Conclusion

The conclusion stands back from the themes of the individual chapters, to reflect on the wider tensions at work within the Victorians’ reliance upon history as their preferred approach for resolving contentious questions. It became very common for nineteenth-century commentators to regard the movements of history as recording the progressive Christianization of civilization, and as confirming Christian claims. But Mark Pattison hinted at a disturbing possibility when he argued that historical law determined the thought of successive ages, without itself guaranteeing the truth of any one system of religious belief. Progressive understandings of religious history helped Victorians to enter their own kind of modernity; and secularization was not the future most anticipated. Yet they struggled to realize their widespread conviction that historical study would ultimately yield a stable and commonly agreed religious foundation for society, which would prove capable of decisively repelling unbelief.

Reason and Religion in Modern History

This chapter focuses on Victorian debates over the intellectual origins of modernity. These hinged on competing interpretations of the place of the seventeenth and eighteenth centuries in the history of ‘mind’. Secularly inclined sociological critics such as Henry Thomas Buckle, who held to an epistemological phenomenalism influenced by John Stuart Mill and Auguste Comte, hailed these periods for having refined the inductive sciences which drove true progress. An alternative reading of post-Reformation intellectual history, developed by John Tulloch and others, and attacked by agnostics, instead credited it with having made rational theology possible. Underlying these debates was the question of whether experience was confined to the world of sense data, or else also encompassed the intuitive powers of mind. William Inge, in dialogue with Idealist philosophy, developed the latter possibility, in ways that hinted at the development of the apologetic authority of history into a new concern with the psychology of religion.

Religion and History in Nineteenth-Century Britain

The chapter introduces the process by which progressive and developmental ideas of history became authoritative in Protestant intellectual culture: a process affecting Anglicans and nonconformists; liberals and evangelicals; and religious and secular critics. It argues that the religious revivalism of the earlier part of the century tended to express itself in terms of static conceptions of religious tradition. Religious and secular varieties of liberalism, by contrast, began to rely upon more dynamic ideas of the religious past. Religious liberals challenged traditionalists by interpreting religion in developmental terms. Rooting the wider progress of civilization in the different phases of the history of the church, they elevated history into a new kind of natural theology, often with reference to different kinds of German Idealism. Their unbelieving critics, on the other hand, understood progress as the history of secularization. The chapter grounds these debates in the institutions and publishing culture of the Victorian public sphere.

Reformation Protestantism

Whereas the third chapter considers the ways in which Protestants used history to come to terms with an opposing religious system, the fourth explores developing Protestant responses to their own, post-Reformation religious heritage. After evangelicals during the 1830s and 1840s used Reformation history to strengthen Biblicist religion, and Tractarians denounced the Reformation’s destructiveness, the growth of developmental historicism pushed debate over the Reformation’s legacies in new directions. Liberal Protestants identified the kernel of modern freedom in the husk of Reformation-era dogmatism, whilst critical evangelicals, such as Henry Wace and Robert William Dale, used developmental understandings of sixteenth-century history to refresh reformed orthodoxy. John Addington Symonds and Karl Pearson, however, began to exalt the Renaissance as the alternative birthplace of the autonomous individual. Whether Reformation religion was to be regarded as the quintessence of the modern spirit, or else as its impediment, became an important dividing line in late-Victorian intellectual culture.

Latin Christianity

This chapter considers the Victorian rehabilitation of the religious history of the Middle Ages, a period which symbolized for contemporaries the claims of Roman and Anglo-Catholicism to present-day obedience and acceptance. It draws particular attention to the importance of the liberal Anglican historian, Henry Hart Milman. Influenced by Leopold von Ranke, Milman challenged anti-Catholic denunciations of the papal Antichrist on the one hand, and reactionary eulogies to medievalism on the other, to depict the period instead as a progressive and autonomous age of ‘Latin Christianity’. It became increasingly common for religious liberals, and even conservative evangelicals and high churchmen, to echo Milman’s treatment of the Middle Ages as a providential training ground for modern individuality. The more secular appraisals of the period offered, in different ways, by William Lecky and George Gordon Coulton grated against Protestant attempts to integrate Catholicism into theologically driven understandings of the development of civilization.

The Early Church

This chapter is the first of four to explore the ways in which the different layers of the Christian past came to symbolize distinctive Victorian problems. It focuses on the early church, and its significance for debates over the authority of Christian orthodoxy. Beginning with the Oxford Movement and its prehistory, a period during which high church Anglicans emphasized the static authority of patristic orthodoxy, the chapter highlights John Henry Newman’s role in distilling a more dynamic conception of the growth of religious mind. Anti-dogmatic liberals such as Arthur Penrhyn Stanley tried to separate early Christian progress from its doctrinal dimensions. But a larger number, beginning with Christian Karl Josias Bunsen, preferred to intensify the apologetic emphasis which Newman had placed on orthodoxy as the expression of developing religious subjectivity: a stance which gave new kinds of rational justification to the doctrines of the Trinity and the Incarnation.