Grace Kennedy’s anti-Catholic novel Father Clement: A Roman Catholic Story (1823) stands almost alone in the nineteenth century when it comes to evidence not only for its reception, but also its use and success, or lack thereof, as a proselytization and devotional tool. The novel’s form and polemical strategies exerted a powerful influence on both Catholic and Protestant writers, popularizing the controversial novel across denominations. In particular, Father Clement’s celebration of prooftexting rooted in sola scriptura as the best method of religious disputation helped end the earlier nineteenth-century “polite” novel’s emphasis on non-confrontational, genteel sociability. But as its Protestant and Catholic reception histories suggest, the novel’s ambivalent treatment of its title character, along with its overt didacticism, led to appropriations that Kennedy could not have predicted. Father Clement catalyzed resistance amongst Catholic readers and novelists, some of whom were inspired by the title character to creatively reinterpret the novel as a brief for Catholicism, others of whom turned to Biblical quotation as a means of undoing sola scriptura altogether. Thus, if the novel predictably generated Protestant imitations, it also led Catholics to new experiments in controversial rhetoric and fiction.

The Scottish Reformation Society's The Bulwark (1851–present) was the Victorian era's most influential anti-Catholic periodical, a reputation based on its self-proclaimed devotion to “facts.” Attempting to counter a unified Catholic Church in a period of pronounced intra-Protestant conflict, the Bulwark sought to root religious controversy in the increasingly popular phenomenon of statistical inquiry. The Bulwark’s obsession with collating and interpreting religion-based numbers was unique not for its existence, but for its sheer extent. It thus exemplifies how “official” statistical documents, methods, and conclusions were translated into the concerns of popular religious culture. In particular, the Bulwark’s ongoing surveys of Catholicism's “progress,” intended to frighten Protestants into action, weaponized statistical discourses that were used in more measured fashion elsewhere. To that end, the Bulwark argued that only Protestants had the right mindset to put religious statistics into a proper explanatory framework, whereas Catholics manipulated their own data for dishonest rhetorical purposes that the Bulwark disclaimed. The Bulwark’s statistical turn, which bypassed the sectarianism of its theological articles, positioned it as a voice uniting the interests of all Protestant readers against Parliament's dangerously tolerant brand of liberalism.

A PROTESTANT CLERGYMAN exhorts a young Jewish woman to tell her father of her conversion, and reminds her of Matthew 10.37: “He that loveth father and mother more than me, is not worthy of me” (Ball 36). A Roman Catholic priest rebukes a young woman who worries that a monastic vocation would be disloyal to her mother, and reminds her too of Matthew 10.37: “I must choose between God and my mother. I could not serve both; and if I made choice of the latter, I would lose my immortal soul, and be damned, quoting the passage, ‘whoever loveth father or mother more than me, is not worthy to be my disciple” (O'Gorman 12–13). The same Biblical text – yet each polemicist appropriates it for noticeably different ends. In the first case, the danger lies not in young Thirza's own rejection of her father but his rejection of her; his anti-Christian sentiments have negated in advance her own challenge to his authority. But in the second, Edith O'Gorman faces a church hierarchy that equates familial affection with demonic evil. Whereas the Jewish convert mournfully recognizes that her decision may alienate her parents, the would-be nun must actively repudiate her own family.