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The Age of Doubt: Tracing the Roots of Our Religious Uncertainty, by Christopher Lane; pp. vii + 233. New Haven and London: Yale University Press, 2011, $26.00, £18.00.
In this elegantly written book, Christopher Lane tells the story of Victorian doubt by exploring the public and private writing of figures such as Thomas Carlyle, Charles Lyell, Robert Chambers, J. A. Froude, Alfred Tennyson, George Eliot, Herbert Spencer, and Leslie Stephen. While some of their personal stories are better known than others, in each case Lane finds something insightful to say about the nature of belief and "what it felt like to lose one's religious faith-as an individual and, more broadly, as a people and society" (4). An attentiveness to the psychology of faith is one of Lane's strengths as a critic, and he evinces a genuine sympathy for the ebb and flow of changing beliefs. I evoke Matthew Arnold here deliberately, for the nineteenth-century sage's commitment to culture as a new repository of the sacred and a potential answer to any narrowness of thought is discernable throughout, despite Lane's limited and cautious reference to Arnold's work. One of the main reasons for Lane's interest in doubt is his conviction that the uncertainty of "secular 'forms of faith'" is preferable to the unyielding expressions of belief and unbelief that dominate public debate in our own day (8).
Despite making every effort to talk about a range of beliefs sensitively, Lane is sometimes blind to his own prejudices. This includes an intellectual snobbery that occasionally mars his efforts to deal with different positions fairly. There is an uncomfortable contrast between the admiration of great Victorian intellectuals such as Eliot and the tone of the final chapter's anecdote, which narrates Lane's visit to the populist Creation Museum in Cincinnati and exposes the failings of Tim LaHaye and Jerry B. Jenkins's LeftBehind book series. Another,...