Often a thing must be loved before it is lovable

Nineteenth-Century Religion and Literature: an introduction (2007) by Mark Knight and Emma Mason is a recommendable read if you are interested in 19th century British literature and its contexts... with caveats.

The first half (chapters on Dissent, Unitarianism, and the Oxford movement are a very competent summary of trends and phenomenons that aren't easy to describe, and in that way I wholeheartedly recommend to anyone interested in understanding the religious and socio-religious controversies that underlie so much of Victorian Literature. It covers the different eras of dissent, the relationships between Enthusiasm, Presbiterianism, Methodism, Unitarianism, Christian Socialism, the high church/low church/broad church distinctions, the role of industrialization, colonialism and development of the natural sciences in theological debates... it is very complete.

The second half (chapters on Evangelicalism, Secularization, and Catholicism) is... not nearly as good. It is ironic/interesting that what would or should be the easiest part to write is the one the authors seem to have the most difficulty with.

Most of the chapter on Evangelicalism is dedicated To Dickens and Collins' portrayal of it in Bleak House and The Moonstone. I can understand including some perspective of how broad church people regarded Evangelicals, but making it the bulk of the chapter (and then ending with Eliot as a rejection of an Evangelical upbringing) is too biased and not particularly useful if you want to understand Evangelicalism itself and it's authors. I myself am not a sympathizer of Victorian British Evangelicalism by any means, and yet... the missed opportunity to talk about Jane Eyre and The Tenant of Wildfell Hall in depth is felt.

It's not that the chapters are devoid of interest; the discussion around secularization touching on A Christmas Carol is very interesting, and so is the discussion of the influence of Catholicism and sacramentality in decadent authors such as Oscar Wilde. But they do feel more like poorly stringed article topics than the sort of systematic explanation one expects from an Introduction.

<<Ten thousand difficulties do not make one doubt, as I understand the subject; difficulty and doubt are incommensurate.>>

St. John Henry Newman, Apologia Pro Vita Sua

"In their account of the history of the British Evangelical Alliance, David Hillborn and Ian Randall insist that a desire for Evangelical unity was the primary motivation behind the creation of the organization, citing Essays on Christian Union (1845), among other texts, in support of their claim. However, while the outward expression of a desire for Evangelical unity in the cause of the Gospel permeates this collection of essays, lending credence to the claim of a positive rationale behind the creation of the Alliance, other, more negative, factors are also present, particularly concern about the rise of Roman Catholicism.

The struggle between the Tractarians and Evangelicals during and after the 1830s for control of the Church of England and the Maynooth controversy of 1844, in which the British government gave additional money to a Catholic seminary in Ireland, encouraged anti-Catholic prejudice. Many of the contributions to Essays on Christian Union suggest that anti-Catholicism was more important to the emergence of the Alliance than Randall and Hillborn are willing to admit. Like the identity of any other group, Evangelical identity was construed partly in terms of what they were not, and opposition to Catholicism was integral to their growing self-consciousness. In response to the perceived threat of Catholicism, a threat that one of the contributors to Essays on Christian Union, Ralph Wardlaw, equates with the antichrist, another contributor, Reverend J.A. James, urged:

《Our appeal, therefore, is made to all Evangelical Protestants --Is it not time to unite? Does not your situation require it? Strike hands, then, in a covenant of love and friendship, and form a holy league, aggressive and defensive, against a system which is aiming to destroy you utterly, that it may be left at liberty to pursue its unobstructed course through the world, the consummation of which would be reached in overthrowing Evangelical religion, and planting everywhere a baleful superstition in its place.》"

--Emma Mason and Mark Knight, Nineteenth Century Religion and Literature, Oxford: 2007.

"What Pusey's case suggests is that the re-establishment of confession provoked as much gender trouble as it did anti-Catholic anxiety, an idea voiced by Charles James Blomfield, Bishop of London, in his declaration that confession was 'the source of unspeakable abominations'. These 'abominations' were thought to have the potential to damage two dominant nineteenth-century institutions: first, the Church of England, threatened by the spread of Catholic ideology; and secondly, the Victorian family unit, inexcusably invaded by the questioning priest. Confessing one's sins to God through the medium of a human agent in the space of a confessional box threatened Victorian sensibility because it forced one to broadcast sin outside of the family space to a priest portrayed as perversely eager to listen. The seeping of Rome into Britain's domestic corners was considered more threatening still to women, the narrator of Charles Maurice Davies's Tractarian love story, Philip Paternoster (1858), claiming: 'It would be a fatal day for England if ever England's wives and daughters were led to deem the confessional a more sacred place than the home.' The notion of male confessors cajoling female penitents to betray their sins and sexual secrets induced far-fetched anti-Catholic propaganda, verifying the fear that priests might usurp the control husbands and fathers held over the female members of their household. This paranoia was further excited by anecdotes such as that narrated by Sir William Harcourt in a letter to The Times, in which he quoted the Catholic confessor of the King of Spain bragging to his penitent: 'I hold your God in my hand, and I have your wife at my feet.' As Miss Cusack attests in recounting her liaisons with Pusey, 'few men went to Confession' with the 'Doctor', and Walsh's chapter, 'Ritualistic Sisterhoods', implicates Pusey as an insidious meddler intent on diffusing Catholicism through Britain by way of kidnapping women for his conventual establishments."

-- Mark Knight and Emma Mason, Nineteenth-Century Religion and Literature: An Introduction, Oxford: Oxford University Press, 2006.

One of the main curses of having attended and worked at Franciscan school is the knee jerk reaction every time I see Make Me An Instrument of Your Peace being attributed to St. Francis (it's probably not older than 1912, anonymous, and made extremely popular during WWI).