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