sacred books made some progress in England, France, and America in the
first half of the century; though for a time the attention even of the
educated world was centred much more upon the Oxford "tractarian"
religious reaction than upon the movement of rationalism. The
reaction, associated mainly with the name of John Henry Newman, was
rather against the political Erastianism and æsthetic apathy of the
Whig type of Christian than against German or other criticism, of
which Newman knew little. But against the attitude of those moderate
Anglicans who were disposed to disestablish the Church in Ireland
and to modernize the liturgy somewhat, the language of the "Tracts
for the Times" is as authoritarian and anti-rationalistic as that
of Catholics denouncing freethought. Such expressions as "the filth
of heretical novelty" [1822] are meant to apply to anything in the
nature of innovation; the causes at stake are ritual and precedent,
the apostolic succession and the status of the priest, not the truth
of revelation or the credibility of the scriptures. The third Tract
appeals to the clergy to "resist the alteration of even one jot or
tittle" of the liturgy; and concerning the burial service the line of
argument is: "Do you pretend you can discriminate the wheat from the
tares? Of course not." All attempts even to modify the ritual are an
"abuse of reason"; and the true believer is adjured to stand fast in
the ancient ways. [1823] At a pinch he is to "consider what Reason
says; which surely, as well as Scripture, was given us for religious
ends"; [1824] but the only "reason" thus recognized is one which
accepts the whole apparatus of revelation. Previous to and alongside
of this single-minded reversion to the ideals of the Dark Ages--a
phenomenon not unconnected with the revival of romanticism by Scott
and Chateaubriand--there was going on a movement of modernism, of which
one of the overt traces is Milman's History of the Jews (1829), a work
to-day regarded as harmless even by the orthodox, but sufficient in
its time to let Newman see whither religious "Liberalism" was heading.
Other and later researches dug much deeper into the problems of
religious historiography. The Unitarian C. C. Hennell produced an
Inquiry Concerning the Origin of Christianity (1838), so important for
its time as to be thought worth translating into German by Strauss;
and this found a considerable response from the educated English
public of its day. In the preface to his second edition (1841) Hennell
spoke very plainly of "the large and probably increasing amount of
unbelief in all classes around us"; and made the then remarkably
courageous declarations that in his experience "neither deism,
pantheism, nor even atheism indicates modes of thought incompatible
with uprightness and benevolence"; and that "the real or affected
horror which it is still a prevailing custom to exhibit towards their
names would be better reserved for those of the selfish, the cruel,
the bigot, and other tormentors of mankind." It was in the circle of
Hennell that Marian Evans, later to become famous as George Eliot,
grew into a rationalist in despite of her religious temperament;
and it was she who, when Hennell's bride gave up the task, undertook
the toil of translating Strauss's Leben Jesu--though at many points
she "thought him wrong." [1825] In the churches he had of course no
overt acceptance. At this stage, English orthodoxy was of such a cast
that the pious Tregelles, himself fiercely opposed to all forms of
rationalism, had to complain that the most incontrovertible corrections
of the current text of the New Testament were angrily denounced. [1826]
In the next generation Theodore Parker in the United States, developing
his critical faculty chiefly by study of the Germans, at the cost of
much obloquy forced some knowledge of critical results and a measure of
theistic or pantheistic rationalism on the attention of the orthodox
world; promoting at the same time a semi-philosophic, semi-ethical
reaction against the Calvinistic theology of Jonathan Edwards,
theretofore prevalent among the orthodox of New England. In the old
country a number of writers developed new movements of criticism
from theistic points of view. F. W. Newman, the scholarly brother
of John Henry, [1827] produced a book entitled The Soul (1849), and
another, Phases of Faith (1853), which had much influence in promoting
rationalism of a rather rigidly theistic cast. R. W. Mackay in the
same period published two learned treatises, A Sketch of the Rise
and Progress of Christianity (1854), notably scientific in method
for its time; and The Progress of the Intellect as Exemplified in the
Religious Development of the Greeks and Hebrews (1850), which won the
admiration of Buckle; "George Eliot" translated Feuerbach's Essence of
Christianity (1854) under her own name, Marian Evans; and W. R. Greg,
one of the leading publicists of his day, put forth a rationalist
study of The Creed of Christendom: Its Foundations Contrasted with
its Superstructure (1850), which has gone through many editions and
is still reprinted. In 1864 appeared The Prophet of Nazareth, by Evan
Powell Meredith, who had been a Baptist minister in Wales. The book
is a bulky prize essay on the theme of New Testament eschatology,
which develops into a deistic attack on the central Christian
dogma and on gospel ethics. Another zealous theist, Thomas Scott,
whose pamphlet-propaganda on deistic lines had so wide an influence
during many years, produced an English Life of Jesus (1871), which,
though less important than the works of Strauss and less popular than
those of Renan, played a considerable part in the disintegration of
the traditional faith among English churchmen. Still the primacy in
critical research on scholarly lines lay with the Germans; and it was
the results of their work that were co-ordinated, from a theistic
standpoint, [1828] in the anonymous work, Supernatural Religion
(1874-77), a massive and decisive performance, too powerful to be
disposed of by the episcopal and other attacks made upon it. [1829]
Since its assimilation the orthodox or inspirationist view of the
gospels has lost credit among competent scholars even within the
churches. The battleground is now removed to the problem of the
historicity of the ostensible origins of the cult; and scholarly
orthodoxy takes for granted many positions which fifty years ago were
typical of "German rationalism."