ABSTRACT
When Matthew Arnold heard the ‘melancholy, long, withdrawing roar, retreating’ of ‘The Sea of Faith’, he was invoking a master narrative that achieved virtual consensus in the Victorian world. The underlying metaphor for religious change was the downward slope from a Christian past to a secular future. I do not intend in this chapter to challenge Arnold’s master narrative or the Victorian orthodoxy, although I have done that elsewhere (Cox 2010), but instead to substitute a different metaphor, that of the bell-shaped curve. The most interesting characteristic of Victorian Christianity is that it was becoming more rather than less important. It is the upward slope of the bell-shaped curve (which curved downward in the twentieth century) that is the topic of this chapter.
