was apparent to the prophetic eyes of Wilberforce and Robert Hall,
of whom the former lamented the total absence of Christian sentiment
from nearly all the successful fiction even of his day; [1861] and
the latter avowed the pain with which he noted that Miss Edgeworth,
whom he admired for her style and art, put absolutely no religion
in her books, [1862] while Hannah More, whose principles were so
excellent, had such a vicious style. With Thackeray and Dickens,
indeed, serious fiction might seem to be on the side of faith,
both being liberally orthodox, though neither ventured on religious
romance; but with George Eliot the balance began to lean the other
way, her sympathetic treatment of religious types counting for little
as against her known rationalism. At the end of the century almost
all of the leading writers of the higher fiction were known to be
either rationalists or simple theists; and against the heavy metal of
Mr. Meredith, Mr. Conrad, Mr. Hardy, Mr. Bennett, Mr. Moore (whose
sympathetic handling of religious motives suggests the influence of
Huysmans), and the didactic-deistic Mrs. Humphry-Ward, orthodoxy can
but claim artists of the third or lower grades. The championship of
some of the latter may be regarded as the last humiliation of faith.
In 1905 there was current a vulgar novel entitled When it was
Dark, wherein was said to be drawn a blood-curdling picture
of what would happen in the event of a general surrender of
Christian faith. Despite some episcopal approbation, the book
excited much disgust among the more enlightened clergy. The
preface to Miss Marie Corelli's Mighty Atom may serve to
convey to the many readers who cannot peruse the works of
that lady an idea of the temper in which she vindicates her
faith. Another popular novelist of a low artistic grade, the
late Mr. Seton-Merriman, has avowed his religious soundness in a
romance with a Russian plot, entitled The Sowers. Referring to
the impressions produced by great scenes of Nature, he writes:
"These places and these times are good for convalescent atheists
and such as pose as unbelievers--the cheapest form of notoriety"
(p. 168). The novelist's own Christian ethic is thus indicated:
"He had Jewish blood in his veins, which ... carried with it
the usual tendency to cringe. It is in the blood; it is part of
that which the people who stood without Pilate's palace took
upon themselves and their children" (p. 59). But the enormous
mass of modern novels includes some tolerable pleas for faith,
as well as many manifestoes of agnosticism. One of the works of
the late "Edna Lyall," We Two, was notable as the expression of
the sympathy of a devout, generous, and amiable Christian lady
with the personality and career of Mr. Bradlaugh.