defiance against all that authority held sacred.  All the great poets of the nineteenth century were more or less unorthodox; Wordsworth in the years of his highest inspiration was a pantheist; and the greatest of all, Shelley, was a declared atheist.  In fearless utterance, in unfaltering zeal against the tyranny of Gods and Governments, Swinburne was like Shelley.  His drama Atalanta in Calydon (1865), even though a poet is strictly not answerable for what the persons in his drama say, yet with its denunciation of “the supreme evil, God,” heralded the coming

[209] of a new champion who would defy the fortresses of authority.  And in the following year his Poems and Ballads expressed the spirit of a pagan who flouted all the prejudices and sanctities of the Christian world.

But the most intense and exciting period of literary warfare against orthodoxy in England began about 1869, and lasted for about a dozen years, during which enemies of dogma, of all complexions, were less reticent and more aggressive than at any other time in the century.  Lord Morley has observed that “the force of speculative literature always hangs on practical opportuneness,” and this remark is illustrated by the rationalistic literature of the seventies.  It was a time of hope and fear, of progress and danger.  Secularists and rationalists were encouraged by the Disestablishment of the Church in Ireland (1869), by the Act which allowed atheists to give evidence in a court of justice (1869), by the abolition of religious tests at all the universities (a measure frequently attempted in vain) in 1871.  On the other hand, the Education Act of 1870, progressive though it was, disappointed the advocates of secular education, and was an unwelcome sign of the strength of ecclesiastical influence.  Then there was the general alarm felt in Europe by all outside the Roman Church,

[210] and by some within it, at the decree of the infallibility of the Pope (by the Vatican Council 1869-70), and an Englishman (Cardinal Manning) was one of the most active spirits in bringing about this decree.  It would perhaps have caused less alarm if the Pope’s denunciation of modern errors had not been fresh in men’s memories.  At the end of 1864 he startled the world by issuing a Syllabus “embracing the principal errors of our age.”  Among these were the propositions, that every man is free to adopt and profess the religion he considers true, according to the light of reason; that the Church has no right to employ force; that metaphysics can and ought to be pursued without reference to divine and ecclesiastical authority; that Catholic states are right to allow foreign immigrants to exercise their own religion in public; that the Pope ought to make terms with progress, liberalism, and modern civilization.  The document was taken as a declaration of war against enlightenment, and the Vatican Council as the first strategic move of the hosts of darkness.  It seemed that the powers of obscurantism were lifting up their heads with a new menace, and there was an instinctive feeling that all the forces of reason should be brought into the field.  The history of the last forty years shows that the theory of