A saner instinct counseled those who were not satisfied with the purely ...

A saner instinct counseled those who were not satisfied with the purely immanent order, physical or moral, propounded by science, to hold fast to the historic forms of devotion, and compel them to yield what they still promised and once had yielded: the certitude of experience as the reward of faith, insight into the nature of the transcendent, and the renewal, by the sacraments, of the saving impulse which Christ had through his Church imparted to the race. There, in the balanced emphasis on individual conduct and social coherence, on the personal origin and historic transmission of the faith, was the new Via Media.

In this fusion of the Evangelical, the Arnoldine and the Tractarian teaching, this return to a faith more primitive than the creeds or the Bible, and shot with strands of Plato and Hegel, we can feel rather than discern the religious philosophy of Later Victorian England moving towards its next objective, while from In Memoriam to The Woods of Westermain, from The Woods of Westermain to the Choruses of The Dynasts, we can follow the secular intellect seeking its way to such an apprehension of Being as Process as might hereafter reconcile the spiritual demands of humanity with the rapt and cosmic indifference of Evolution. IN the life of a nation, to dispose of one problem is to start another.

To an observer of a benevolently Utilitarian disposition in 1865, it might well have appeared that the problem of progress had been solved.