Around the mid-nineteenth century, however, the field began to professionalize. A discipline called English literature arose, founded on and formed around Shakespeare. It arose, first and foremost, as a substitute for religion. For centuries, Christianity had exerted a pacifying influence on the population, encouraging values of meekness and self-sacrifice, and unifying all classes, from the richest congregant to the pious peasant, under a single ideology. But by the Victorian period, religion was threatened by scientific discovery and social change. Church attendance among the working classes was falling. Social unrest seemed to be building. The church was losing its hold on the masses, and the Victorian ruling class worried that, without religion to encourage morality and restraint, something like the French Revolution could happen in Britain. A new religion was needed; a discourse that could provide the unifying, pacifying function formerly provided by Christianity. As the scholar Terry Eagleton writes, "If one were to provide a single explanation for the growth of English studies in the later nineteenth century, one could do worse than to reply: 'the failure of religion.'"

—Elizabeth Winkler, Shakespeare was a Woman and Other Heresies

It has been calculated that the whites advance every year a mean distance of seventeen miles along the whole of this vast boundary. Obstacles such as an unproductive district, a lake, or an Indian nation are from time to time encountered. The advancing column then halts for a while; its two extremities curve round upon themselves, and as soon as they are reunited, they proceed onwards. This gradual and continuous progress of the European race towards the Rocky Mountains has the solemnity of a providential event; it is like a deluge of men rising unabatedly, and daily driven onwards by the hand of God.

—Alexis de Tocqueville, Democracy in America

Insensibility to beauty may be an index of misery. Or it may reflect wholehearted commitment to another value such as justice, whose claims seem more urgent.

—Peter Schjeldahl, quoted in Cameron Anderson, The Faithful Artist

Having done away with innate ideas, having altogether renounced the vanity of believing that we are always thinking, Locke proves that all our ideas come to us through the senses, examines our ideas both simple and complex, follows the human mind in all its operations, and shows the imperfections of all the languages spoken by man, and our constant abuse of terms. He comes at last to consider the extent, or rather the nothingness, of human knowledge.

—Voltaire, Philosophical Letters

In case of doubt the neo-classicist is always ready to sacrifice fancy to the "substantial, useful part," and so he seems too negative and cool and prosaic in his reason, and this is because his reason is so largely a protest against a previous romantic excess. What had been considered genius in the time of the "metaphysicals" had too often turned out to be only oddity. With this warning before them men kept their eyes fixed very closely on the model of normal human nature that had been set up, and imitated it very literally and timorously. A man was haunted by the fear that he might be "monstrous," and so, as Rymer put it, "satisfy nobody's maggot but his own." Correctness thus became a sort of tyranny. We suffer to the present day from this neo-classical failure to work out a sound conception of the imagination in its relation to good sense. Because the neo-classicist held the imagination lightly as compared with good sense the romantic rebels were led to hold good sense lightly as compared with imagination. The romantic view in short is too much the neo-classical view turned upside down; and, as Sainte-Beuve says, nothing resembles a hollow so much as a swelling.

—Irving Babbitt, Rousseau and Romanticism

Out of the turmoil incidental to the Great Revival came a number of schisms among the evangelical denominations active in the West. Doctrinally conservative, the Presbyterians were quick to scent heresy and to throw out the unorthodox. As a result, they soon began to divide by fission. New Lights, Cumberland Presbyterians, Seceders, Old School and New School Presbyterians, and many other names for dissident groups indicate the division within the ranks. The Baptists and Methodists were also riven by controversy. But these sectarian divisions owe less to the frontier than they do to the beliefs implicit in Protestantism. They merely illustrate a tendency which had been in operation since the Reformation. When the Reformers conceded that men could read and interpret the Scriptures according to the dictates of their consciences and could dispense with a priest as intercessor with God, they opened a Pandora's box which they could never close thereafter.

—Louis B. Wright, Culture on the Moving Frontier

King James I insisted that he held his authority directly from God, that he himself was the supreme, indeed the sole, lawgiver, that parliament was merely an advisory board summoned by him when he felt inclined and then only because it was the custom of the land.

—Maurice Ashley, The Greatness of Oliver Cromwell

Evil, then, the origin of which I had been seeking, has no substance at all; for if it were a substance, it would be good. For either it would be an incorruptible substance and so a supreme good, or a corruptible substance, which could not be corrupted unless it were good. I understood, therefore, and it was made clear to me that you made all things good, nor is there any substance at all not made by you.

—Augustine, Confessions

It is too absurd to say that some men might have taken ship and traversed the whole wide ocean, and crossed from this side of the world to the other, and that thus even the inhabitants of that distant region are descended from that one first man.

—Augustine, The City of God

So long as the soul keeps the firmness of purpose which sanctifies even the body, the violence done by another's lust makes no impression on this bodily sanctity, which is preserved intact by one's own persistent continence.

—Augustine, The City of God