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PARTISAN REVIEW
ried state" was under no illusion, as his modem descendant might
be, as to the relevance of his sermon to the lives of his pupils. Re–
ligion, as distinct from the mere social activity of church-going, was
a private affair.
Religion was a private affair, partly at least for the reason that
science was so much a public affair.
It
was in the 'fifties, while
Stephen was at the university, that the Mosaic .account of creation
began to be seriously undermined, on the one side from geology and
zoology, with their revelations about the antiquity of the universe and
the evolution of species, and on the other from the recently imported
"Biblical Criticism" of Germany. Many of the bright young men in
these middle years of Victoria's reign discovered that they could no
longer subscribe to the dogmas of Christianity. Those of the Rugby–
Oxford temperament, like Matthew Arnold's friend, Arthur Clough,
went through agonies of doubt and emerged to find their familiar
world shattered. Others, generally the more sanguine products of
Eton or Cambridge, experienced nothing more disturbing than the
sensation of having awakened. Stephen, as he later testified, did not
lose
his
faith; he simply awoke to the realization that he had none.
A professional intellectual, he managed to live through one of the
greatest intellectual revolutions of modern times, without quite know–
ing
it.
Under the impression that the true historical explanation of any
event is an evolutionary one, historians have represented the English
loss of faith as a gradual stripping of religion of one dogma after
another until nothing remained but the memory of Christianity-the
convention of a name and the habit of a ritual.
If
this were so,
Stephen's agnosticism might be taken as a kind of diluted fourth–
generation Evangelicalism: the first generation being represented by
Wesleyan fundamentalism, when religion looked upon learning and
culture as godless; the second by the Clapham Sect (including
Stephen's grandfather and Macaulay's father), which succeeded
in
making piety socially and culturally respectable; and the third by
men like Macaulay and James Stephen (Leslie's father), who had
discarde the traditional Evangelical apparatus of conscience-probing,
sin-confessing, "illuminations" and conversions. Leslie Stephen him–
self would have favored such an interpretation. His own spiritual
journey, starting from the quiet, unostentatious piety of his home,
