Note 163 — Chapter XXI · FREETHOUGHT IN THE NINETEENTH CENTURY

Other and later researches dug much deeper into the problems of religious historiography. The Unitarian C. C. Hennell produced an Inquiry Concerning the Origin of Christianity (1838), so important for its time as to be thought worth translating into German by Strauss; and this found a considerable response from the educated English public of its day. In the preface to his second edition (1841) Hennell spoke very plainly of “the large and probably increasing amount of unbelief in all classes around us”; and made the then remarkably courageous declarations that in his experience “neither deism, pantheism, nor even atheism indicates modes of thought incompatible with uprightness and benevolence”; and that “the real or affected horror which it is still a prevailing custom to exhibit towards their names would be better reserved for those of the selfish, the cruel, the bigot, and other tormentors of mankind.” It was in the circle of Hennell that Marian Evans, later to become famous as George Eliot, grew into a rationalist in despite of her religious temperament; and it was she who, when Hennell’s bride gave up the task, undertook the toil of translating Strauss’s Leben Jesu—though at many points she “thought him wrong.”163 In the churches he had of course no overt acceptance. At this stage, English orthodoxy was of such a cast that the pious Tregelles, himself fiercely opposed to all forms of rationalism, had to complain that the most incontrovertible corrections of the current text of the New Testament were angrily denounced.164