Summary
If the eighteenth century can be summarily characterized as the Age of Reason its successor is less amenable to facile generalization: the tendencies and developments of which the historian has to take note are more numerous, diverse and complex. In particular the nineteenth century, far more obviously than its predecessor, was an era of change. Again, a large measure of the appeal which the latter has for the modern mind lies not only in its comparative simplicity of aspect but in its remoteness: to study it is to encounter, as it were, a prepossessing stranger. With the nineteenth century, however, we are aware of a closer affinity, so that it has for us the sometimes tiresome familiarity of a kinsman. Yet the student of religion is likelier to find it of much greater interest. Its forerunner represents a time when the religious spirit blew but fitfully; convention, decorum and prudence were the usually accepted marks of a right-thinking man, and faith itself admitted reason as its better part. By contrast the century which began with revolution and general war, and whose early temper was displayed in the emotional and imaginative vagaries of the Romantic movement, turned to religion with a new concern, as to something holding the key, it might be, to the interpretation of man's historic life itself, a belief fostered and stimulated by a growing knowledge and appreciation of the phases through which that life had actually passed.
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- Religious Thought in the Nineteenth Century , pp. 1 - 36Publisher: Cambridge University PressPrint publication year: 1966