NINETEENTH-century free thought (the Victorians generally called it Rationalism) made its grand assault on Christian orthodoxy1 during the twenty years or so following the publication of Darwin's Origin of Species in I859. It was then that advanced theological liberalism, twice rebuked in the Court of Arches, was twice vindicated by the Privy Council, that Oxford and Cambridge were opened to nonsubscribers to the Thirty-nine Articles, that scholarly clergymen like Leslie Stephen, J. R. Green, and J. E. Thorold Rogers felt it a duty of conscience to resign their orders, and that such stalwart soldiers of truth as T. H. Huxley, John Tyndall, G. J. Holyoake, and Charles Bradlaugh were marching from victory to victory. This was undoubtedly the climax of the story, but there is no need to rehearse it in detail. It is more worth-while to analyze the forces that lay behind it, and this will focus our attention on the two or three decades immediately preceding T859. The factors usually cited in explanation of the decline of nineteenthcentury orthodoxy are the rise of the concept of evolution as a scientific hypothesis in geology and biology, and of the higher criticism in Biblical scholarship. The prevailing impression seems to be (a) that, because Lyell and Darwin had shown that neither the origin of the earth nor the origin of man as described in Genesis can be reconciled with the findings of science, therefore thinking people became atheists or agnostics; and (b) that, because a number of German scholars had shown that neither the Old nor the New Testament can be taken at face value, therefore honest men had no recourse but to abandon Christianity altogether. Not only is this implausible on the face of it. It has also obscured the fact that the Victorian religious crisis was produced by a fundamental conflict between certain cherished orthodox dogmas (of which the infallibility of the