Leslie Stephen

Essays on Religion, Volume 1 Leslie Stephen

Leslie Stephen (1832-1904) was one of the towering intellectual figures of the Victorian age. Author of such celebrated works as History of English Thought in the Eighteenth Century and The English Utilitarians, he wrote literary criticism, philosophy, and much other work. This volume includes Stephen's provocative essays on religion. In many of his essays he not only expounded his own agnostic beliefs, but maintained that many avowed Christians were also unwitting agnostics in their inability or unwillingness to define the precise nature and attributes of the god they believed in. In several essays Stephen discusses the intellectual ferment caused by Darwin's theory of evolution, and he engages in a long rumination on the morality and effiacy of suppressing "poisonous" beliefs. This volume-which includes essays that have never been reprinted from their original appearances in magazines of the later 19th century-is the first of a multi-volume series that will reprint Stephen's collected shorter essays on a wide variety of topics.