Were it seemly to speak of serious literary scholarship in the language of haute couture, one would be tempted to say that the New Look in Fielding studies features a lengthened, much more modest hemline. Modern scholars have made it fashionable to argue that Henry Fielding was a man of serious and relatively orthodox religious attitudes. Now the more enlightened critics conceive him as an upright man, a great moralist, and an earnest worker for reform.'It has not, of course, always been thus. Designers of the New Look in Fielding studies have had to combat the persistent tradition of a ' low' Fielding, one who had the moral attitudes of Shaftesbury vulgarized. Until recently this tradition was corrected by supposing a development in Fielding from youthful indifference to mature solemnity (Cross), from early deism to final orthodoxy (Digeon). The latest researches, however, have done away with the suspiciously convenient view of a change in Fielding's moral attitudes. Fielding, it is currently argued, need no longer answer charges of inconsistency. Much of what used to be thought the sole responsibility of deistic philosophers like Shaftesbury is now known to have been pervasive among the late 17th-century latitudinarian divines and is, presumably, less reprehensible on that account.2 This parallelism between contemporary phenomena explains some of Fielding's moral positions in a way that does not commit him pejoratively to deism. In fact, so great has been the progress of the arguments for consistency and seriousness that we are now reminded that it is unnecessary, among serious students at least, to deny