From beginning to end the nineteenth century was a period of crisis for historical Christianity. No doubt God had been disappearing from men's actual experience for quite some time before that, and certainly the previous century had produced a significant amount of very articulate disbelief; but the nineteenth century has its own peculiar tone and atmosphere. The further we go, the less we are confronted by a wide separation between affirmation and denial, the more we hear the painful modern voice of doubt on all sides. If the eighteenth century is Paley against Hume, Bishop Butler against the Deists, Yale University against Tom Paine, the nineteenth century is Tennyson, Arnold, Melville. Similarly, apologetics becomes less and less the defense of specific doctrines and more and more an inquiry into what-William James would boldly come to call man's ‘‘will” or “right” to believe. In an atmosphere of widespread doubt— when argument has countered argument and proof stalemated proof— there yet remain many reasons for believing. But none of the reasons is any longer “pure” and faith is everywhere felt as a “risky” business.

True, the sense of faith one sees emerging in the nineteenth century is, though not precisely new, quite unlike the fading medieval sense. “Reason and Faith” could never again be the sort of problem it was for the scholastics. How could faith simply seek understanding when the very nature of faith had itself become the central epistemological question of the day? And more fundamentally, perhaps, how could a “faith” based on a set of preliminary “proofs” be other than a self-contradictory notion? Ironic as it seems, only when the higher criticism had cast substantial doubt on the Christian “evidences” did many people begin to feel such evidences were irrelevant even if they were perfectly trustworthy.