ABSTRACT
Biblical criticism, as old as the Bible itself, took on a new seriousness when fortified by the detailed scholarship of which England had its first bitter taste in 1862 and '63 in Colenso's commentary on the Pentateuch. Some of the mid-Victorian critics of Christianity were convinced that the beliefs of the Church were not essential to its beneficial social influence. The prosperity of mid-Victorian England gave some men more leisure for reading, and emphasized the worth of scientific and technological advances on which industrialization, the source of England's economic superiority, was based. The Act of Uniformity Amendment Act which he brought into Parliament in 1872 to provide for shortened church services was altered slightly by Parliament with the result that clergymen adopting the shortened form were obliged to substitute the Apostles' Creed for the Athanasian on five of the thirteen Sundays on which its use had formerly been compulsory.
