A wag once asked whether there had been even single Victorian intellectual who did not experience religious crisis of some sort. And indeed it does often seem as if such crisis was test ofauthenticity which all genuine Victorian thinkers had to pass. To be sure, doubts concerning their religious faith perplexed many Victorians, and although Charles Darwin, George Eliot, Alfred Tennyson, Matthew Arnold, Thomas Carlyle, Thomas Hardy, and John Stuart Mill were the best-known sufferers ofthis spiritual turmoil, thousands of other English men and women, by no means all intellectuals, endured equal misery. The most common intellectual cause of these pervasive of faith was of course the challenge presented by the discoveries of nineteenth-century science-most especially those associated with the name of Darwin. Both the severity and the ubiquity of the reaction to these scientific innovations were due to the very nature of the challenge itself, for the threat posed by science to religion struck at the very root of established Christian doctrine and ethics. Questions of human purpose, responsibility, and worth were all opened to doubt and reinterpretation, as were issues of social conscience, cosmic design, and metaphysical certitude. The lives of many Victorians were riven by conflicting loyalties-by respect for the method and discoveries ofscience on the one hand, and by an emotional attachment to the ancient faith and its forms on the other. As their old faith gradually ebbed and their belief in science proved to be spiritually deficient alternative, these men and women experienced what Leslie Stephen sensitively termed a painful discord between the imagination and the reason. I Confused, anxious, and beleaguered, they found themselves living in frightening age, time that John Stuart Mill described as at once devoid of faith, yet terrified of scepticism. 2 Many of these Victorian crises were, however, religious only in