W. H. Mallock is the "exemplary" crisis-of-faith nineteenth-century writer, enacting in the late Victorian and Edwardian periods the careers of the sages of the preceding generation. He set as his task--in essays, treatises, novels, and poetry--the work of "reducing this chaos of revolutionary thought to order." But unlike Thomas Carlyle and John Ruskin and George Eliot, he made no accommodations with the changes science had brought to man's physical and metaphysical landscapes. His "order" was absolutely traditional: Mallock spent his career proclaiming the necessity of orthodox belief, if human beings were to be more than animals and any civilized life were to be possible. And he died asking, characteristically, the question that he had asked throughout his life, "whether the Church of Rome was not perhaps the one true religion, after all."

Born in 1849 into a Church of England family (his father was a rector, his maternal grandfather...