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The Old Enemies: Catholic and Protestant in Nineteenth-Century English Culture. By Michael Wheeler. Cambridge: Cambridge University Press, 2006. xvi + 352 pp. $80.00 cloth.
The controversy between Catholics and Protestants, according to a passage in the novel John Inglesant (1876) quoted in the book under review, was a struggle dividing the noblest parts of human nature: "On the one side obedience and faith, on the other, freedom and the reason." It was a psychological as well as a religious and political dispute. "This," concluded the novel's author, J. H. Shorthouse, "is the supreme quarrel of all" (272). Michael Wheeler's study of the debate in the literature of nineteenth-century England goes a long way towards vindicating this judgment. Wheeler, a former professor of English Literature at the University of Lancaster, reveals how attitudes on both sides were molded by personal preoccupations, such as Charles Kinsley's distaste for celibacy, as much as by theological opinions, such as John Cumming's prophetic expectations. The contest was deep, fierce, and persistent because it called into question some of the most profound convictions entertained by the protagonists.
The author brings out the intensity of the controversy in the first chapter, which recounts the alarmed reaction by Protestant...