[211] Infallibility, since it has become a dogma, is not more harmful than it was before.  But the efforts of the Catholic Church in the years following the Council to overthrow the French Republic and to rupture the new German Empire were sufficiently disquieting.  Against this was to be set the destruction of the temporal power of the Popes and the complete freedom of Italy.  This event was the sunrise of Swinburne’s Songs before Sunrise (which appeared in 1871), a seedplot of atheism and revolution, sown with implacable hatred of creeds and tyrants.  The most wonderful poem in the volume, the Hymn of Man, was written while the Vatican Council was sitting.  It is a song of triumph over the God of the priests, stricken by the doom of the Pope’s temporal power.  The concluding verses will show the spirit.

“By thy name that in hellfire was written, and burned at the point of thy sword, Thou art smitten, thou God, thou art smitten; thy death is upon thee, O Lord.  And the lovesong of earth as thou diest resounds through the wind of her wings—­ Glory to Man in the highest! for Man is the master of things.”

[212]

The fact that such a volume could appear with impunity vividly illustrates the English policy of enforcing the laws for blasphemy only in the case of publications addressed to the masses.

Political circumstances thus invited and stimulated rationalists to come forward boldly, but we must not leave out of account the influence of the Broad Church movement and of Darwinism.  The Descent of Man appeared precisely in 1871.  A new, undogmatic Christianity was being preached in pulpits.  Mr. Leslie Stephen remarked (1873) that “it may be said, with little exaggeration, that there is not only no article in the creeds which may not be contradicted with impunity, but that there is none which may not be contradicted in a sermon calculated to win the reputation of orthodoxy and be regarded as a judicious bid for a bishopric.  The popular state of mind seems to be typified in the well-known anecdote of the cautious churchwarden, who, whilst commending the general tendency of his incumbent’s sermon, felt bound to hazard a protest upon one point.  ‘You see, sir,’ as he apologetically explained, ‘I think there be a God.’  He thought it an error of taste or perhaps of judgment, to hint a doubt as to the first article of the creed.”

The influence exerted among the cultivated

[213] classes by the aesthetic movement (Ruskin, Morris, the Pre-Raphaelite painters; then Pater’s Lectures on the Renaissance, 1873) was also a sign of the times.  For the attitude of these critics, artists, and poets was essentially pagan.  The saving truths of theology were for them as if they did not exist.  The ideal of happiness was found in a region in which heaven was ignored.

The time then seemed opportune for speaking out.  Of the unorthodox books and essays, [2] which influenced the young and alarmed believers, in these exciting years, most were the works of men who may be most fairly described by the comprehensive term agnostics—­a name which had been recently invented by Professor Huxley.