony Froude, The Nemesis of Faith (London: John Chapman, 1849), 84.
2. Cecil Rhodes, “Confession of Faith” (1877), as quoted in S. G. Millin, Rhodes (London: Chatto, 1933), 138.
3. Charles Dickens, A Tale of Two Cities (1859; London: Penguin, 2003), 5.
4. John Henry Newman, Parochial and Plain Sermons in Eight Volumes (1843; London: Longmans, Green, 1891), 2:215.
5. John Henry Newman, An Essay in Aid of a Grammar of Assent (Notre Dame, Ind.: University of Notre Dame Press, 1979), 180.
6. William Hurrell Mallock, Is Life Worth Living? (1879; London: Chatto and Windus, 1907).
7. Margaret Maison, Search Your Soul, Eustace: A Survey of the Religious Novel in the Victorian Age (London: Sheed and Ward, 1961), 209. See also Martin E. Marty, Varieties of Unbelief (New York: Holt, Rinehart and Winston, 1964).
8. Edward Rothstein, “Reason and Faith, Eternally Bound,” New York Times, December 20, 2003.
9. Leo Bersani, The Culture of Redemption (Cambridge, Mass.: Harvard University Press, 1992). My adoption, above, of the phrase “ethical necessity” is from his book Homos (Cambridge, Mass.: Harvard University Press, 1995), 151.
10. Owen Chadwick, “Doubt,” in The Victorian Church, 2 vols. (London: A. and C. Black, 1966–70), 2:120.
11. See, e.g., Newman’s thoughts on “notional assent” in his Essay in Aid of a Grammar of Assent, 52–76.
12. Thomas Cooper, The Purgatory of Suicides: A Prison-Rhyme in Ten Books (1845; London: Chapman and Hall, 1853), 199 (bk. 6, stanza 31); emphasis in original.
13. Josef L. Altholz, “The Warfare of Conscience with Theology,” in The Mind and Art of Victorian England (Minneapolis: University of Minnesota Press, 1976), 58.
14. Samuel Wilberforce, as quoted in ibid., 63.
15. John Henry Newman, as quoted in ibid., 64.
16. Altholz, “Warfare of Conscience with Theology,” 64.
17. For instance, Samuel Wilberforce, bishop of Oxford, The Revelation of God, the Probation of Man: Two Sermons Preached before the University of Oxford, January 27 and February 3, 1861 (London: John Murray, 1861), and the Reverend George Putnam, “Doubt,” Unitarian Review and Religious Magazine 19 (May 1883), 442–52.
18. The Oxford English Dictionary dates the first use of “benefit of the doubt” to 1848; see also Violet Hunt, “The Benefit of the Doubt,” English Illustrated Magazine 7 (1895), 23–28. The Rev. G. Frederick Wright, “‘Beyond Reasonable Doubt’—A Practical Principle,” Homiletic Review 36 (October 1898), 291–95; J. S. Erwin, “Reasonable Doubt and Moral Certainty,” Criminal Law Magazine and Reporter 18 (March 1896), 149–58.
19. James H. Snowden, “The Place of Doubt in Religious Belief,” Biblical World 47.3 (March 1916), 151.
20. For instance, “Ghosts and the Balance of Doubt,” an editorial in the Spectator, September 18, 1897, 366–67.
21. W. H. [William Hurrell] Mallock, “Faith and Verification,” Nineteenth Century (London), rept. in Littell’s Living Age, November 16, 1878, 411, 410.
22. Mallock, Is Life Worth Living? 272. See also the book-length response to Mallock by clergyman John Clifford, Is Life Worth Living? An Eightfold Answer (London: Marlborough, 1880), which pleaded with his congregations to make space for Christ in their hearts: “Let us then be trustful and patient, hopeful and brave” (97).
23. Matthew Arnold, “Dover Beach” (1867), in The Poetical Works of Matthew Arnold, ed. C. B. Tinker and H. F. Lowry (London: Oxford University Press, 1950), 211 (line 34).
24. Matthew Arnold, Literature and Dogma: An Essay towards a Better Apprehension of the Bible (1873; New York: Macmillan, 1914), x; John Morley, On Compromise (1874; London: Macmillan, 1917), 221.
25. Bernard Lightman, The Origins of Agnosticism: Victorian Unbelief and the Limits of Knowledge (Baltimore: Johns Hopkins University Press, 1987), 3.
26. John Patrick Shanley, Doubt: A Parable (New York: Theatre Communications Group, 2005); David Carr, “‘Doubt’ and Doubts of a Workingman,” New York Times, December 4, 2008; Christopher Hitchens, “The Dogmatic Doubter: The Nun’s Leading Critic Argues That the Psychic Pain Revealed in a New Book Was a Byproduct of Her Faith,” Newsweek, September 10, 2007, 41–42, referencing Brian Kolodiejchuk, ed., Mother Teresa: Come Be My Light: The Private Writings of the “Saint of Calcutta” (New York: Doubleday, 2007); Antony Flew with Roy Abraham Verghese, There Is a God: How the World’s Most Notorious Atheist Changed His Mind (New York: HarperOne, 2007).
27. Rebecca Newberger Goldstein, Thirty-Six Arguments for the Existence of God: A Work of Fiction (New York: Pantheon, 2010).
28. Vexen Crabtree, “Religion in the United Kingdom: Diversity, Trends and Decline,” http://www.vexen.co.uk/UK/religion.html; “Trends in UK Church Attendance,” http://www.whychurch.org.uk/trends.php; Phil Lawler, “Sharp Decline in British Mass Attendance,” Catholic World News, July 6, 2006. See also Stephen Prothero, Religious Literacy: What Every American Needs to Know—And Doesn’t (New York: HarperCollins, 2007).
29. Laurie Goodstein, “More Atheists Shout It from the Rooftops,” New York Times, April 27, 2009; Bruce Feiler, “Where Have All the Christians Gone?” Fox News, September 25, 2009; Frank Newport, “Majority of Republicans Doubt Theory of Evolution: More Americans Accept Theory of Creationism than Evolution,” Gallup News Service, June 11, 2007; “Britons Unconvinced on Evolution,” BBC News Online, January 26, 2006.
30. Charles Lyell to George J. P. Scrope, June 14, 1830, in The Life, Letters, and Journals of Sir Charles Lyell, Bart., ed. Katherine M. Lyell, 2 vols. (London: J. Murray, 1881), 1:268.
31. Charles Darwin, The Autobiography of Charles Darwin, 1809–1882 (1887), ed. Nora Barlow (New York: Norton, 1958), 87, 72, 78.
32. Robert M. Baird, “The Creative Role of Doubt in Religion,” Journal of Religion and Health 19.3 (1980), 175.
33. Sam Harris, The End of Faith: Religion, Terror, and the Future of Reason (New York: Norton, 2004); Richard Dawkins, The God Delusion (Boston: Houghton Mifflin, 2006); Christopher Hitchens, God Is Not Great: How Religion Poisons Everything (New York: Twelve, 2007).
34. Thomas Crean, God Is No Delusion: A Refutation of Richard Dawkins (San Francisco: Ignatius, 2007); Timothy Keller, The Reason for God: Belief in an Age of Skepticism (New York: Dutton, 2008); Scott Hahn and Benjamin Wiker, Answering the New Atheism: Dismantling Dawkins’ Case against God (Steubenville, Ohio: Emmaus Road, 2008). See also Chris Lehmann’s blistering review of The End of Faith, “Among the Non-Believers: The Tedium of Dogmatic Atheism,” Reason Magazine (January 2005), http://reason.com/archives/2005/01/01/among-the-non-believers.
35. Richard Dawkins, “How Dare You Call Me a Fundamentalist: The Right to Criticise ‘Faith-Heads,’” Times (London), May 12, 2007.
36. Harris, End of Faith, 66: “Faith is an impostor.”
37. Dawkins, God Delusion, 48.
38. Arthur James Balfour, A Defence of Philosophic Doubt: Being an Essay on the Foundations of Belief (London: Macmillan, 1879). See also J. Z. Young, Doubt and Certainty in Science: A Biologist’s Reflections on the Brain (Oxford: Clarendon, 1951).
1. Infidel: “one without faith,” an English word from the Old French, infidèle, and Latin, infidel-is.
2. John Stuart Mill, On Liberty (1859; London: Penguin, 1982), 159, 151, 159.
3. “An Act for Preventing Certain Abuses and Profanations on the Lord’s Day, Called Sunday (London, 1781),” as quoted in Robert Cox, The Literature of the Sabbath Question, in Two Volumes (Edinburgh: MacLachlan and Stewart, 1865), 2:234.
4. See the Reverend Robert Hodgson, The Life of the Right Reverend Beilby Porteus, D.D., Late Bishop of London (London: Cadell and Davies, 1813) (hereafter cited in the text as LBP). Hodgson writes: “The following statement I insert exactly as I find it. It marks in the strongest manner his vigilant, firm, and persevering mind, and the unremitting assiduity with which he ever laboured to discharge the high and sacred duties of a Christian Bishop” (70–71).
5. See Edward Royle, Victorian Infidels: The Origins of the British Secularist Movement, 1791–1866 (Manchester: Manchester University Press, 1974); also Terry Eagleton, Reason, Faith, and Revolution: Reflections on the God Debate (New Haven: Yale University Press, 2009), 68.
6. Thomas Bayly Howell, A Complete Collection of State Trials and Proceedings for High Treason and Other Crimes and Misdemeanors, from the Earliest Period to the Year 1783, vol. 24 (London: Longman, Rees, 1826), 253.
7. Cox, Literature of the Sabbath Question, 2:239.
8. Mark H. Judge, Honorary Secretary, “National Federation of Sunday Societies,” instituted in Leeds, May 7, 1894, concerning Statute 21 George III, Chapter 49, Federation Papers No. 3 (London: Pall Mall, 1894), 1.
9. The Office of Public Sector Information (OPSI), the Sunday Entertainments Act 1932 (chapter 51), part 4, http://www.opsi.gov.uk/RevisedStatutes/Acts/ukpga/1932/cukpga_19320051_en_1, and the Sunday Theatre Act 1972 (chapter 26), part 1, http://www.opsi.gov.uk/RevisedStatutes/Acts/ukpga/1972/cukpga _19720026_en_1.
10. See, among others, Robert Flint, Agnosticism (Edinburgh: W. Blackwood, 1903).
11. [William Nicholson], The Doubts of Infidels; or, Queries Relative to Scriptural Inconsistencies & Contradictions, Submitted for Elucidation to the Bench of Bishops, &c. &c. by a Weak but Sincere Christian (first published in The Deist, or, Moral Philosopher, 1, no. 1, 1781; rept. London: R. Carlile, 1819), v (hereafter cited in the text as DI).
12. David O’Connor, Routledge Philosophy Guidebook to Hume on Religion (London: Routledge, 2001), 19.
13. David Hume, The Natural History of Religion (1757), ed. H. E. Root (Stanford, Calif.: Stanford University Press, 1957), 76.
14. Thomas H. Huxley, “Agnosticism” (1889), in Science and Christian Tradition (1894; New York: D. Appleton, 1915), 249. See also Claudia M. Schmidt, David Hume: Reason in History (University Park: Pennsylvania State University Press, 2003), 339–40.
15. David Hume, “Of Miracles,” in An Enquiry Concerning Human Understanding and Selections from a Treatise of Human Nature (Chicago: Open Court, 1907), 116 (hereafter cited in the text as “M”).
16. Marcus Tullius Cicero, De natura deorum: Academica, trans. H. Rackham (London: Loeb, 1961), 323. Hume’s Dialogues Concerning Natural Religion were modeled after Cicero’s text.
17. Hume, characterizing the “Sum of the Charge” in his Letter from a Gentleman to His Friend in Edinburgh, Containing Some Observations on a Specimen of the Principles concerning Religion and Morality, Said to Be Maintain’d in a Book Lately Publish’d, Intituled, A Treatise of Human Nature, &c. (1745), reprinted in Hume, A Treatise of Human Nature: Texts, ed. David Fate Norton and Mary J. Norton (Oxford: Oxford University Press, 2007), 425.
18. A. N. Wilson, God’s Funeral: The Decline of Faith in Western Civilization (New York: Norton, 1999), 25.
19. Hesiod’s Theogony (c. 700 BC), as referenced by Philo in Hume’s Dialogues Concerning Human Nature (1779), ed. and intro. Martin Bell (London: Penguin, 1990), 85.
20. Alfred Tennyson, “The Lotus-Eaters” (1833), in The Poems of Tennyson, 1830–1865 (London: Cassell, 1907), 81 (stanza 6).
21. Robert M. Baird, “The Creative Role of Doubt in Religion,” Journal of Religion and Health 19.3 (1980), 175.
22. See the “Sum of the Charge” (1745), reprinted in Hume, Treatise of Human Nature: Texts, 425.
23. See John Henry Newman, An Essay in Aid of a Grammar of Assent (Notre Dame, Ind.: University of Notre Dame Press, 1979), 230–60. Jacques Derrida elaborates on both sides of this argument in “Faith and Knowledge: The Two Sources of ‘Religion’ at the Limits of Reason Alone,” in Religion, ed. Jacques Derrida and Gianni Vattimo, trans. Samuel Weber (Stanford, Calif.: Stanford University Press, 1998), 1–78. See also the appendix to Rebecca Newberger Goldstein’s Thirty-Six Arguments for the Existence of God: A Work of Fiction (New York: Pantheon, 2010), esp. 365–66.
24. Hume, Natural History of Religion, 28.
25. Bell, introduction to Dialogues Concerning Natural Religion, 8.
26. Baird, “Creative Role of Doubt in Religion,” 175.
27. Dennis R. Dean, James Hutton and the History of Geology (Ithaca, N.Y.: Cornell University Press, 1992), 22; John C. Greene, The Death of Adam: Evolution and Its Impact on Western Thought (Ames: Iowa State University Press, 1959), 76.
28. James Hutton, System of the Earth, Theory of the Earth, and Observations on Granite, intro. Victor A. Eyles (1785; New York: Hafner, 1973), 4.
29. James Hutton, Theory of the Earth; or, An Investigation of the Laws Observable in the Composition, Dissolution, and Restoration of Land upon the Globe (1788; Sioux Falls, S. Dak.: NuVision Publications, 2007), 11 (hereafter cited in the text as TE).
30. For elaboration on Hutton’s “deistic geotheory,” see Martin J. S. Rudwick, Bursting the Limits of Time: The Reconstruction of Geohistory in the Age of Revolution (Chicago: University of Chicago Press, 2007), chap. 3, part 4; Dean, James Hutton and the History of Geology, chap. 3; and John Hedley Brooke, Science and Religion: Some Historical Perspectives (Cambridge: Cambridge University Press, 1991), 214–15.
31. Hutton, as quoted in Charles Lyell, Principles of Geology (1830–33), 3 vols., ed. James A. Secord (London: Penguin, 1997), 8.
32. Richard Kirwan, Geological Essays (London: T. Bensley, 1799), 2–3.
33. Ibid., 13.
34. John Williams, The Natural History of the Mineral Kingdom, in Two Volumes (Edinburgh: T. Ruddiman, 1789), 1:lvii, lix.
35. Rudwick, Bursting the Limits of Time, chap. 3, section 5.
36. Williams, Natural History of the Mineral Kingdom, 2:119, 115.
37. John Playfair, “Biographical Account of the Late James Hutton, M.D.,” in The Works of John Playfair, Esq., 4 vols. (Edinburgh: A. Constable, 1822), 4:81.
38. See also Nigel Leask, “Mont Blanc’s Mysterious Voice: Shelley and Huttonian Earth Science,” in The Third Culture: Literature and Science, ed. Elinor S. Shaffer (New York: de Gruyter, 1997), 182–203, and Noah Heringman, Romantic Rocks, Aesthetic Geology (Ithaca, N.Y.: Cornell University Press, 2004), chap. 2.
39. Percy Bysshe Shelley, “Mont Blanc: Lines Written in the Vale of Chamounix” (1817), in The Complete Poems of Percy Bysshe Shelley (New York: Modern Library, 1994), 571 (lines 1–4).
40. Percy Bysshe Shelley, The Necessity of Atheism and Other Essays (1811; Loughton, Essex: Prometheus Books, 1993), 35.
41. Shelley, “Mont Blanc,” lines 71, 75–79.
42. Michael Erkelenz, “Shelley’s Draft of ‘Mont Blanc’ and the Conflict of ‘Faith,’” Review of English Studies 40.157 (1989), 100.
1. William Tuckwell, Reminiscences of Oxford (London: Cassell, 1901), 38.
2. Ibid.
3. The Reverend William Buckland, as quoted in Martin J. S. Rudwick, Worlds before Adam: The Reconstruction of Geohistory in the Age of Reform (Chicago: University of Chicago Press, 2008), 75.
4. Keith Thomson, Before Darwin: Reconciling God and Nature (New Haven: Yale University Press, 2005), 191–92.
5. John C. Greene, The Death of Adam: Evolution and Its Impact on Western Thought (Ames: Iowa State University Press, 1959), 77.
6. The Reverend William Buckland, Vindiciœ Geologicœ; or, The Connexion of Geology with Religion Explained, in an Inaugural Lecture Delivered before the University of Oxford, May 15, 1819, on the Endowment of a Readership in Geology by His Royal Highness the Prince Regent (Oxford: University Press, 1820), v (hereafter cited in the text as VG).
7. William Henry Fitton in the Edinburgh Review, as quoted in Rudwick, Worlds before Adam, 84.
8. For those noting the concern with which God commanded Noah to protect each species, the extinction of species was clearly a theological conundrum. Why would God allow even one species to become extinct? As Robert Plot, an early paleontologist and “Professor of Chymistry” put it in 1677, “If it be said, that possibly these Species may now be lost, I shall leave it to the Reader to judge, whether it be likely that Providence, which took so much care to secure the Works of the Creation in Noah’s Flood, should either then, or since, have been so unmindful of some Shell-Fish (and of no other Animals) as to suffer any one Species to be lost.” Plot, The Natural History of Oxford-Shire, Being an Essay towards the Natural History of England (1677), 2nd ed. (London: L. Lichfield, 1705), 115.
9. Arthur MacGregor and Abigail Headon, “Re-Inventing the Ashmolean: Natural History and Natural Theology at Oxford in the 1820s to 1850s,” Archives of Natural History 27.3 (2000), 371.
10. See Thomson, Before Darwin, 267.
11. John Ray, The Wisdom of God Manifested in the Works of the Creation (London: Samuel Smith, 1691). Paley borrowed heavily from this particular treatise, one of the first of its kind on natural theology in England.
12. John Ray, The Wisdom of God (1701 ed.), as quoted in Greene, Death of Adam, viii.
13. William Paley, Natural Theology; or, Evidence of the Existence and Attributes of the Deity, Collected from the Appearances of Nature (1802; Oxford: Oxford University Press, 2006), 16.
14. Ibid., 10.
15. Wilson, Charles Lyell, The Years to 1841: The Revolution in Geology (New Haven: Yale University Press, 1972), 33.
16. Ibid.
17. John Charles Ryle, Evangelical Religion: What It Is, and What It Is Not (1867), as quoted in Elisabeth Jay, Faith and Doubt in Victorian Britain (London: Macmillan, 1986), 13.
18. Paley, Natural Theology, 216.
19. Ibid.
20. Ibid., 15.
21. Charles Lyell to George J. P. Scrope, June 14, 1830, in The Life, Letters, and Journals of Sir Charles Lyell, Bart., ed. Katherine M. Lyell, 2 vols. (London: J. Murray, 1881), 1:268.
22. Roy Porter, “Charles Lyell: The Public and Private Faces of Science,” Janus 69 (1982), 29–50, esp. his sections “Creating a Public Rôle” and “Lyell and the Strategy of Truth.” But see also Rudwick, Worlds before Adam, 250.
23. Lyell, Principles of Geology (1830–33), 3 vols., ed. James A. Secord (London: Penguin, 1997), 102 (hereafter cited by the abridged edition in the text as PG).
24. James Hutton, Theory of the Earth; or, An Investigation of the Laws Observable in the Composition, Dissolution, and Restoration of Land upon the Globe (1788) (Sioux Falls, S. Dak.: NuVision, 2007), 75. The term “deep time” is John McPhee’s, from his Basin and Range (New York: Farrar, Straus and Giroux, 1982), 20. See also Stephen Jay Gould, Time’s Arrow, Time’s Cycle: Myth and Metaphor in the Discovery of Geological Time (Cambridge, Mass.: Harvard University Press, 1987).
25. Greene, Death of Adam, 249.
26. Adrian Desmond, The Politics of Evolution: Morphology, Medicine, and Reform in Radical London (Chicago: University of Chicago Press, 1989), 4.
27. Lyell, Principles of Geology, 3:x–xi, as quoted in Secord’s introduction to Principles, xxvi.
28. Lyell to Scrope, June 14, 1830, in Life, Letters, and Journals of Lyell, 1:268.
29. According to Secord, Lyell abstained from voting to avoid conflict with his father and brothers: “He could not violate his beliefs by voting Tory; but neither could he slight his father by siding with the Whigs, at the height of the Reform Bill agitation and in an open election with less than a hundred voters” (introduction to Principles, xiii).
30. Porter, “Charles Lyell,” 30. One exception was Darwin’s teacher, the botanist and geologist professor the Reverend John Stevens Henslow, who was married when he taught at Cambridge.
31. Secord, introduction to Principles of Geology, xxvii.
32. Ibid.
33. Lyell, cited in ibid. I am grateful to Secord’s introduction to Principles for detailing many of these sources.
34. Lyell to George Ticknor, 1850, in Life, Letters, and Journals of Lyell, 2:169.
35. Porter, “Charles Lyell,” 30.
36. The separation, that is, of church and state, so that the Church of England would cease to be the country’s official religion and the monarch would no longer be supreme governor of both the Church of England and the twenty-six bishops who sit in the House of Lords.
37. Secord, introduction to Principles of Geology, xxx.
38. Michael Bartholomew, “Lyell and Evolution: An Account of Lyell’s Response to the Prospect of an Evolutionary Ancestry for Man,” British Journal for the History of Science 6.23 (1973), 267.
39. Lyell to Gideon Mantell, December 29, 1827, in Life, Letters, and Journals of Lyell, 1:174.
40. Ibid., 173.
41. Lyell to Thomas S. Spedding, May 19, 1863, in ibid., 2:376.
42. “I re-read his book,” Darwin writes, “and remembering when it was written, I felt I had done him injustice.” Quoted in Secord, introduction to Principles of Geology, xxxvii.
43. Lyell to Mantell, March 2, 1827, in Life, Letters, and Journals of Lyell, 1:168.
44. Lyell, Principles of Geology, 196; also Secord, introduction to Principles of Geology, xxx.
45. Lyell to Mantell, March 2, 1827.
46. Ibid.
47. “Principles of Geology,” Monthly Review (London), ser. 4 (March 1832), 1:353.
48. Lyell, Sir Charles Lyell’s Scientific Journals on the Species Question, ed. Leonard G. Wilson (New Haven: Yale University Press, 1970), 280. The entry, “Birth of Man—Progressionists,” is dated June 29, 1859. Darwin’s On the Origin of Species was published in November that year.
49. Ibid., 84–85 (entry dated May 5, 1856).
50. Ibid., 57 (“Origin & Reality of Species”; entry dated April 29, 1856).
51. Ibid., 172 (“Unity of Creation”; entry dated July 11, 1858).
52. Ibid., 86 (“Dignity of Man”; entry dated May 7, 1856).
53. Ibid., 120 (“From the Lower Mammalia to Man”; entry dated July 10, 1856).
54. Ibid., 98 (“Races & Species”; entry dated June 13, 1856).
55. Secord, introduction to Principles of Geology, xxxiii–xxxiv.
56. Lyell, Sir Charles Lyell’s Scientific Journals, 196 (entry dated November 1, 1858).
57. Ibid., 180 (“Species”; entry dated July 2, 1858).
58. Bishop Berkeley, Verses on the Prospect of Planting Arts and Learning in America (1726), as quoted in Lyell, Sir Charles Lyell’s Scientific Journals, 211. Adam Sedgwick, then Woodwardian Professor of Geology at Cambridge, whose criticisms of Robert Chambers will recur in chapter 4, took a line similar to Berkeley in his 1833 Discourse on the Studies of the University, intro. Eric Ashby and Mary Anderson (Leicester: Leicester University Press, 1969), 16.
59. Lyell, Sir Charles Lyell’s Scientific Journals, 182 (“Immortality”; entry dated July 2, 1858); emphasis mine.
60. Ibid., 200 (“Creation”; entry dated December 23, 1858).
61. Wilson, private conversation with the author, November 15, 2008.
62. Ibid.
63. Alfred, Lord Tennyson, In Memoriam (1850; New York: Norton, 1973), 3, 35 (prologue and section 56).
64. Ibid., 36, 34–36 (sections 56, 55, 55, 56, 56). See also Michael Tomko, “Varieties of Geological Experience: Religion, Body, and Spirit in Tennyson’s In Memoriam and Lyell’s Principles of Geology,” Victorian Poetry 42.2 (2004), 113–33.
65. Tennyson, In Memoriam, 34 (section 54).
66. George Eliot, The Mill on the Floss (1860; London: Penguin, 2003), 543. For more on Eliot’s debt to Lyell, see Jonathan Smith, Fact and Feeling: Baconian Science and the Nineteenth-Century Literary Imagination (Madison: University of Wisconsin Press, 1994), chap. 4.
67. Thomas Carlyle to Jane W. Carlyle, July 11, 1843, in The Collected Letters of Thomas and Jane Welsh Carlyle, ed. Clyde de L. Ryals and Kenneth J. Fielding, 37 vols. (Durham: Duke University Press, 1977–2009), 16:260.
68. Carlyle to MacVey Napier, October 8, 1831, ibid., 6:13.
69. Carlyle, Sartor Resartus: The Life and Opinions of Herr Teufelsdrôckh in Three Books (1833–34), intro. Rodger L. Tarr, with text established by Mark Engel and Rodger L. Tarr (Berkeley: University of California Press, 2000), 121 (hereafter cited in the text as SR).
70. Volume 1 of Principles appeared in July 1830. Carlyle began writing the first draft of Sartor Resartus in September that year, though it took him several more years to complete it and find a publisher for it.
71. For one of several good essays on Carlyle, science, and doubt, see Carlisle Moore, “Carlyle and the ‘Torch of Science,’” in Lectures on Carlyle and His Era, ed. Jerry D. James and Charles S. Fineman (Santa Cruz: University of California Press, 1982), 1–25.
72. Carlyle, as quoted in the introduction to Sartor Resartus, xliii.
73. Ibid., li.
74. Tarr, introduction to ibid., xxxv.
75. A. L. Le Quesne, “Carlyle,” in Victorian Thinkers, ed. Keith Thomas (Oxford: Oxford University Press, 1993), 13.
76. Tarr, introduction to Sartor Resartus, xxxv.
77. Ibid., xl.
78. Ibid., xxxviii.
79. Ibid., xxvi.
80. John Bunyan, The Pilgrim’s Progress (1678; New York: P. F. Collier and Son, 1909), 119–23.
1. John Henry Newman, “My Illness in Sicily” (March 1840), based on travels from December 1832, in Autobiographical Writings, ed. Henry Tristram (London: Sheed and Ward), 1957), 125.
2. Ibid., 121; Newman, Apologia pro Vita Sua (1864; London: Penguin, 1994), 50.
3. Newman, “My Illness,” 125.
4. Newman, Apologia, 50.
5. Newman, “My Illness,” 121. See also Ian Ker, John Henry Newman: A Biography (Oxford: Oxford University Press, 1988), 61–83.
6. Kevin Rawlinson, “Cardinal Newman Moves Step Closer to Sainthood,” Independent (London), July 3, 2009. Rawlinson begins: “Campaigners for the canonisation of John Paul [sic] Newman are praying for another miracle after the Pope confirmed that the Cardinal was responsible for curing a case of spinal debility more than 100 years after his death.”
7. Close friends since 1826, Hurrell and Newman grew centrally involved in its Tractarian Movement, so named because of the “Tracts” that Newman edited and often wrote. Many of these strongly contested the political principle—established since the Reformation—that the Anglican Church was in theory beholden to the British state and monarch and not to the pope (Apologia, 32).
8. Newman to John Frederic Christie, March 7, 1833, and Newman to Samuel Rickards, April 14, 1833, both in The Letters and Diaries of John Henry Newman, ed. Birmingham Oratory, 29 vols. (Oxford: Oxford University Press, 1970–78), 3:240, 289.
9. Newman, Apologia, 50.
10. Newman, “Lead, Kindly Light” (June 16, 1833), in John Henry Newman: Prose and Poetry, ed. Geoffrey Tillotson (Cambridge, Mass.: Harvard University Press, 1957), 807.
11. Currer Bell [Charlotte Brontë], “Biographical Notice of Ellis and Acton Bell,” reprinted in Emily Brontë, Wuthering Heights (1847; London: Penguin, 1995), xlvii.
12. Newman, Apologia, 25. See also J. M. Robertson, History of Freethought in the Nineteenth Century, 2 vols. (London: Watts, 1929), 1:147.
13. Newman, Apologia, 164.
14. Newman had left Oriel College two years earlier, in 1841.
15. Bernard Lightman, The Origins of Agnosticism: Victorian Unbelief and the Limits of Knowledge (Baltimore: Johns Hopkins University Press, 1987), 3. See also Frank M. Turner, “The Religious and the Secular in Victorian England,” in Turner, Contesting Cultural Authority: Essays in Victorian Intellectual Life (Cambridge: Cambridge University Press, 1993), 3–37.
16. Arthur Hugh Clough to J. P. Gell, October 8, 1843, in The Correspondence of Arthur Hugh Clough, ed. Frederick L. Mulhauser, 2 vols. (Oxford: Clarendon, 1957), 1:124.
17. Clough to Gell, November 24, 1844, in ibid., 1:140.
18. Anglicans Online, “The Thirty-Nine Articles of Religion” (updated April 15, 2007): http://anglicansonline.org/basics/thirty-nine_articles.html.
19. Susan Budd, Varieties of Unbelief: Atheists and Agnostics in English Society, 1850–1960 (London: Heinemann, 1977), 105.
20. Robert Lee Wolff offers a comprehensive summary of many of them in Gains and Losses: Novels of Faith and Doubt in Victorian England (New York: Garland, 1977); “Victorian Fiction: Novels of Faith and Doubt,” his own book series with Garland, encompasses ninety-two novels simply by staying with mostly non canonical works. See also Lance St. John Butler, Victorian Doubt: Literary and Cultural Discourses (London: Harvester Wheatsheaf, 1990), and A. N. Wilson, God’s Funeral: The Decline of Faith in Western Civilization (New York: Norton, 1999), two works of central importance to mine.
21. John Kucich, “Intellectual Debate in the Victorian Novel: Religion, Science and the Professional,” in The Cambridge Companion to the Victorian Novel, ed. Deirdre David (Cambridge: Cambridge University Press, 2001), 215.
22. Thomas Hardy, “God’s Funeral” (c. 1908), line 21.
23. Winifred Gérin, Anne Brontë (London: Allen Lane, 1959; 2nd ed., 1976), 35.
24. Charlotte Brontë, Jane Eyre: An Autobiography (1847; London: Penguin, 2006), 76.
25. Ibid., 78, 38.
26. Ibid., 424, 464, 471. Other, unforgettable depictions of Evangelicals include Dickens’ Murdstone in David Copperfield (1850) and Chadband in Bleak House (1853). Samuel Butler’s semiautobiographical novel The Way of All Flesh (1903; London: Penguin, 1986) is also a riveting account of a stifling Evangelical Victorian childhood. For more on Dickens and religion, see Janet L. Larson, Dickens and the Broken Scripture (Athens: University of Georgia Press, 1985).
27. Newman, Apologia, 41–42.
28. [William Nicholson], The Doubts of Infidels; or, Queries Relative to Scriptural Inconsistencies and Contradictions (London: R. Carlile, 1819), 1.
29. Francis William Newman helps explain why in his own religious autobiography, Phases of Faith; or, Passages from the History of My Creed (1850; 1874; Charleston, S.C.: BiblioBazaar, 2008). He later participated in the important debates that formed Agnosticism: A Symposium (1884), which included Thomas H. Huxley and appeared in the Agnostic Annual (1884). For another, equally fascinating account of agnosticism at Oxford, see Nitram Tradleg [Edmund Martin Geldart], A Son of Belial: Autobiographical Sketches (London: Trübner, 1882).
30. “The Church has authority in controversies,” Newman later explained; but the articles “do not say what authority. They say that it may enforce nothing beyond Scripture, but do not say where the remedy lies when it does,” and so on. Newman, Apologia, 91.
31. Ibid., 57.
32. John Keble, “National Apostasy” (preached at Saint Mary’s, Oxford, on July 14, 1833; London: A. R. Mowbray, n.d.).
33. Ibid.
34. Ibid.; emphasis in original.
35. For elaboration on Constable’s relation to Salisbury Cathedral, often in his own words, see C. R. Leslie, Memoirs of the Life of John Constable, Composed Chiefly of His Letters, 2nd ed. (London: Longman, Brown, 1845), 94, 115.
36. Thomas Arnold to A. P. Stanley, May 24, 1836, in Arthur Penrhyn Stanley, The Life and Correspondence of Thomas Arnold, 2 vols. (New York: Scribner’s, 1895), 2:46–47. See also Arnold, “The Oxford Malignants and Dr. Hampden,” Edinburgh Review 63 (April 1836), 225–39.
37. The Rev. Edward Monro, Reasons for Feeling Secure in the Church of England: A Letter to a Friend, in Answer to Doubts Expressed in Reference to the Claims of the Church of Rome (London: I. H. Parker, 1850), 3. However hyperbolic the reverend’s rhetoric, the issue is still making news. See Rachel Donadio and Laurie Goodstein, “Vatican Bidding to Get Anglicans to Join Its Fold,” New York Times, October 20, 2009.
38. John Stuart Mill, On Liberty (1859; London: Penguin, 1982), 109, 66, 104. See also his Three Essays on Religion (1874), in Essays on Ethics, Religion and Society, Collected Works of John Stuart Mill, ed. J. M. Robson and F. E. L. Priestley, 33 vols. (Toronto: University of Toronto Press, 1963–91), 10:369–489.
39. David J. DeLaura, Hebrew and Hellene in Victorian England: Newman, Arnold, and Pater (Austin: University of Texas Press, 1969), 13.
40. Ibid.
41. Acton Bell [Anne Brontë], “The Doubter’s Prayer” (September 1843; published 1846), in The Poems of Anne Brontë: A New Text and Commentary, ed. Edward Chitham (Totowa, N.J.: Rowman and Littlefield, 1979), 91 (lines 25–28). Subsequent references to Anne’s poetry are to this edition.
42. Gérin, Anne Brontë, v.
43. Ibid., 34, 33.
44. Ibid., 33.
45. Marianne Thormählen, The Brontës and Religion (Cambridge: Cambridge University Press, 1999), 72.
46. Gérin, Anne Brontë, 99.
47. Brontë, “Doubter’s Prayer,” line 29.
48. Ibid., lines 5, 8, 9, 12; emphasis in original.
49. Edward Chitham, A Life of Anne Brontë (Oxford: Blackwell, 1991), 105.
50. Patrick Brontë, as quoted in Michael Baumber, “William Grimshaw, Patrick Brontë, and the Evangelical Revival,” History Today (November 1992), 29.
51. [Charlotte Brontë], “Biographical Notice of Ellis and Acton Bell,” reprinted in Emily Brontë, Wuthering Heights, xlvii. The preface dates from September 19, 1850, the year after Anne died of pulmonary tuberculosis and two years after Emily also died of tuberculosis (from influenza).
52. See, e.g., Lucasta Miller, The Brontë Myth (New York: Knopf, 2001), esp. chap. 1.
53. May Sinclair, The Three Brontës (1912; Charleston, S.C.: Dodo/BiblioBazaar, 2007), 49.
54. [Elizabeth Rigby], “Vanity Fair and Jane Eyre,” Quarterly Review (London) 84, no. 167 (December 1848), 173–74.
55. Charlotte Brontë, preface to the second edition of Jane Eyre, 5–6. See also John Maynard’s useful complication of Charlotte’s and her sisters’ position in “The Brontës and Religion,” in The Cambridge Companion to the Brontës, ed. Heather Glen (Cambridge: Cambridge University Press, 2002), esp. 196.
56. Charlotte Brontë, Shirley: A Tale (1849; London: Penguin, 2006), 521.
57. Charlotte Brontë, Villette (1853; New York: Modern Library, 2001), 186 and 133. For other uses of the term heretic, see 479, 481, 513, 535.
58. Emily Brontë, “No coward soul is mine,” in The Brontë Sisters: Selected Poems, ed. Stevie Davies (New York: Routledge, 2002), 89.
59. Review of Anne Brontë, The Tenant of Wildfell Hall, Spectator, July 8, 1848, rept. in The Brontës: Critical Heritage, ed. Miriam Allott (London: Routledge, 1974), 270, 252.
60. Review of Anne Brontë, The Tenant of Wildfell Hall, Fraser’s Magazine 39 (April 1849), rept. in The Brontë Sisters: Critical Assessments, ed. Eleanor McNees, 4 vols. (Mountfield, Sussex: Helm Information, 1996), 2:454.
61. Brontë, preface to the second edition, The Tenant of Wildfell Hall (1848; London: Penguin, 1996), 4 (hereafter cited in the text as WH).
62. Chitham, Life of Anne Brontë, 13.
63. To the sequence of “H” characters that spell out kinship in the Heights series (Hindley, Heathcliff, and Hareton), Anne offered a resounding echo, one year later, with Huntingdon, Hargrave, Hattersley, Halford, and of course Helen.
64. Acton Bell [Anne Brontë], “A Word to the ‘Elect,’” in Poems of Anne Brontë, 89; original emphasis in most other editions, including in the first edition of the Brontës’ Poems (1846). According to Chitham, Life of Anne Brontë, 104, Brontë wrote “A Word to the Calvinists” in May 1843, four months before “The Doubter’s Prayer.”
65. According to Herman Hanko, “Election is … that decree of God which He eternally makes, by which, with sovereign freedom, He chooses to Himself a people, upon whom He determines to set His love, whom He rescues from sin and death through Jesus Christ, unto Himself in everlasting glory.” Hanko, with Homer Hoeksema and Gise J. Van Baren, The Five Points of Calvinism (Grand Rapids, Mich.: Reformed Free Publishing Association, 1976), 33.
66. Review of Brontë, Tenant of Wildfell Hall, Fraser’s Magazine, 2:455.
67. For contrasting perspectives on Brontë’s suggestion here, see Thormählen, “The Villain of ‘Wildfell Hall’: Aspects and Prospects of Arthur Huntingdon,” Modern Language Review 88.4 (1993), 831–41, and Chitham, Life of Anne Brontë, on the critical chap. 49 of Brontë’s novel: “Helen’s arguments from passages in the Bible are toned down as “mere suggestions” (175).
68. Review of Brontë, The Tenant of Wildfell Hall, Fraser’s Magazine, 2:454.
69. Brontë, “A Prayer” (October 1844), in Poems of Anne Brontë, 105 (lines 3–4, 13).
70. Brontë, “Despondency” (December 1841), in ibid., 81 (lines 31–32).
71. Brontë, “To Cowper” (November 1842), in ibid., 84 (lines 15, 11, 16, 17, 21–22).
72. Susan R. Bauman, “‘How Shall I Appear?’ The Dialogue of Faith and Doubt in Anne Brontë’s Hymns,” in Sublimer Aspects: Interfaces between Literature, Aesthetics, and Theology, ed. Natasha Duquette (Newcastle: Cambridge Scholars, 2007), 84; and Brontë, “Three Guides” (August 1847), in Poems of Anne Brontë, 144 (lines 195, 206, 210).
73. Charlotte Brontë, as quoted in The Brontës: Their Lives, Friendships, and Correspondence, ed. Thomas J. Wise and John Alexander Symington, 4 vols. (Oxford: Blackwell, 1932), 2:261.
74. Esther Alice Chadwick, In the Footsteps of the Brontës (London: Pitman and Sons, 1914), 85–86.
75. Daphne du Maurier, The Infernal World of Branwell Brontë (Garden City, N.Y.: Doubleday, 1961); Joan Rees, Profligate Son: Branwell Brontë and His Sisters (London: Robert Hale, 1986); Mary Butterfield, Brother in the Shadow: Stories and Sketches by Patrick Branwell Brontë, ed. R. J. Duckett (Bradford: Bradford Libraries and Information Service, 1988).
76. Du Maurier, Infernal World of Branwell Brontë, 61. On page 239 she uses the word “schizophrenia” to describe Branwell’s dissociative states.
77. Victor A. Neufeldt, introduction to The Poems of Patrick Branwell Brontë: A New Text and Commentary (New York: Garland, 1990), xxxvii.
78. Rees, Profligate Son, 13.
79. Gérin, Anne Brontë, 193.
80. [Patrick] Branwell Brontë, “The Doubter’s Hymn” (November 1835), in The Poems of Patrick Branwell Brontë, ed. Tom Winnifrith (Oxford: Blackwell/Shakespeare Head, 1983), 210–11 (lines 21–24).
81. Ibid., lines 1–4.
82. Ibid., lines 17–20.
83. Branwell Brontë, quoted in du Maurier, Infernal World of Branwell Brontë, 62.
84. Ibid., 63.
85. Michael Walker, “J. B. Leyland: Sculptor and Friend of Branwell Brontë,” Brontë Studies 32 (March 2007), 57–70.
86. Morning Chronicle, as quoted in ibid., 60.
87. Martin Priestman, Romantic Atheism: Poetry and Freethought, 1780–1830 (Cambridge: Cambridge University Press, 2000). For a comparable example, see Samuel Taylor Coleridge, “Confessions of an Inquiring Spirit,” in The Collected Works of Samuel Taylor Coleridge, ed. H. L. Jackson and J. R. de J. Jackson, 16 vols. (Princeton, N.J.: Princeton University Press, 1969–2000), 12:1111–71.
88. Branwell Brontë, “Harriet II” (May 1838), in Poems of Patrick Branwell Brontë, ed. Winnifrith, 92 (lines 57–61).
1. Robert Chambers, Vestiges of the Natural History of Creation and Other Evolutionary Writings, ed. and intro. James A. Secord (Chicago: University of Chicago Press, 1994), 153 (hereafter cited in the text as V).
2. James A. Secord, Victorian Sensation: The Extraordinary Publication, Reception, and Secret Authorship of Vestiges of the Natural History of Creation (Chicago: University of Chicago Press, 2000), 39.
3. Spectator, November 9, 1844, 1072–73; [E. Forbes], Lancet, November 23, 1844; Atlas, November 2, 1844, 746, as cited by Secord in Victorian Sensation, 35–36. Here, as elsewhere, I am much indebted to Secord’s exhaustive research and meticulous analysis of the book’s reception.
4. Erasmus Darwin began to spell out his theory in Zoönomia; or, The Laws of Inorganic Life (London: J. Johnson, 1794–96), a work that anticipated Jean-Baptiste Lamarck’s developmental theory of evolution.
5. Secord, introduction to Vestiges, xxiv.
6. [Lewis Tayler], “Vestiges of the Natural History of Creation,” American Review 1 (1845), 526, as quoted in Secord, introduction to Vestiges, xi–xii.
7. Florence Nightingale to [? P. Nightingale], February 1845, as quoted in Secord, Victorian Sensation, 162.
8. Susan Budd, Varieties of Unbelief: Atheists and Agnostics in English Society 1850–1960 (London: Heinemann, 1977), 104–5. The breadth and depth of Budd’s research seems necessary to underscore because Timothy Larsen has since disputed its importance, arguing in Crisis of Doubt: Honest Faith in Nineteenth-Century England (Oxford: Oxford University Press, 2006) that Budd failed to account for reconversions to Christianity, which for obvious reasons wouldn’t have appeared in such journals. In fact, Budd wrote that deathbed repentance stories “were usually reported anonymously and were sometimes true” (105). On the same page, she also discusses “patterns of conversion to Christianity.” While Larsen is right to point out that “reconversions were a major reality in the Secularist movement” (14), he overstates their cultural impact relative to Budd’s far greater numbers of secular obituaries, which he largely ignores to focus on the reconversion of seven relatively minor intellectual figures. For more on the spread of secularism, see also Edward Royle’s excellent study, Victorian Infidels: The Origins of the British Secularist Movement, 1791–1866 (Manchester: Manchester University Press, 1974).
9. See, e.g., J. P. Earwaker, “Natural Science at Oxford,” Nature, December 29, 1870, 170–71.
10. “Deliverance from Doubt,” Universalist Quarterly and General Review 14 (April 1857), 122–29; W. B. Clarke, “Faith, Doubt, and Reason,” New Englander 22 (January 1863), 79–103. See also J. F. Spalding, “The Discipline of Doubt,” Boston Review 6 (1866), 120–28.
11. Clarke, “Faith, Doubt, and Reason,” 103; emphasis in original.
12. John Stuart Mill, On Liberty (1859; London: Penguin, 1982), 115, 93.
13. See in particular Jeremy Bentham’s chief work, An Introduction to the Principles of Morals and Legislation (1789; Oxford: Clarendon, 1907), 27, 36, 40.
14. Ludwig Feuerbach, The Essence of Christianity (1841; Amherst, N.Y.: Prometheus Books, 1989), x. See also 283–84, 289.
15. Charlotte Brontë, Jane Eyre: An Autobiography (1847; London: Penguin, 2006), 396, 468.
16. Robert Flint, Agnosticism (Edinburgh: W. Blackwood, 1903), 30.
17. Ayaan Hirsi Ali, “Blind Faiths,” New York Times Book Review, January 6, 2008. See also Jonathan Israel, A Revolution of the Mind: Radical Enlightenment and the Intellectual Origins of Modern Democracy (Princeton, N.J.: Princeton University Press, 2009), esp. chap. 1.
18. William Henry Fitton in the Edinburgh Review, as quoted in Martin J. S. Rudwick, Worlds before Adam: The Reconstruction of Geohistory in the Age of Reform (Chicago: University of Chicago Press, 2008), 84.
19. Secord, introduction to Vestiges, xxii.
20. Ibid.
21. Ibid.
22. Ibid.
23. [Adam Sedgwick], “Vestiges of the Natural History of Creation,” Edinburgh Review 82 (July 1845), 63–64.
24. Ibid., 3.
25. Ibid., 7.
26. Secord, Victorian Sensation, 13, 37.
27. Ibid., 132–34.
28. Ibid., 274, referencing [D. Brewster], “Explanations,” North British Review (February 1846), 487–504.
29. Ibid., 330, quoting Nonconformist, July 9, 1845, 490, and August 13, 1845, 569; and “Vestiges of Creation,” Christian Observer, n.s., 165 (September 1851), 606, 601; and “Claims of the Animal Creation,” ibid., 95 (November 1845), 671.
30. Charles Darwin, “An Historical Sketch of the Progress of Opinion on the Origin of Species,” in On the Origin of Species by Means of Natural Selection (1859), ed. J. W. Burrow (London: Penguin, 1968), 58.
31. Alfred, Lord Tennyson, diary entry for March 28, 1871, as quoted in Secord, Victorian Sensation, 9.
32. Tennyson, In Memoriam (1850; New York: Norton, 1973), 34 (section 55, line 5); see also David R. Dean, Tennyson and Geology (Lincoln: Tennyson Society, 1985), 1–8.
33. Tennyson, In Memoriam, 62 (section 96, lines 9, 11–12, 4).
34. Secord, Victorian Sensation, 253.
35. J. Anthony Froude, The Nemesis of Faith (London: John Chapman, 1849), 12, 121 (hereafter cited in the text as NF).
36. Froude to Charles Kingsley, January 1849, as quoted in Waldo Hilary Dunn, James Anthony Froude: A Biography, 2 vols. (Oxford: Clarendon, 1961–63), 1:131. See also Rosemary Ashton, “Doubting Clerics: From James Anthony Froude to Robert Elsmere via George Eliot,” in The Critical Spirit and the Will to Believe: Essays in Nineteenth-Century Literature and Religion, ed. David Jasper and T. R. Wright (Basingstoke: Macmillan, 1989), 74.
37. Julia Markus, J. Anthony Froude: The Last Undiscovered Great Victorian: A Biography (New York: Scribner, 2005), 41–42.
38. Froude to Kingsley, January 1849, in Dunn, Froude, 1:131.
39. Ibid.
40. Kingsbury Badger, “The Ordeal of Anthony Froude, Protestant Historian,” Modern Language Quarterly 13.1 (1952), 46. But see also Basil Willey, More Nineteenth Century Studies: A Group of Honest Doubters (New York: Columbia University Press, 1956), 121–32, and Daniel Cook, “Froude’s Post-Christian Apostate and the Uneven Development of Unbelief,” Religion and Literature 38.2 (2006), esp. 60–61.
41. The Reverend John Cumming, The Church before the Flood (London: Arthur Hall, Virtue, 1853), 47.
42. Robert H. Ellison and Carol Engelhardt, “Prophecy and Anti-Popery in Victorian London: John Cumming Reconsidered,” Victorian Literature and Culture 31.1 (2003), 379. See also the Rev. John Cumming, Apocalyptic Sketches; or, Lectures on the Book of Revelation, First Series (London: Arthur Hall, 1849); The Romish Church, a Dumb Church (Arthur Hall, 1853); and The Destiny of Nations as Indicated in Prophecy (London: Hurst and Blackett, 1864).
43. The Reverend John Cumming, Is Christianity from God? or, A Manual of Christian Evidence for Scripture Readers, City Missionaries, Sunday School Teachers, &c. (London: Arthur Hall and J. F. Shaw, 1847), 144–45; emphasis in original.
44. George Eliot, “Evangelical Teaching: Dr Cumming” (Westminster Review, October 1855), in George Eliot: Selected Essays, Poems and Other Writings, ed. A. S. Byatt and Nicholas Warren (London: Penguin, 1990), 50.
45. Ibid., 40 (hereafter cited in the text as “ET”). See also Peter Allan Dale, In Pursuit of a Scientific Culture: Science, Art, and Society in the Victorian Age (Madison: University of Wisconsin Press, 1989).
46. Lord Byron, “Euthanasia” (1811), as quoted in ibid., 47–48; emphases in original.
47. Lewes was unable to procure a divorce from his wife, Agnes Jervis, because he had countenanced her adultery and agreed to represent himself, on birth certificates, as the father of several of the children that she had had with other men. In the eyes of the law, he thus forfeited his legal right to end the marriage. The price that he and Eliot paid for such open-mindedness was considerable, especially when Adam Bede made her a literary celebrity.
48. Thomas Carlyle, Sartor Resartus: The Life and Opinions of Herr Teufelsdröckh in Three Books (1833–34), intro. Rodger L. Tarr, with text established by Mark Engel and Rodger L. Tarr (Berkeley: University of California Press, 2000), 34.
49. George Eliot, “Prospectus of the Westminster and Foreign Quarterly Review” (January 1852), a revised and expanded version of the draft Eliot cowrote with John Chapman, in George Eliot: Selected Essays, 6–7.
50. Gordon S. Haight, George Eliot: A Biography (1968; London: Penguin, 1992), 186.
51. Eliot’s phrase is, “sunt quibus non credidisse honor est, et fidei futurae pignus,” in George Eliot: Selected Essays, 51.
52. Cumming, as quoted in ibid., 51.
53. Ibid.; emphasis mine.
54. Anne Brontë [Acton Bell], “A Word to the ‘Elect’” (May 1843; published 1846), in The Poems of Anne Brontë: A New Text and Commentary, ed. Edward Chitham (Totowa, N.J.: Rowman and Littlefield, 1979), 90.
55. See Bernard Lightman, “Huxley and Scientific Agnosticism: The Strange History of a Failed Rhetorical Strategy,” British Journal for the History of Science 35.3 (2002), 271–89, and A. O. J. Cockshut, The Unbelievers: English Agnostic Thought, 1840–90 (London: Collins, 1964), chap. 3: “George Eliot: The Search for Justice.”
56. See, e.g., Bernard J. Paris, “George Eliot’s Religion of Humanity,” in George Eliot: A Collection of Critical Essays, ed. George R. Creeger (Englewood Cliffs, N.J.: Prentice-Hall, 1970), esp. 13. The phrase is Auguste Comte’s, from his System of Positive Polity; or, Treatise on Sociology, Instituting the Religion of Humanity (Paris: Carilian-Goeury et Dalmont, 1851–54). See also U. C. Knoepflmacher, Religious Humanism and the Victorian Novel: George Eliot, Walter Pater, and Samuel Butler (Princeton, N.J.: Princeton University Press, 1965).
57. All that remains of the poem appears in Rosemary Ashton’s biography George Eliot: A Life (London: Penguin, 1997), 22.
58. John Keble, The Christian Year: Thoughts in Verse for the Sundays and Holydays throughout the Year, 2 vols. (Oxford: J. Parker, 1827), 2:131 (84, stanza 12). See also Jude V. Nixon, “Framing Victorian Religious Discourse: An Introduction,” in Victorian Religious Discourse: New Directions in Criticism (New York: Palgrave, 2004), 3.
59. Thomas à Kempis, De Imitatione Christi (The imitation of Christ), as quoted in Eliot, The Mill on the Floss (1860; London: Penguin, 2003), 301. “Stern, ascetic views”: as quoted in Ashton, George Eliot, 25.
60. Charles C. Hennell, An Inquiry Concerning the Origin of Christianity (1838), 2nd ed. (London: T. Allman, 1841), 476.
61. Ibid., 72.
62. Arthur James Balfour tackles some of these arguments in A Defence of Philosophic Doubt: Being an Essay on the Foundations of Belief (London: Macmillan, 1879), part 2.
63. Ashton, George Eliot, 36.
64. Eliot, as quoted in Kathryn Hughes, George Eliot: The Last Victorian (New York: Farrar, Straus and Giroux, 1999), 38.
65. Hughes, ibid., 49.
66. “Higher criticism” was meant to distinguish the approach from a longstanding tradition of studying religious manuscripts, dubbed “the lower criticism.”
67. Eliot, review of Robert William Mackay’s Progress of the Intellect, as Exemplified in the Religious Development of the Greeks and Hebrews (London: John Chapman, 1850), Westminster Review 54 (January 1851), in George Eliot: Selected Essays, 268–69.
68. Feuerbach, Essence of Christianity, 63.
69. Ibid., 316; emphasis in original.
70. For elaboration, see my chapter “George Eliot and Enmity” in Hatred and Civility: The Antisocial Life in Victorian England (New York: Columbia University Press, 2004), 107–35.
71. George Eliot, Silas Marner: The Weaver of Raveloe (1861; London: Penguin, 1996), 14 (hereafter cited in the text as SM).
1. Among the wettest Junes on record in Britain, June 2007 just beats out June 1860: http://www.metoffice.gov.uk/climate/uk/interesting/june2007/.
2. Baden Powell, “On the Study of the Evidences of Christianity,” Essays and Reviews: The 1860 Text and Its Reading, ed. Victor Shea and William Whitla (Charlottesville: University of Virginia Press, 2005), 258.
3. See, e.g., John William Draper, History of the Conflict between Religion and Science (London: King, 1875).
4. Samuel Wilberforce, as quoted in, among others, John A. Moore, From Genesis to Genetics: The Case of Evolution (Berkeley: University of California Press, 2002), 76. See also J. R. Lucas, “Wilberforce and Huxley: A Legendary Encounter,” Historical Journal 22.2 (1979), 313–30.
5. Thomas H. Huxley, as quoted in Leonardo Huxley, Life and Letters of Thomas Henry Huxley, 2 vols. (London: Macmillan, 1990), 1:208.
6. Huxley, as quoted in Adrian Desmond, Darwin: The Life of a Tormented Evolutionist (New York: Norton, 1991), 497.
7. Keith Stewart Thomson, “Huxley, Wilberforce, and the Oxford Museum,” American Scientist 83 (May-June 2000), 210.
8. Press (London), July 7, 1860, 656, as quoted in J. Vernon Jensen, “Return to the Wilberforce-Huxley Debate,” British Journal for the History of Science 21.2 (1988), 161. See also Athenaeum, July 7, 1860, 19. The Guardian and Jackson’s Oxford Journal joined the Athenaeum in running summary reports of the debate.
9. John Hedley Brooke, Science and Religion: Some Historical Perspectives (Cambridge: Cambridge University Press, 1991), 41.
10. John C. Greene, The Death of Adam: Evolution and Its Impact on Western Thought (Ames: Iowa State University Press, 1959), 266.
11. Christopher Hitchens, editorial preface to Charles Darwin, Autobiography (1887), in The Portable Atheist: Essential Readings for the Nonbeliever (New York: Da Capo, 2007), 93.
12. Randal Keynes, “Faith, Cricket and Barnacles,” Annie’s Box: Charles Darwin, His Daughter and Human Evolution (London: Fourth Estate, 2001), esp. 118–21. See also Anthony Barnes, “Darwin’s Doubts Revealed in His Letters to Friends,” Independent (London), April 8, 2007, and Nick Spencer, Darwin and God (London: Society for Promoting Christian Knowledge, 2009).
13. Bernard Lightman, The Origins of Agnosticism: Victorian Unbelief and the Limits of Knowledge (Baltimore: Johns Hopkins University Press, 1987), 15.
14. For a fascinating, comprehensive overview of them, see Lightman, “Huxley and Scientific Agnosticism: The Strange History of a Failed Rhetorical Strategy,” British Journal for the History of Science 35.3 (2002), 271–89.
15. Charles Darwin, The Autobiography of Charles Darwin, 1809–1882 (1887), ed. Nora Barlow (New York: Norton, 1958), 76 (hereafter cited in the text as A).
16. For elaboration on the broader implications of Darwin’s position, see Brooke, “Evolutionary Theory and Religious Belief,” Science and Religion, 275–320.
17. See Nigel M. Cameron, Biblical Higher Criticism and the Defense of Infallibilism in Nineteenth-Century Britain (Lewiston, N.Y.: E. Mellen, 1987).
18. Henry Longueville Mansel, The Limits of Religious Thought Examined in Eight Lectures, Preached before the University of Oxford in the Year 1858 (London: J. Murray, 1870) (a fifth edition), vii–viii.
19. Lightman, Origins of Agnosticism, 6, 7.
20. Shea and Whitla, “From Clerical Culture to Secularized Anglicanism: Positioning Essays and Reviews in Victorian Social Transformation,” in Essays and Reviews, 25.
21. Mark Pattison, “Tendencies of Religious Thought in England, 1688–1750,” in Essays and Reviews, 412.
22. William Thomson, Lord Bishop of Gloucester and Bristol, “Preface” to Aids to Faith: A Series of Theological Essays: Being a Reply to “Essays and Reviews” by Several Writers, ed. Thomson (New York: D. Appleton, 1862), 3. See also the essays “On Miracles as Evidences of Christianity,” by H. L. Mansel, and “The Mosaic Record of Creation,” by A. McCaul (9–54 and 219–72, respectively), and Frances Power Cobbe, Broken Lights: An Inquiry into the Present Condition and Future Prospects of Religious Faith (London: Trübner, 1864).
23. Benjamin Jowett, “On the Interpretation of Scripture,” in Essays and Reviews, 501.
24. Ibid., 495, 502. See also his later “Darwinism, and Faith in God,” in Sermons on Faith and Doctrine, ed. W. H. Fremantle (London: Murray, 1901), 1–22.
25. Jowett, “Interpretation of Scripture,” 481, 482, 482. For further elaboration on the implications of Jowett’s argument, see Hans W. Frei, The Eclipse of Biblical Narrative: A Study in Eighteenth- and Nineteenth-Century Hermeneutics (New Haven: Yale University Press, 1974), and Sue Zemka, Victorian Testaments: The Bible, Christology, and Literary Authority in Early Nineteenth-Century British Culture (Stanford, Calif.: Stanford University Press, 1997).
26. The Rev. Charles Wesley Rishell, The Higher Criticism: An Outline of Modern Biblical Study (1893; New York: Eaton and Mains, 1896), 35.
27. Ibid.
28. Jude V. Nixon, “‘Kill[ing] Our Souls with Literalism’: Reading Essays and Reviews,” Religion and the Arts 5.1–2 (2001), 38. See also his excellent edited collection Victorian Religious Discourse: New Directions in Criticism (New York: Palgrave, 2004).
29. Nixon, “‘Kill[ing] Our Souls with Literalism,’” 40–41; Rowland Williams, “Bunsen’s Biblical Researches,” in Essays and Reviews, 639. Williams here is invoking the research of biblical scholar Baron von Bunsen.
30. C. C. J. Bunsen, God in History; or, The Progress of Man’s Faith in the Moral Order of the World, trans. Susanna Winkworth, 3 vols. (London: Longmans, Green, 1869–70). For a contemporary version of this argument, see Robert Wright, The Evolution of God (New York: Little, Brown, 2009), and for an account of its Victorian implications, see Peter Hinchliff, God and History: Aspects of British Theology, 1875–1914 (Oxford: Clarendon, 1992).
31. J. Hillis Miller, The Disappearance of God: Five Nineteenth-Century Writers (1963; Urbana: University of Illinois Press, 2000), 270–359.
32. See Peter Milward and Raymond Schoder, eds., Readings of the Wreck: Essays in Commemoration of the Centenary of G. M. Hopkins’ “The Wreck of the Deutschland” (Chicago: Loyola University Press, 1976).
33. Gerard Manley Hopkins, “I wake and feel the fell of dark, not day,” in The Later Poetic Manuscripts of Gerard Manley Hopkins in Facsimile, ed. Norman H. MacKenzie (New York: Garland, 1991), 271 (lines 9–10).
34. W. H. [William Hurrell] Mallock, “Faith and Verification,” Nineteenth Century (London), rept. in Littell’s Living Age, November 16, 1878, 410–11.
35. Friedrich Nietzsche, The Gay Science (1882), ed. Bernard Williams (Cambridge: Cambridge University Press, 2001), 120 (section 125).
36. Thomas Carlyle, Sartor Resartus: The Life and Opinions of Herr Teufelsdröckh in Three Books (1833–34), intro. Rodger L. Tarr, with text established by Mark Engel and Rodger L. Tarr (Berkeley: University of California Press, 2000), 124.
37. Nietzsche, Gay Science, 120.
38. Nietzsche, Thus Spoke Zarathustra: A Book for All and None (1883–85), trans. R. J. Hollingdale (London: Penguin, 1961), 23; emphasis in original.
39. Matthew Arnold, “Dover Beach” (1867), in The Poetical Works of Matthew Arnold, ed. C. B. Tinker and H. F. Lowry (London: Oxford University Press, 1950), 211, 212.
40. Arnold, Empedocles on Etna (1852), in Poetical Works, 421.
41. R. W. Dale, “From Doubt to Faith,” Lectures Delivered before the Young Men’s Christian Association, in Exeter Hall Lectures to Young Men 20 (1864–65), 119.
42. W. S. Balch, “Modern Doubt and Christian Belief,” Universalist Quarterly and General Review 13 (July 1876), 239. See also “Victims of Doubt,” Month: A Magazine and Review (London) 5 (1866), 441–53.
43. The Rev. A. C. Dixon, “How to Talk with Doubters,” Treasury: A Christian Magazine 15 (May 1897), 184–85, 187. See also James A. Howe, “The Way Out of Doubt,” Treasury 11 (March 1894), 915; Henry C. King, The Treatment of Doubts (Oberlin, Ohio: E. Goodrich, 1887); and R. P. Quadrupani, Light and Peace: Instructions for Devout Souls to Dispel Their Doubts and Allay Their Fears (London: B. Herder, 1904).
44. J. M. Howard, “How to Deal with Doubt and Doubters,” Cumberland Presbyterian Quarterly 4 (July 1883), 296, 297, 312, 311.
45. D. A. Wasson, “Intellectual Doubt,” Radical: A Monthly Magazine Devoted to Religion (Somerville, Mass.) 3 (1867), 293–99; J. F. Spalding, “The Discipline of Doubt,” Boston Review 6 (January 1866), 120–28; J. Mortimer Granville, M.D., “A Very Common Mind-Trouble,” Good Words (London) 23 (1882), 340–43. See also John M’Clintock and James Strong, “Doubt: Mental Uncertainty,” Cyclopaedia of Biblical, Theological, and Ecclesiastical Literature 2 (1874), 876.
46. Editorial, “The Value of Doubt,” Outlook (New York), May 29, 1897, 245. See also W. Raistrick, “The Province and Value of Doubt,” Primitive Methodist Quarterly Review 33 (July 1891), 438.
47. Aubrey L. Moore, “Darwinism and the Christian Faith,” Science and the Faith: Essays on Apologetic Subjects (1889; London: Kegan Paul, Trench, Trübner, 1898), 162.
48. Christian Responses to Charles Darwin, 1870–1900: An Exhibit at the Yale Divinity School Library (February-June 2009), http://www.library.yale.edu/div/exhibits/Darwin.htm. See also James R. Moore, The Post-Darwinian Controversies: A Study of the Protestant Struggle to Come to Terms with Darwin in Great Britain and America, 1870–1900 (Cambridge: Cambridge University Press, 1979).
49. Moore, “Darwinism,” Essays Scientific and Philosophical (London: Kegan Paul, Trench, Trübner, 1890), 30–40.
50. See Asa Gray, Darwiniana: Essays and Reviews Pertaining to Darwinism (New York: D. Appleton, 1876); Henry Drummond, The Lowell Lectures on the Ascent of Man (London: Hodder and Stoughton, 1894); Arthur James Balfour, A Defence of Philosophic Doubt: Being an Essay on the Foundations of Belief (London: Macmillan, 1879). See also L. S. Jacyna, “Science and Social Order in the Thought of A. J. Balfour,” Isis 71.1 (1980), 16; and David N. Livingstone, Darwin’s Forgotten Defenders: The Encounter between Evangelical Theology and Evolutionary Thought (Grand Rapids, Mich.: Eerdmans, 1987).
51. Josiah Keep, “Doubts Concerning Evolution,” Overland Monthly, Devoted to the Development of the Country (San Francisco), n.s., 18 (1891), 191. See also Penelope Frederica Fitzgerald, A Protest against Agnosticism: The Rationale or Philosophy of Belief (London: Kegan, Paul, Trench, Trübner, 1890).
52. For instance, H. Carlisle, “Belief and Doubt,” Nineteenth Century 22 (December 1887), 871–84.
53. Henry van Dyke, The Gospel for an Age of Doubt (1896; London: Macmillan, 1904), xvii.
54. Laman Blanchard, “Nothing Certain in Life,” New Monthly Magazine 57 (1839), 502. For commentary on contemporary forms of uncertainty, see David Brooks, “The God That Fails,” New York Times, December 31, 2009.
55. Blanchard, “Nothing Certain,” 503, 502.
56. William Cowper, “Light Shining out of Darkness” (1774), in Olney Hymns, in Three Books, 5th ed. (London: J. Buckland and J. Johnson, 1788), 3:255.
57. Heisenberg’s principle states that with certain pairs of physical properties, such as position and momentum, the more precisely one property is known, the less precisely the other can be known. See Macmillan Encyclopedia of Physics, ed. John S. Rigden, 4 vols. (New York: Simon and Schuster Macmillan, 1996), 4:1643–47, and Werner Heisenberg, “Über den anschaulichen Inhalt der quantentheoretischen Kinematik und Mechanik,” Zeitschrift für Physik 43 (1927), 172–98.
58. For analysis of that discussion in England, see Elaine Freedgood, Victorian Writing about Risk: Imagining a Safe England in a Dangerous World (Cambridge: Cambridge University Press, 2000), and, in France, A. Javary, De la certitude (Paris: Librairie philosophique de Ladrange, 1847), ix–x.
59. Christopher Herbert, Victorian Relativity: Radical Thought and Scientific Discovery (Chicago: University of Chicago Press, 2001).
60. Herbert Spencer, First Principles (1862; New York: D. Appleton, 1909), 137, 148 (hereafter cited in the text as FP).
61. Frederic W. H. Myers, “Charles Darwin and Agnosticism,” Fortnightly Review, n.s., January 1, 1888, 99–108; “Agnosticism,” Westminster Review 132 (August 1889), 148–56; and “Ardent Agnosticism,” Spectator, March 31, 1888, 299. See also Susan Budd, Varieties of Unbelief: Atheists and Agnostics in English Society 1850–1960 (London: Heinemann, 1977).
62. Frederick James Gould, Stepping-Stones to Agnosticism (London: Watts, 1890), and The Agnostic Island (London: Watts, 1891). See also Lightman, “Ideology, Evolution and Late-Victorian Agnostic Popularizers,” History, Humanity and Evolution: Essays for John C. Greene, ed. James R. Moore (Cambridge: Cambridge University Press, 1989), 285–309.
63. Temporal agnosticism: “The view that the existence or nonexistence of any deities is currently unknown but is not necessarily unknowable.” Permanent agnosticism: “The question of the existence or nonexistence of a deity or deities and the nature of ultimate reality is unknowable by reason of our natural inability to verify any experience with anything but another subjective experience.” Pragmatic agnosticism: “There is no proof of either the existence or nonexistence of any deity, but since any deity that may exist appears unconcerned for the universe or the welfare of its inhabitants, the question is largely academic.” Agnostic Theism: “The view of those who do not claim to know of the existence of any deity, but do not believe in any.” See Lightman, “Agnosticism,” in The Continuum Encyclopedia of British Philosophy, ed. Anthony Grayling, Andrew Pyle, and Naomi Goulder, 4 vols. [London: Thoemmes Continuum International, 2006], 1:48–50; and Encyclopedic Dictionary of Religion, ed. Paul Kevin Meagher et al, 3 vols. (Washington, D.C.: Corpus, 1978), 1:77–78; the citations are from Wikipedia: “Agnosticism,” accessed December 21, 2009. See also Frederic Harrison, “Agnostic Metaphysics,” Nineteenth Century 16 (September 1884), 353–78; H. G. Curteis, “Christian Agnosticism,” ibid. 15 (February 1884), 337–44; and Martin E. Marty, Varieties of Unbelief (New York: Holt, Rinehart, and Winston, 1964).
64. Thomas H. Huxley, “Agnosticism” (1889), in Science and Christian Tradition (1894; New York: D. Appleton, 1915), 238.
65. Ibid., 250.
66. Huxley to Charles Kingsley, September 23, 1860, as quoted in Leonard Huxley, Life and Letters of Thomas Henry Huxley, 2 vols. (New York: D. Appleton, 1916), 1:234.
67. Huxley, “Agnosticism,” 238.
68. Huxley to F. C. Gould, 1889, as quoted in Edward Clodd, Thomas Henry Huxley (Edinburgh: Blackwood, 1905), 220.
69. Huxley, as quoted in ibid., 221.
70. Lightman, “Huxley and Scientific Agnosticism,” 287.
71. Huxley, “Agnosticism,” 242.
72. Huxley to Gould, 220–21.
73. Lightman, “Huxley and Scientific Agnosticism,” 287.
74. Ibid., 289.
75. The first was Spencer, The Data of Ethics (London: Williams and Norgate, 1879).
76. Leslie Stephen, as quoted in Frederic William Maitland, The Life and Letters of Leslie Stephen (London: Duckworth, 1906), 150–51.
77. Virginia Woolf, as quoted in A. N. Wilson, God’s Funeral: The Decline of Faith in Western Civilization (New York: Norton, 1999), 10.
78. Noel Annan, Leslie Stephen: The Godless Victorian (Chicago: University of Chicago Press, 1984), 70.
79. Wilson, God’s Funeral, 8.
80. Stephen, “An Agnostic’s Apology,” Fortnightly Review 19 (June 1876), 860 (hereafter cited in the text as “AA”).
81. Balfour, A Defence of Philosophic Doubt; also Leslie Stephen, “Philosophic Doubt,” Mind 5 (April 1880), 157–81; and William James, The Will to Believe (1897; New York: Dover, 1956).
82. Dickinson S. Miller, “‘The Will to Believe’ and the Duty to Doubt,” International Journal of Ethics 9 (January 1899), 169–95; W. L. Sheldon, “The Ethics of Doubt—Cardinal Newman,” International Journal of Ethics 1 (1891), 224–38; D. W. Simon, “The Idealistic Remedy for Religious Doubt,” Contemporary Review 62 (July-December 1892), 855–69.
83. Owen Chadwick, “Doubt,” in The Victorian Church, 2 vols. (London: A. and C. Black, 1966–70), 2:113.
84. Ibid.
85. Clyde de L. Ryals, editor’s introduction to Mrs. Humphry Ward, Robert Elsmere (1888; Lincoln: University of Nebraska Press, 1967), xii.
86. T. H. Green, Works, ed. R. L. Nettleship, 3 vols. (London: Longmans, Green, 1888), 3:233. See also Simon, “Idealistic Remedy for Religious Doubt,” 864.
87. Walter Pater, Guardian, March 28, 1888.
88. Ward, Robert Elsmere, 496.
89. Matthew Arnold, Literature and Dogma: An Essay towards a Better Apprehension of the Bible (1873; New York: Macmillan, 1914), x.
90. John Morley, On Compromise (1874; London: Macmillan, 1917), 221.
91. Lance St. John Butler, Victorian Doubt: Literary and Cultural Discourses (Hemel Hemstead: Harvester Wheatsheaf, 1990), jacket copy.
92. Morley, On Compromise, 153–54.
93. Ibid., 154.
94. Butler, Victorian Doubt, 108.
95. Other likely models for Watts’ Hope include paintings by Velázquez, Francisco Pacheco, and Bartolomé Esteban Murillo entitled The Assumption of the Virgin.
96. Lightman, Origins of Agnosticism, 1–2.
97. Alexis de Tocqueville, Democracy in America (1835–40), 2 vols., ed. J. P. Mayer, trans. George Lawrence (New York: Harper and Row, 1969), 2:290, 291.
98. See Gray, Darwiniana, esp. Article VII: “Evolution and Theology”; also Moore, Post-Darwinian Controversies, esp. chapters 10–12; Susan Jacoby, Freethinkers: A History of American Secularism (New York: Holt, 2004), chap. 9; and James Turner, Without God, Without Creed: The Origins of Unbeliefin America (Baltimore: Johns Hopkins University Press, 1985).
99. George Santayana, “The Intellectual Temper of the Age,” in Winds of Doctrine: Studies in Contemporary Opinion (London: Dent, 1913), 1.
100. Jean-Pierre Falret, “De la non-existence de la monomanie,” in Des Maladies mentales et des asiles d’aliénés (Paris: Baillière, 1864), 425–48.
101. M. B. Bill, “Delusions of Doubt,” Popular Science Monthly (New York) 21 (October 1882), 788–95; J. Mortimer Granville, “A Very Common Mind-Trouble,” Good Words (London) 23 (1882), 340–43.
102. Bill, “Delusions of Doubt,” 788 (hereafter cited in the text as “DD”).
103. Santayana, “Intellectual Temper of the Age,” 1.
104. Philip Combs Knapp, “The Insanity of Doubt,” American Journal of Psychology 3 (January 1890), 13.
105. But see Lennard J. Davis’s Obsession: A History (Chicago: University of Chicago Press, 2008) for an astute account of the fluctuating line between obsession and all that passes in U.S. culture as habit and ritual.
106. Granville, “Very Common Mind-Trouble,” 343.
107. Ibid., 342.
108. Jacob Cooper, “Irrationality of Doubt,” Reformed Church Review (Lancaster, Pa.) 4 (October 1897), 409 (hereafter cited in the text as “ID”).
1. Sigmund Freud, Civilization and Its Discontents (1929, rev. 1930), ed. and trans. James Strachey (New York: Norton, 1961), 10 (hereafter cited in the text as CD); Freud, The Future of an Illusion (1927; New York: Norton, 1989), 38.
2. Freud’s original title for Civilization and Its Discontents was “Unhappiness in Civilization,” but he later altered the “Unglück” to “Unbehagen” (“malaise” or “discomfort”). See Strachey’s introduction to Freud, Civilization, 4.
3. Freud, Future of an Illusion, 34.
4. See, e.g., his interesting short commentary “A Religious Experience” (1928), in The Standard Edition of the Complete Psychological Works of Sigmund Freud, ed. and trans. James Strachey, 24 vols. (London: Hogarth, 1953–74), 21:167–72. See also Hans Küng, “Freud and the Problem of God,” Wilson Quarterly 3.4 (1979), 162–71.
5. Christopher Hitchens, God Is Not Great: How Religion Poisons Everything (New York: Twelve, 2007), 18 (hereafter cited in the text as GING).
6. Carl Jung, “Face to Face,” a 1959 BBC interview with John Freeman, as quoted in “Carl Gustav Jung—His Life,” http://www.bbc.co.uk/dna/h2g2/A653410.
7. Richard Dawkins, The God Delusion (Boston: Houghton Mifflin, 2006); Thomas Crean, God Is No Delusion: A Refutation of Richard Dawkins (San Francisco: Ignatius, 2007); Sam Harris, The End of Faith: Religion, Terror, and the Future of Reason (New York: Norton, 2004); Timothy Keller, The Reason for God: Belief in an Age of Skepticism (New York: Riverhead, 2008); John Allen Paulos, Irreligion: A Mathematician Explains Why the Arguments for God Just Don’t Add Up (New York: Hill and Wang, 2008); Scott Hahn and Benjamin Wiker, Answering the New Atheism: Dismantling Dawkins’ Case against God (Steubenville, Ohio: Emmaus Road, 2008). Also John F. Haught, God and the New Atheism: A Critical Response to Dawkins, Harris, and Hitchens (Louisville, Ky.: Westminster John Knox, 2008).
8. Michael Novak, No One Sees God: The Dark Night of Atheists and Believers (New York: Doubleday, 2008), xxi.
9. Ibid., jacket.
10. Dawkins, God Delusion, jacket (hereafter cited in the text as GD).
11. Dawkins, “How Dare You Call Me a Fundamentalist: The Right to Criticise ‘Faith-Heads,’” Times (London), May, 12, 2007.
12. Stephen Jay Gould, “Nonoverlapping Magisteria,” Natural History 106.2 (1997), 16–22.
13. T. H. Huxley, “Agnosticism” (1889), Science and Christian Tradition (1894; New York: D. Appleton, 1915), 238; emphasis added.
14. John Humphrys, In God We Doubt: Confessions of a Failed Atheist (London: Hodder and Stoughton, 2007).
15. For more on the limits of secularism, see Karen Armstrong, The Case for God (New York: Knopf, 2009); Charles Taylor, A Secular Age (Cambridge, Mass.: Harvard University Press, 2007); and William E. Connolly, Why I Am Not a Secularist (Minneapolis: University of Minnesota Press, 1999), 6: “Secular models of thinking, discourse, and ethics are too constipated to sustain the diversity they seek to admire, while several theocratic models that do engage the density of culture do so in ways that are too highly centered.”
16. Chris Lehmann, “Among the Non-Believers: The Tedium of Dogmatic Atheism,” Reason Magazine (January 2005), http://reason.com/archives/2005/01/01/among-the-non-believers.
17. Bernard Lightman, The Origins of Agnosticism: Victorian Unbelief and the Limits of Knowledge (Baltimore: Johns Hopkins University Press, 1987), 183.
18. Bill Maher, Religulous (LionsGate Films, 2008).
19. Stanley Fish, “The Three Atheists,” New York Times, June 10, 2007. See also his review “God Talk,” ibid., May 3, 2009.
20. Terry Eagleton, “Lunging, Flailing, Mispunching,” London Review of Books, October 19, 2006, since expanded into the book: Reason, Faith, and Revolution: Reflections on the God Debate (New Haven: Yale University Press, 2009).
21. “The Creation Museum”: http://creationmuseum.org.
22. Alfred, Lord Tennyson, In Memoriam (1850; New York: Norton, 1973), 36 (section 56, line 15).
23. Ken Ham, “What Really Happened to the Dinosaurs?” The New Answers Book: Over Twenty-Five Questions on Creation/Evolution and the Bible, ed. Ham (Green Forest, Ark.: Answers in Genesis, 2006), 150.
24. Ibid.
25. Keith Thomson, Before Darwin: Reconciling God and Nature (New Haven: Yale University Press, 2005), 281, quoting the King James Bible (Genesis 1:2).
26. Joseph Conrad, The Secret Agent: A Simple Tale (1907; Oxford: Oxford World Classics, 2004), 23.
27. For more on “theistic evolution,” see Keith B. Miller, ed., Perspectives on an Evolving Creation (Grand Rapids, Mich.: Eerdmans, 2003), and Francis S. Collins, The Language of God: A Scientist Presents Evidence for Belief (New York: Free Press, 2006).
28. Robert G. Ingersoll, “The Gods” (1872), in The Works of Robert G. Ingersoll, 12 vols. (New York: Dresden/C. P. Farrell, 1902), 1:81; Asa Gray, “Evolution and Theology” (first published in the Nation, January 15, 1874), in Darwiniana: Essays and Reviews Pertaining to Darwinism (New York: D. Appleton, 1876), 252. See also Ingersoll, “Why I Am an Agnostic” (1896), in Works 4:esp. 52–53, and David N. Livingstone, Darwin’s Forgotten Defenders: The Encounter between Evangelical Theology and Evolutionary Thought (Grand Rapids, Mich.: Eerdmans, 1987).
29. James McKeown, Genesis: Two Horizons Old Testament Commentary (Grand Rapids, Mich.: Eerdmans, 2008), 48.
30. Josiah Keep, “Doubts Concerning Evolution,” Overland Monthly and Out West Magazine 18 (August 1891), 197.
31. John Thomas Scopes, The World’s Most Famous Court Trial: Tennessee Evolution Case: A Complete Stenographic Report (Clark, N.J.: Lawbook Exchange, 1997), 77.
32. William Jennings Bryan, as quoted in ibid., 176.
33. Jon D. Miller, Eugenie C. Scott, and Shinji Okamoto, “Public Acceptance of Evolution,” Science (Washington, D.C.), August 11, 2006, 765–66.
34. Frank Newport, “Majority of Republicans Doubt Theory of Evolution: More Americans Accept Theory of Creationism than Evolution,” Gallup News Service, June 11, 2007.
35. Edwards v. Aguillard, 482 U.S. 578 (1987). The ruling nonetheless held that “teaching a variety of scientific theories about the origins of humankind to school children might be validly done with the clear secular intent of enhancing the effectiveness of science instruction” (emphasis added).
36. “Britons Unconvinced on Evolution,” BBC News Online, January 26, 2006.
37. Edward Rothstein, “Adam and Eve in the Land of the Dinosaurs,” New York Times, May 24, 2007.
38. Thomas Jefferson, The Jefferson Bible: The Life and Morals of Jesus of Nazareth (New York: Dover, 2006).
39. James Madison to William Bradford, Jr., April 1, 1774, in Letters and Other Writings of James Madison, 1769–1793, 4 vols. (Philadelphia: Lippincott, 1865), 1:14, 12; Madison to Edward Livingston, July 10, 1822, in James Madison: Philosopher, Founder, and Statesman, ed. John R. Vile, William D. Pederson, and Frank J. Williams (Athens: Ohio University Press, 2008), 128.
40. Kenneth T. Walsh, with Jeff Kass, “Separate Worlds,” U.S. News and World Report, October 17, 2004.
41. Ibid.
42. Ruth Gledhill, “Archbishop: Disestablishment of Church of England Not ‘The End of the World,’” Times (London), December 18, 2008.
43. Jerome Taylor, “‘Desperately Difficult’ to Keep Church Together Over Women Bishops,” Independent, July 12, 2010. See also the editorial “Tone-Deaf in Rome,” New York Times, July 16, 2010, concerning the Vatican’s pronouncement earlier that week that the ordination of women would be a “grave crime” as offensive as the scandal of priests who sexually abuse children.
44. Mark Hope-Unwin, as quoted in Jonathan Wynne-Jones, “Cathedral Turns to Wine Bars to Woo New Business,” Daily Telegraph, August 31, 2008.
45. “‘No God’ Slogans for City Buses,” BBC News Online, October 21, 2008.
46. “Jesus Said”: as quoted by Ariane Sherine, “The Atheist Bus Journey,” Guardian, January 6, 2009.
47. “‘No God’ Campaign Draws Complaint,” BBC News Online, January 8, 2009.
48. As quoted in Sherine, “Atheist Bus Journey.”
49. Laurie Goodstein, “More Atheists Shout It from the Rooftops,” New York Times, April 27, 2009.
50. Bruce Feiler, “Where Have All the Christians Gone?” Fox News, September 25, 2009.
51. See also Kurt Andersen, “The End of the World as They Know It: Why Everyone Has Apocalypse Fever,” New York Magazine, September 24, 2006.
52. Robert H. Ellison and Carol Engelhardt, “Prophecy and Anti-Popery in Victorian London: John Cumming Reconsidered,” Victorian Literature and Culture 31 (2003), 379.
53. Chip Berlet of Political Research Associates, a progressive think thank monitoring civil liberties, interviewed on MSNBC’s “Rachel Maddow” show, March 29, 2010, http://www.goddiscussion.com/22654/maddow-on-religious-extremism-30–40-percent-of-americans-believe-in-the-end-times/. According to Berlet, “30–40% of the American population religiously believes that the end times are coming, and of those probably 15% … think it will happen in their lifetime.”
54. Editorial to “The New Prophets of Revelation” cover story, Newsweek, May 24, 2004, 3; emphases in original.
55. Tim LaHaye, introduction to Mark Hitchcock and Thomas Ice, The Truth behind Left Behind: A Biblical View of the End Times (Sisters, Oreg.: Multnomah, 2004), 6 (hereafter cited in the text as TBLB). See also Stephen Prickett, Narrative, Religion and Science: Fundamentalism versus Irony, 1700–1999 (Cambridge: Cambridge University Press, 2002), chap. 1.
56. Ellison and Engelhardt, “Prophecy and Anti-Popery,” 373–89.
57. Others, such as David Gergen, perceived the ad as advancing a different but related message: that Obama was being “uppity.”
58. Mara Vanderslice, as quoted in Amy Sullivan, “An Antichrist Obama in McCain Ad?” Time, August 8, 2008.
59. Sullivan, “Antichrist Obama?” See also Nicholas D. Kristof, “The Push to ‘Otherize’ Obama,” New York Times, September 20, 2008.
60. Rick Davis, appearing on the Hugh Hewitt Show, September 11, 2008.
61. Sullivan, “Antichrist Obama?” When Ronald Reagan first ran for office, it is worth adding to put evangelical anxiety in further context, he generated similar concern because each of his three names—Ronald Walker Reagan—contained six letters, resulting in the well-known 666 code for the devil.
62. Maira Kalman, “The Inauguration: At Last—And the Pursuit of Happiness,” New York Times, January 29, 2009.
63. “Dobson Accuses Obama of ‘Distorting’ Bible,” CNN Political Tracker, June 24, 2008. See also Peter Wehner, “Dobson vs. Obama,” Washington Post, June 28, 2008.
64. Wehner, “Dobson Accuses Obama.”
65. Ibid.
66. John Patrick Shanley, Doubt: A Parable (New York: Theatre Communications Group, 2005), 5 (hereafter cited in the text as D).
67. Ben Brantley, “As a Nun Stands Firm, the Ground Shifts Below,” New York Times, April 1, 2005.
68. Shanley, as quoted in Alex Witchel, “The Confessions of John Patrick Shanley,” New York Times Magazine, November 7, 2004. See also Peter Berger and Anton Zijderveld, In Praise of Doubt: How to Have Convictions Without Becoming a Fanatic (New York: HarperOne, 2010).
69. Leslie Stephen, “An Agnostic’s Apology,” Fortnightly Review 19 (June 1876), 859.
70. Virginia Woolf, “Poetry, Fiction and the Future” (August 14, 1927), in Virginia Woolf: Selected Essays, ed. David Bradshaw (Oxford: Oxford World Classics, 2008), 75.
71. Robert M. Baird, “The Creative Role of Doubt in Religion,” Journal of Religion and Health 19.3 (1980), 175.
72. [William Nicholson], The Doubts of Infidels; or, Queries Relative to Scriptural Inconsistencies & Contradictions, Submitted for Elucidation to the Bench of Bishops, &c. &c. by a Weak but Sincere Christian (1781; rept. London: R. Carlile, 1819); Robert Chambers, Vestiges of the Natural History of Creation and Other Evolutionary Writings, ed. and intro. James A. Secord (Chicago: University of Chicago Press, 1994), 153; J. Anthony Froude, The Nemesis of Faith (London: John Chapman, 1849), 84.