ABSTRACT
A burning Christian faith was the main recruiting sergeant for the noble army of Victorian missionaries. David Livingstone spent all but a few months of the 32 years from 1841 to 1873 in the African interior he himself made only a handful of Christian converts. Christianity, in general, seemed to be succumbing to attack. In the first half of the century, German textual critics of the Bible discovered mistranslations and faults in wording, which altered meaning and threw doubt on conventional beliefs. The dechristianising of modern times happened not in the university study or biological laboratory but in the industrial city. The cities grew so fast that the churches could not keep up with ministering to the faithful, let alone winning back the backsliders or converting those who had never been Christian. From the money provided in 1818 by the Church Building Act, 214 churches were erected, but they proved too few and were often in the wrong places.
