Page:Four Victorian poets; a study of Clough (IA fourvictorianpoe00broorich).pdf/40

media, different thinkers made many. And beyond the main schools of religious thought, there were guerrilla schools that fought for their own hand. Out of the religious struggle there arose, not only a host of questions concerning doctrinal theology which excited the intellect as much as the passions of men, but also multitudinous questions concerning the problem of human life—its origin, its end, its conduct, its relation to God, and His relation to it, whether our will in it was free or subject to necessity, whether its happenings mastered us or we them—old questions in new shapes. Was its evil good or its good evil, was life itself illusion or reality, what attitude in it was the true attitude of the soul, and a hundred minor problems clashing together like a swarm of atoms. As long as men had faith in the authority of a Church or a Book which revealed the origin and destiny of man in God's will, the divine conduct and sacred laws of being, the redemption of the world by the sacrifice and resurrection of Christ—so long men felt that hope and peace might be attained in the midst of this turmoil of thought, so long they believed that into the darkness light could arise and prevail. But now, at this very time, the discoveries of science and especially of geological science threw doubt on the authority of the Book, and historical criticism, coming from Germany, threw doubt on the Gospel History on which the authority of the Church reposed. Wherever men read and thought, the disturbance which already existed was now deep-