But the idea of progress-achieved by experiment, consolidated by law or custom, ...

But the idea of progress-achieved by experiment, consolidated by law or custom, registered by statistics-had, without much straining of logic or conscience, been made to engage with the dominant Protestant faith, and this, equally, in both its modes: in the individualism of the soul working out its own salvation, in the charity which sought above all things the welfare of others. Now, of the main articles of the common Protestant faith, the Inerrant Book was gone, and it had carried with it the chief assurance of an intervening Providence.

To propose an infallible Church, in compensation for a Bible proved fallible, was a pretension which the Church of England had expressly, and in advance, disclaimed,' and which no Protestant sect could maintain. The only valid alternative was agnosticism, or a religion of experience.

But in those very years when the historic impact was loosening the whole fabric of tradition, we can see, and it is one of the strangest Paradoxes on record, historic speculation engaged in building an inerrant system of economics, and demonstrating, with inexorable scholastic rigor, the future evolution of society through class war into its final state of Communism. Disraeli about this time spoke of a 'craving credulity' as the note of the age.