ABSTRACT
Religious faith was a solemn matter In Victorian England: So was religious doubt. That this is no longer true in England cannot be attributed to a failure of zeal on the part of either the "faithful" or the "doubtful". Equally significant in the eclipse of fervent organizational commitment to dogmatic consideration of religious issues was the social and intellectual transformation that made the traditional categories of serious religious debate on truth simply irrelevant. Personality conflicts, as well as diverging interests among the leadership and changing times, largely account for the fragmentation and eventual decline of proselytizing freethought. Holyoake's Secularism, promulgated in the briefly revived Reasoner and in the shortlived Secular Review, emphasized the positive side of freethought. It sounded more and more like Christian middle class morality without the God-words, or like a revival of utopian socialism, and increasingly less like the anti-Establishment atheism that had been the movement's trademark.
