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Crisis of Doubt: Honest Faith in Nineteenth-Century England
The Victorian crisis of faith has dominated discussions of religion and the Victorians. Stories are frequently told of prominent Victorians such as George Eliot losing their faith. This crisis is presented as demonstrating the intellectual weakness of Christianity as it was assaulted by new lines of thought such as Darwinism and biblical criticism. This study serves as a corrective to that narrative. It focuses on freethinking and Secularist leaders who came to faith. As sceptics, they had imbibed all the latest ideas that seemed to undermine faith; nevertheless, they went on to experience a crisis of doubt, and then to defend in their writings and lectures the intellectual cogency of Christianity. The Victorian crisis of doubt was surprisingly large. Telling this story serves to restore its true proportion and to reveal the intellectual strength of faith in the nineteenth century.
330 pages, Paperback
First published January 1, 2006
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About the author
Timothy Larsen
36 books26 followersTimothy Larsen is McManis Professor of Christian Thought at Wheaton College, Wheaton, Illinois, and an Honorary Research Fellow at the University of Wales Trinity Saint David.
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January 7, 2020John Wilson's brief review: "You know the familiar story, according to which virtually every thinking person in late-Victorian England either lost his faith or maintained a pale simulacrum of genuine belief. While Timothy Larsen acknowledges that there were of course plenty of instances of deconversion, in his new book he draws attention to a counternarrative that has been widely overlooked, embodied in the experience of men and women who moved from doubt or resolute skepticism to Christian faith. In chapter after chapter of brilliantly condensed biography, he tells the stories of individuals whose lives followed this second course. This is a book that will force honest scholars to reconsider what they thought they knew."
August 6, 2020
Exceptional. This is the type of history I want to write. Larsen is looking for the truth, and like a bloodhound he will not rest easy until he has sniffed it out. He sensed an untruth in the statements made by people like A.N. Wilson (who later converted, incidentally), that "in the Victorian Era it became impossible for thinking people to be orthodox Christians." This is bunk, and Larsen proves it to be so by sharing the stories of convinced atheists and free thinkers who came back to the faith during this period.
This sort of careful but satisfying academic writing is much rarer than it ought to be. Larsen's academic book reads almost like a novel.
Five stars. I would like to shake the man's hand for writing this book.
This sort of careful but satisfying academic writing is much rarer than it ought to be. Larsen's academic book reads almost like a novel.
Five stars. I would like to shake the man's hand for writing this book.
October 4, 2022
This is a series of six studies of Victorian men who, Larsen says, underwent a “crisis of doubt,” as opposed to the well-known Victorian crisis of faith. “A crisis of doubt may be discerned when a significant pattern can be found of erstwhile sceptics coming to find unbelief no longer intellectually convincing.” (P. 15) Larsen says his sketches will “highlight the remarkable intellectual cogency of the claims of Christianity in nineteenth-century Britain.” (Id.) I read three of the portraits but left off the other three. Larsen’s model did not bear reiteration.
The problem with the book is too-fold. One is that the lives of Larsen’s subjects aren’t particularly interesting. They give speeches, write for skeptical newsletters, and produce books, and then drift into something like Unitarianism or spiritualism, then into a vague Christianity, then into the real thing; and then they write and preach some more. They don’t make it as candidates to be “eminent Victorians” because they’re not eminent, and there’s nothing noteworthy about them, except, for Larsen, their conversion from what passed as skepticism among the Victorians to Nicene Christianity.
And these men are not particularly interesting because they did not in fact undergo a crisis of doubt but gradually re-embraced the religion of their childhood. All of them, even as skeptics, saw Jesus as a unique, effectively divine individual. While they may have thought, as daringly skeptical young men, that Christianity had a significant element of myth or that it was a tool in the hands of evil politicians, their devotion to a truly divine Jesus gained on them as the fires of youth started to sputter.
Larsen’s first exhibit, William Hone, lived prior to the distinctively Victorian crisis. His skepticism was of the 18th century variety, informed by d’Holbach. Hone had been brought up as a Christian, but for two years as a teenager he considered himself an atheist, then for awhile a skeptical deist. Eventually, “disillusionment with the conduct of free-thinkers; the inadequacy of materialism and the thoughts of classical authors as a philosophy of life; experiences of the paranormal or spirit realm; a fresh appreciation for the Bible; the character and teaching of Jesus of Nazareth; and other reading material beside the Bible” led him back to Christianity. (P. 42)
He could never have been far away from it. Hone met Godwin, who had developed an atheist moral system. But he found that Godwin was a thoroughly unpleasant man. Hone believed in spiritualism. He concluded that one page of Jesus was worth more than all the Greek philosophers. Now, a belief in spiritualism is hardly the mark of a skeptic. Godwin may have been a bad man, but it’s hard to see how that fact outweighed 1500 years of Christian corruption. And a page of Jesus — who had no woman, no children, no friends, no close relations, who disowned his family (and the list could go on) — could hardly outweigh all Greek philosophy, for a thinking person. Hone’s skepticism, in short, was always a fragile plant, and the roots of his Christianity were deep.
The second sketch is of Fredric Roland Young, who moved from being a Quaker to being a skeptic to — but, as a skeptic he affirmed that “‘belief in God and a future life is a matter of consciousness, superior to, and independent of, all logical proof. With that latter I class myself.’ He was,” Larsen explains, “a Secularist in the sense that he believed that secular resources were sufficient for humanity: ‘There may be other sanctions for morality than those of human nature, utility, and intelligence, but these also are accessible and reliable sanctions.’ He went on, however, to praise the nature of Secularism in a way that does not seem easily compatible with his superior consciousness of the divine: ‘its God is law, its Bible nature, its worship labour, its motive and inspiration utility, its final appeal reason.’” (P. 55) Larsen says that towards the end of his life Young embraced spiritualism. But he always seems to have been a spiritualist.
Larsen’s conclusion about Young reveals the limitation in Larsen’s thinking. “Frederic Rowland Young’s theological opinions may have been right or wrong. They certainly changed over time. Nevertheless, he held them all—however contradictory they might have been—each in turn with intellectual integrity for the simple reason that, in all phases of his life, he was genuinely persuaded by the convictions he publicly espoused. He never shrank from thought, from reading and hearing what learned and reflective people of other persuasions believed, from argument, from critical enquiry, from the quest for knowledge and truth.” (P. 71)
To affirm that Young held various views “with intellectual integrity for the simple reason that, in all phases of his life, he was genuinely persuaded by the convictions he publicly espoused” is to say that Young was intellectually honest because he had beliefs. Of course he was “persuaded by his convictions.” But that’s not enough.
Young wrote copiously in support of all his kaleidoscopic changes of opinion, but Larsen doesn’t analyze Young’s reasoning. If Larsen wants to demonstrate Young’s intellectual honesty, Young’s spiritualism and eventual trinitarianism put Larsen to the proof: but Larsen doesn’t produce.
Larson mentions Young’s 1884 book Indirect Evidences in the New Testament for the Personal Divinity of Christ, but doesn’t discuss it. A discussion would have been revelatory. In this book, Young notes that higher criticism exists, but he dismisses it. Instead, he accepts that the reports about Jesus’s ministry in four gospels are historically accurate and were written by the persons whose names they bear, and that the rest of the NT is historically accurate. These are assertions without analysis.
Indirect evidence is evidence that, once it is pointed out, lends further support for propositions for which there are “proof texts” of some sort. (Indirect Evidences, p. 3) Young says he’s presenting his examples in chronological order, as set forth in a Harmony of the Gospels. The first 8 come from John. The tenor of Young’s intellectual inquiry is illustrated by No. 8. Jesus says, “I always do those things that please Him.” John 8:29. According to Young, the “saintliest Christian that ever lived” would not dream of saying this about himself, since he’d be conscious of his human limitations. But Jesus “could and did say this because there was a perfection of union between Himself and God.” (Id., pp. 3-4) Similarly, in the first example, John, on seeing Jesus says, “Behold the lamb of God which taketh away the sins of the world.” John 8:1. Young says that a Jew would not say this about a “simple man.”(Id., p. 8)
As regards the Sermon on the Mount, Young says he has no need to consider the possible relationship between Luke and Matthew. Rather, he looks at the sermon “as a whole.” The first thing he notices its style: “It is the style of a sovereign who is legislating for the world.” (Id., p. 9)
Young is not just somewhat lacking in intellectual integrity. Based on Indirect Evidences, he is willfully ignorant of what was even then relevant scholarship, tendentious, and utterly unpersuasive to anyone who is not wearing blinders.
The last sketch is of the polymath Thomas Cooper, whose skepticism was either provoked or encouraged by Strauss’s Leben Jesu, which argued that the miraculous parts of the NT were mythological. But Cooper’s particular skepticism was such, he said that “‘I yield to none in fervent admiration and love for the character of Christ. Under all changes of opinion, his moral beauty has ever kept its throne in my heart and mind, as the most worshipful of all portraitures of goodness.’” (P. 81)
Early on Cooper “dramatically declared his belief in ‘the existence of the Divine Moral Governor, and the fact that we should have to give up our account to Him, and receive His sentence, in a future state’.” Larsen adds that, “From the available evidence, it does not seem that Cooper had ever categorically denied these things, although he had wondered aloud in more than one freethinking speech if the problem of suffering indicated that there was no God or, should God exist, that perhaps God was immoral. It is important to realize that Cooper’s affirmations on this mid-January Sunday evening fell far short of orthodox Christianity and well within the bounds of what many leading freethinkers had also believed.” (P. 86)
Larsen’s argument about Cooper’s “crisis of belief” is built on the fact that Cooper read and lectured about everything. So Larsen concludes that “it cannot be said that Cooper never felt the full weight of sceptical objections to religious faith. It cannot be said that he was not keeping up with his reading, that an honest encounter with the thought of Darwin, Huxley, Hume, Paine, Strauss, or some such author would have made orthodox Christian belief irrevocably untenable for him.” (P. 108)
As with Hone and more especially Young, Larsen seems not to understand that intellectual inquiry, in an era of Newtonian science, Bible criticism and the beginnings of comparative religion, means addressing issues raised by these disciplines on their own terms, and not, when religion is considered, moving the discussion to a different plane. But that is what Cooper does. In a “poignant letter” from 1856, Cooper writes to Charles Kingsley, “‘In mentioning Lange’s ‘Leben Jesu’—you have touched a sore chord in me. Ah, my friend, what shall I do with Strauss? He is the stern impassable stone which next lies in my path. My heart is with Christ—has always been with him. I have maintained his beauty, with tears, amidst the scoffs of these ‘reasoners’’” (P. 87)
But Cooper rolled away the stone. In The Bridge of History Over the Gulf of Time (1871), Cooper produced what, as far as I can tell, purports to be a universal history, with special attention to Christianity, and to Strauss, who is refuted point by point. The reader learns that of course we know the names of the authors of the gospels. Also, it would be crazy to think that Christianity grew from nothing if the resurrection were only an old woman’s story. Didn’t the disciples see Jesus with their own eyes? Can one really believe that “ten men in a room, with the doors shut, all took to dreaming at the same time, with their eyes wide open,” that Jesus talked to them and showed them his wounds? (Bridge, p. 80) This is the reasoning in Sherlock’s Trial of the Witnesses. It may have persuaded high churchmen in 1729 but was hardly a badge of active intellect in 1871.
Larsen briefly discusses Bridge of History — and the discussion gives everything away:
“Cooper particularly excels with the second gospel, which, following early church tradition, he claims Mark based on the preaching of the apostle Peter. Taking the account of Christ calming the storm, he shows how Mark alone mentions that the Lord was asleep on ‘a pillow’, which moreover, Cooper says, should have been translated from the Greek as ‘the pillow’, a detail which only Peter would mention because he fondly remembered that ‘he had always provided a pillow for his dear Master’s head, in his own boat, and most likely, had not one himself’. (P. 97)
Either Larsen is utterly credulous or he is a believer himself. In any event, he has not shown any Victorian intellectual “crisis of doubt.”
The problem with the book is too-fold. One is that the lives of Larsen’s subjects aren’t particularly interesting. They give speeches, write for skeptical newsletters, and produce books, and then drift into something like Unitarianism or spiritualism, then into a vague Christianity, then into the real thing; and then they write and preach some more. They don’t make it as candidates to be “eminent Victorians” because they’re not eminent, and there’s nothing noteworthy about them, except, for Larsen, their conversion from what passed as skepticism among the Victorians to Nicene Christianity.
And these men are not particularly interesting because they did not in fact undergo a crisis of doubt but gradually re-embraced the religion of their childhood. All of them, even as skeptics, saw Jesus as a unique, effectively divine individual. While they may have thought, as daringly skeptical young men, that Christianity had a significant element of myth or that it was a tool in the hands of evil politicians, their devotion to a truly divine Jesus gained on them as the fires of youth started to sputter.
Larsen’s first exhibit, William Hone, lived prior to the distinctively Victorian crisis. His skepticism was of the 18th century variety, informed by d’Holbach. Hone had been brought up as a Christian, but for two years as a teenager he considered himself an atheist, then for awhile a skeptical deist. Eventually, “disillusionment with the conduct of free-thinkers; the inadequacy of materialism and the thoughts of classical authors as a philosophy of life; experiences of the paranormal or spirit realm; a fresh appreciation for the Bible; the character and teaching of Jesus of Nazareth; and other reading material beside the Bible” led him back to Christianity. (P. 42)
He could never have been far away from it. Hone met Godwin, who had developed an atheist moral system. But he found that Godwin was a thoroughly unpleasant man. Hone believed in spiritualism. He concluded that one page of Jesus was worth more than all the Greek philosophers. Now, a belief in spiritualism is hardly the mark of a skeptic. Godwin may have been a bad man, but it’s hard to see how that fact outweighed 1500 years of Christian corruption. And a page of Jesus — who had no woman, no children, no friends, no close relations, who disowned his family (and the list could go on) — could hardly outweigh all Greek philosophy, for a thinking person. Hone’s skepticism, in short, was always a fragile plant, and the roots of his Christianity were deep.
The second sketch is of Fredric Roland Young, who moved from being a Quaker to being a skeptic to — but, as a skeptic he affirmed that “‘belief in God and a future life is a matter of consciousness, superior to, and independent of, all logical proof. With that latter I class myself.’ He was,” Larsen explains, “a Secularist in the sense that he believed that secular resources were sufficient for humanity: ‘There may be other sanctions for morality than those of human nature, utility, and intelligence, but these also are accessible and reliable sanctions.’ He went on, however, to praise the nature of Secularism in a way that does not seem easily compatible with his superior consciousness of the divine: ‘its God is law, its Bible nature, its worship labour, its motive and inspiration utility, its final appeal reason.’” (P. 55) Larsen says that towards the end of his life Young embraced spiritualism. But he always seems to have been a spiritualist.
Larsen’s conclusion about Young reveals the limitation in Larsen’s thinking. “Frederic Rowland Young’s theological opinions may have been right or wrong. They certainly changed over time. Nevertheless, he held them all—however contradictory they might have been—each in turn with intellectual integrity for the simple reason that, in all phases of his life, he was genuinely persuaded by the convictions he publicly espoused. He never shrank from thought, from reading and hearing what learned and reflective people of other persuasions believed, from argument, from critical enquiry, from the quest for knowledge and truth.” (P. 71)
To affirm that Young held various views “with intellectual integrity for the simple reason that, in all phases of his life, he was genuinely persuaded by the convictions he publicly espoused” is to say that Young was intellectually honest because he had beliefs. Of course he was “persuaded by his convictions.” But that’s not enough.
Young wrote copiously in support of all his kaleidoscopic changes of opinion, but Larsen doesn’t analyze Young’s reasoning. If Larsen wants to demonstrate Young’s intellectual honesty, Young’s spiritualism and eventual trinitarianism put Larsen to the proof: but Larsen doesn’t produce.
Larson mentions Young’s 1884 book Indirect Evidences in the New Testament for the Personal Divinity of Christ, but doesn’t discuss it. A discussion would have been revelatory. In this book, Young notes that higher criticism exists, but he dismisses it. Instead, he accepts that the reports about Jesus’s ministry in four gospels are historically accurate and were written by the persons whose names they bear, and that the rest of the NT is historically accurate. These are assertions without analysis.
Indirect evidence is evidence that, once it is pointed out, lends further support for propositions for which there are “proof texts” of some sort. (Indirect Evidences, p. 3) Young says he’s presenting his examples in chronological order, as set forth in a Harmony of the Gospels. The first 8 come from John. The tenor of Young’s intellectual inquiry is illustrated by No. 8. Jesus says, “I always do those things that please Him.” John 8:29. According to Young, the “saintliest Christian that ever lived” would not dream of saying this about himself, since he’d be conscious of his human limitations. But Jesus “could and did say this because there was a perfection of union between Himself and God.” (Id., pp. 3-4) Similarly, in the first example, John, on seeing Jesus says, “Behold the lamb of God which taketh away the sins of the world.” John 8:1. Young says that a Jew would not say this about a “simple man.”(Id., p. 8)
As regards the Sermon on the Mount, Young says he has no need to consider the possible relationship between Luke and Matthew. Rather, he looks at the sermon “as a whole.” The first thing he notices its style: “It is the style of a sovereign who is legislating for the world.” (Id., p. 9)
Young is not just somewhat lacking in intellectual integrity. Based on Indirect Evidences, he is willfully ignorant of what was even then relevant scholarship, tendentious, and utterly unpersuasive to anyone who is not wearing blinders.
The last sketch is of the polymath Thomas Cooper, whose skepticism was either provoked or encouraged by Strauss’s Leben Jesu, which argued that the miraculous parts of the NT were mythological. But Cooper’s particular skepticism was such, he said that “‘I yield to none in fervent admiration and love for the character of Christ. Under all changes of opinion, his moral beauty has ever kept its throne in my heart and mind, as the most worshipful of all portraitures of goodness.’” (P. 81)
Early on Cooper “dramatically declared his belief in ‘the existence of the Divine Moral Governor, and the fact that we should have to give up our account to Him, and receive His sentence, in a future state’.” Larsen adds that, “From the available evidence, it does not seem that Cooper had ever categorically denied these things, although he had wondered aloud in more than one freethinking speech if the problem of suffering indicated that there was no God or, should God exist, that perhaps God was immoral. It is important to realize that Cooper’s affirmations on this mid-January Sunday evening fell far short of orthodox Christianity and well within the bounds of what many leading freethinkers had also believed.” (P. 86)
Larsen’s argument about Cooper’s “crisis of belief” is built on the fact that Cooper read and lectured about everything. So Larsen concludes that “it cannot be said that Cooper never felt the full weight of sceptical objections to religious faith. It cannot be said that he was not keeping up with his reading, that an honest encounter with the thought of Darwin, Huxley, Hume, Paine, Strauss, or some such author would have made orthodox Christian belief irrevocably untenable for him.” (P. 108)
As with Hone and more especially Young, Larsen seems not to understand that intellectual inquiry, in an era of Newtonian science, Bible criticism and the beginnings of comparative religion, means addressing issues raised by these disciplines on their own terms, and not, when religion is considered, moving the discussion to a different plane. But that is what Cooper does. In a “poignant letter” from 1856, Cooper writes to Charles Kingsley, “‘In mentioning Lange’s ‘Leben Jesu’—you have touched a sore chord in me. Ah, my friend, what shall I do with Strauss? He is the stern impassable stone which next lies in my path. My heart is with Christ—has always been with him. I have maintained his beauty, with tears, amidst the scoffs of these ‘reasoners’’” (P. 87)
But Cooper rolled away the stone. In The Bridge of History Over the Gulf of Time (1871), Cooper produced what, as far as I can tell, purports to be a universal history, with special attention to Christianity, and to Strauss, who is refuted point by point. The reader learns that of course we know the names of the authors of the gospels. Also, it would be crazy to think that Christianity grew from nothing if the resurrection were only an old woman’s story. Didn’t the disciples see Jesus with their own eyes? Can one really believe that “ten men in a room, with the doors shut, all took to dreaming at the same time, with their eyes wide open,” that Jesus talked to them and showed them his wounds? (Bridge, p. 80) This is the reasoning in Sherlock’s Trial of the Witnesses. It may have persuaded high churchmen in 1729 but was hardly a badge of active intellect in 1871.
Larsen briefly discusses Bridge of History — and the discussion gives everything away:
“Cooper particularly excels with the second gospel, which, following early church tradition, he claims Mark based on the preaching of the apostle Peter. Taking the account of Christ calming the storm, he shows how Mark alone mentions that the Lord was asleep on ‘a pillow’, which moreover, Cooper says, should have been translated from the Greek as ‘the pillow’, a detail which only Peter would mention because he fondly remembered that ‘he had always provided a pillow for his dear Master’s head, in his own boat, and most likely, had not one himself’. (P. 97)
Either Larsen is utterly credulous or he is a believer himself. In any event, he has not shown any Victorian intellectual “crisis of doubt.”
February 16, 2022
This was an engaging exploration of why Victorian Secularists reconverted to Christianity later in life. The book is structured as seven case studies on secularist figures. I especially appreciated the chapter on Thomas Cooper and the potential new research interests it offered.
January 2, 2022
Fascinating book.
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