GOD'S FUNERAL By A.N. Wilson Penguin
The Victorian era continues to exert a fascination for many of us. Living, as we do, in an age when the decline of the church seems terminal, when each new set of statistics underlines the seriousness of the situation, there is an attraction about an age when Christianity seemed dominant.
But were the seeds of our present decline planted during that age? This is the question behind A.N. Wilson's book God's Funeral. Because there is another perspective on that confident, religious age: it was also the age of doubt. The term 'agnostic' was first coined during Victoria's reign. Darwin's theory of evolution seemed to strike like an axe at the root of Christian certainty. Books like The Way of all Flesh and Fathers and Sons charted in painful detail the sundering of family relationships as sons, and some daughters, found the new intellectual climate inclement to the faith of their fathers.
The dust-jacket says: 'By the end of the 19th century, almost all the great writers, artists and intellectuals had abandoned Christianity, and many had abandoned belief in God altogether ... by 1900, the Church, so vastly rich, so politically and socially powerful, was seen by many as spiritually empty, however full its pews might be of a Sunday.'
