Note 165 — Chapter XXI · FREETHOUGHT IN THE NINETEENTH CENTURY

In the next generation Theodore Parker in the United States, developing his critical faculty chiefly by study of the Germans, at the cost of much obloquy forced some knowledge of critical results and a measure of theistic or pantheistic rationalism on the attention of the orthodox world; promoting at the same time a semi-philosophic, semi-ethical reaction against the Calvinistic theology of Jonathan Edwards, theretofore prevalent among the orthodox of New England. In the old country a number of writers developed new movements of criticism from theistic points of view. F. W. Newman, the scholarly brother of John Henry,165 produced a book entitled The Soul (1849), and another, Phases of Faith (1853), which had much influence in promoting rationalism of a rather rigidly theistic cast. R. W. Mackay in the same period published two learned treatises, A Sketch of the Rise and Progress of Christianity (1854), notably scientific in method for its time; and The Progress of the Intellect as Exemplified in the Religious Development of the Greeks and Hebrews (1850), which won the admiration of Buckle; “George Eliot” translated Feuerbach’s Essence of Christianity (1854) under her own name, Marian Evans; and W. R. Greg, one of the leading publicists of his day, put forth a rationalist study of The Creed of Christendom: Its Foundations Contrasted with its Superstructure (1850), which has gone through many editions and is still reprinted. In 1864 appeared The Prophet of Nazareth, by Evan Powell Meredith, who had been a Baptist minister in Wales. The book is a bulky prize essay on the theme of New Testament eschatology, which develops into a deistic attack on the central Christian dogma and on gospel ethics. Another zealous theist, Thomas Scott, whose pamphlet-propaganda on deistic lines had so wide an influence during many years, produced an English Life of Jesus (1871), which, though less important than the works of Strauss and less popular than those of Renan, played a considerable part in the disintegration of the traditional faith among English churchmen. Still the primacy in critical research on scholarly lines lay with the Germans; and it was the results of their work that were co-ordinated, from a theistic standpoint,166 in the anonymous work, Supernatural Religion (1874–77), a massive and decisive performance, too powerful to be disposed of by the episcopal and other attacks made upon it.167 Since its assimilation the orthodox or inspirationist view of the gospels has lost credit among competent scholars even within the churches. The battleground is now removed to the problem of the historicity of the ostensible origins of the cult; and scholarly orthodoxy takes for granted many positions which fifty years ago were typical of “German rationalism.”