THE VICTORIAN AS INTELLECTUAL
671
and most fortunate that they expressed themselves in the traditional
rivalry between Cambridge and Oxford; without them there would
have been no game, and with them there was the comfortable know–
ledge that the game would be kept under control, that it would
never become more than a game. (Newman so far forgot himself in
the excitement of the game as to be carried away into the alien world
of Catholicism, after which he was looked upon as a disagreeable
curiosity. )
Religious differences, then, could be indulged because, as part
of the game, they did not assume the character of moral differences.
But what
if
it should happen that men started to quarrel not about
religious differences but about religion itself? Would morality still be
inviolable? Would the rules of the game still be observed? No one
worried about these questions more than those who were themselves
least able to believe. And they were the ones who came up with the
answer that for the men of intelligence and character (for the masses
of men it might be different) religion was not the necessary sanction
for morality. George Eliot, Mill, Huxley, Morley, Frederick Harrison
and Stephen agreed that atheism, positivism, agnosticism, or how–
ever they identified their particular variety of disbelief, could be
more, not less, moral than orthodox Christianity.
To Stephen, agnosticism was superior to religion because it was
the more sporting and manly way of playing "the great game of life."
For the agnostic, there were none of the easy subterfuges, the cheap
consolations of religion. The agnostic had to be courageous without
being foolhardy, self-sufficient but not proud. He had to know when
to stand alone and when to join with others, how to exploit his good
fortune and how to retreat before bad. And he had to understand
that the secret of thinking is in the doing and that to be deliberate
is to be decisive. The good agnostic, in short, was the good sportsman.
It
is not surprising that Stephen, interpreting agnosticism in this
way, saw in it a philosophy peculiarly congenial to the English. Cer–
tainly there is no other country where both the spirit of sportsmanship
and the physical activity of sports have penetrated so deeply into so–
ciety as to determine the character of its intellectuals.
It
is almost
impossible to read a memoir or biography of a Victorian writer with–
out coming upon the inevitable walking statistics. Even Mill, that
effeminate "logic-chopping machine," who had escaped the natural-
