THE VICTORIAN AS INTELLECTUAL
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followed by the quiet, unostentatious, lax conformism of school,
ended in the quiet, reasonable, good-natured agnosticism of his ma–
turity. The evolution of faith from belief to unbelief seemed to him
to be as natural and inevitable as the process of physical growth
itself.
Stephen was deceived, however, as were later historians, into
confusing manners with belief. Because the generation of his elders–
his own father and Macaulay, for example-had come to look upon
enthusiasm with distaste, and regarded public protestations of faith,
like public displays of emotion, as vulgar if not obscene, it has been
assumed that their religious belief was as attenuated as the public
expression of that belief. The truth is that Leslie Stephen's father,
who had, indeed, come a long way from the primitive evangelical
fervor of his ancestors, was nevertheless deeply pious, in thought as
well as in behavior. Between James Stephen and Leslie Stephen there
was not simply one more step in the march of enlightenment; there
was a leap which no amount of good manners or good nature could
obscure.
Stephen could not appreciate the enormity of the distance which
separated belief from unbelief, because he could not appreciate or
credit the very fact of belief. "The one thing," he wrote, "that can
spoil the social intercourse of well-educated men . . . is a spirit of
misplaced zeal," and he was grateful that there was no Arnold at
Eton and no Newman in Cambridge. He admitted that Cambridge
men did not deny the existence of the soul, but he congratulated him–
self that they were sensible enough to know that "it should be kept
in its proper place." He himself, who did more to popularize agnos–
ticism than any other man except Huxley, never really understood
what all the fuss was about.
He never understood, as Huxley did, that a new chronology had
come into being, Before-Darwin and After-Darwin, with Darwin
marking the dividing line between belief and unbelief. Before Darwin
a bold spirit could be tempted to think of God as merely the custo–
dian of the laws of nature; after Darwin it took no great courage
to think of the laws of nature as themselves the custodian of the
universe. Before Darwin man was assured that he was created by
God in His image; after Darwin he was advised that he was created
by laws of nature which were the laws of chance, in the image of
