Ch. 4 - The Break-up of the Compromise

If it be curiously and carefully considered it will, I think, appear
more and more true that the struggle between the old spiritual theory
and the new material theory in England ended simply in a deadlock; and a
deadlock that has endured. It is still impossible to say absolutely that
England is a Christian country or a heathen country; almost exactly as
it was impossible when Herbert Spencer began to write. Separate elements
of both sorts are alive, and even increasingly alive. But neither the
believer nor the unbeliever has the impudence to call himself the
Englishman. Certainly the great Victorian rationalism has succeeded in
doing a damage to religion. It has done what is perhaps the worst of all
damages to religion. It has driven it entirely into the power of the
religious people. Men like Newman, men like Coventry Patmore, men who
would have been mystics in any case, were driven back upon being much
more extravagantly religious than they would have been in a religious
country. Men like Huxley, men like Kingsley, men like most Victorian
men, were equally driven back on being irreligious; that is, on doubting
things which men's normal imagination does not necessarily doubt. But
certainly the most final and forcible fact is that this war ended like
the battle of Sheriffmuir, as the poet says; they both did fight, and
both did beat, and both did run away. They have left to their
descendants a treaty that has become a dull torture. Men may believe in
immortality, and none of the men know why. Men may not believe in
miracles, and none of the men know why. The Christian Church had been
just strong enough to check the conquest of her chief citadels. The
rationalist movement had been just strong enough to conquer some of her
outposts, as it seemed, for ever. Neither was strong enough to expel the
other; and Victorian England was in a state which some call liberty and
some call lockjaw.

But the situation can be stated another way. There came a time, roughly
somewhere about 1880, when the two great positive enthusiasms of Western
Europe had for the time exhausted each other--Christianity and the
French Revolution. About that time there used to be a sad and not
unsympathetic jest going about to the effect that Queen Victoria might
very well live longer than the Prince of Wales. Somewhat in the same
way, though the republican impulse was hardly a hundred years old and
the religious impulse nearly two thousand, yet as far as England was
concerned, the old wave and the new seemed to be spent at the same time.
On the one hand Darwin, especially through the strong journalistic
genius of Huxley, had won a very wide spread though an exceedingly
vague victory. I do not mean that Darwin's own doctrine was vague; his
was