Volume 7, Number 8 · November 17, 1966
Believe It Or Not
By Gertrude Himmelfarb
The Unbelievers
by A.O.J. Cockshut
New York University, 192 pp., $5.00
Religious Controversies of the Nineteenth Century: Selected Documents
edited by A.O.J. Cockshut
University of Nebraska, 265 pp., $5.50
The Newman Brothers
by William Robbins
Harvard, 202 pp., $6.00
How can we take seriously the religious qualms of the Victorians now that the 'Death of God' has been solemnized on the cover of Time magazine? How can we attend to their quarrel over the Thirty-Nine Articles while we are fatally quarreling with God himself? How can we be expected to appreciate the audacity of a rationalism that strikes many of us as being no less credulous than religion itself? How can we sympathize with the attempt to create a morality without religion when we are engaged in propounding an ethic without morality? How can we share their indignation at the absurdity of Biblical miracles when we have made a principle and philosophy out of absurdity itself? How can we be patient with doubts after being exposed to the most radical and total nihilism?
Review, 2532 words
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