There are usually a few men and women in each generation who succeed in transcending the common assumptions or intellectual orthodoxies of their contemporaries, or who stand outside the social prejudice of their times, and achieve insights of lasting value. Sometimes, it is true, their appearance of originality is enhanced by the sacralizing tendencies of later beliefs: they are represented as more accurately anticipating the preoccupations of succeeding generations than they probably did; and sometimes, also, their novelties of view or opinion express only a single level of their understanding, while other dimensions of their outlook remain faithfully suffused with contemporaneous pieties. Both conditions have affected the Christian Socialists of Victorian England. Yet what must most impress the student of their beliefs – and largely constitutes the substance of this work – is the importance and authenticity of their social vision. Much will be pointed out to suggest that their ‘Socialism’ was not, by most available tests, either ‘political’ or ‘Socialist’, and that the surviving references to traditional social attitudes were thickly distributed within their thought. But for all that, the Victorian Christian Socialists produced a radical departure from the received attitudes of the Church, both in their religious and in their social contentions, and their contribution to what Frederick Denison Maurice, their greatest thinker, called the ‘humanizing’ of society disclosed qualities of nobility and unusual discernment. Many others in their day sought the alleviation of social suffering, and most, beneath the prevailing orthodoxy of Political Economy and the strength of surviving social paternalism, looked to the application of Christian works of charity, and to the (it was hoped) elevating consequences of popular education.