God and Progress

God and Progress offers an original account of intellectual change in nineteenth-century Britain, by exploring the rich relationship between historical thought and religious debate in Victorian culture. It recovers the twofold process by which the growth of progressive ideas of history transformed religious traditions across British Protestantism, and by which religious debate profoundly shaped Victorian ideas of history. Adopting a remarkably wide contextual perspective which embraces believers and unbelievers, Anglicans and nonconformists, and writers from different parts of the British Isles, and situating British debates in relation to their European and especially German Idealist intellectual contexts, the study reveals that contemporary conceptions of progress integrally relied upon competing understandings of religious history. It argues that, in the wake of religious revival, the Victorian intellectual mainstream came to terms with religious diversity, changing ethical sensibilities, and new kinds of knowledge by locating these phenomena within providential, spiritualised, and developmental understandings of human time. A secular counter-culture, however, disturbed this internally-differentiated consensus by grounding progress in the advance of the scientific method and the retreat of metaphysics. God and Progress thus explores the ways in which divisions within British liberalism were fundamentally related to divisions over the nature of the religious past. It also demonstrates that religious debate drove the process by which different kinds of historicism acquired cultural authority in Victorian Britain - and began to lose it. It will be essential reading for historians of Britain, historiography, liberalism, and religion during the nineteenth century.