l8o ENGLISHSAGA

feudal countryside, none of these institutions seemed safe to the
student of politics. The more educated among the younger
generation in t the growing towns had no feeling for them
but contempt or indifference. It was that new urban generation
which was to govern the England of the future. The teaching
of the rationalists had taken deep root: the spirit of the age was
one of critical egalitarianism, of ceaseless questioning in matters
secular, and in religion of honest doubt. The publication of
Charles Darwin's Origin of Species in 1859 and of similar scientific
works laid bare the absurdity of the popular theological history on
which past generations had been brought up. The revelation of
the laboratory confirmed the gospel of the utilitarian. Biological
and chemical evolution—clear and mathematically demonstrable
—was the explanation of everything.1 To thinking men belief
became harder with every year. Organised religion was nothing
now but a convenient form by which morality and decency could
be preserved until the ignorant masses were ready to do without
it.

For the great revolutionary inventions and changes of the age
of progress proved too much for those who had been taught to
put their trust in reason. Outwardly Victorian life, with its unde-
viating round, stolid respectability, growing physical comfort
and strict religious observance, seemed stable and secure beyond
anything conceived of in former ages. But beneath the surface,
nothing was static and everything familiar was changing at a
bewildering pace. Lack of faith means lack of vitality-: nothing
is more fated to action than the divided and tortured mind.
Apathy and inertia are its inevitable aftermath. As yet the
disease of modern life only touched the few: the great majority,
the workers and countryfolk, the vigorous merchants and manu-
facturers, the sporting gentry and aristocracy never troubled their
heads with doubts about the meaning of existence. But those who
were to teach their children and set the intellectual and moral
tone of the next age were falling into a ferment of philosophic
scepticism. In the 'seventies it became intellectually demode to
believe: fashionable to doubt. -

^ Everything that the illuminating explanation of all things on earth and in the
heavens above the earth hy evolution could be stretched to bring within its sphere,
was pressed through our ordeaL Evolution was passed on from the laboratory and the
study to the parlour, and the eternal riddles that a dozen years before had been proposed
and answered, and then in their crudest form, in obscure debating societies and secularist
clubs, now lay upon the table with the popular magazines."

J. Morley, tecollectiotis, /, 88-9.