Leslie Stephen

Essays on Religion, Volume 2 Leslie Stephen

Throughout his long life, Leslie Stephen addressed the religious views of a number of intellectuals from the seventeenth century to his own day. He keenly pointed out weaknesses in their defenses of religious orthodoxy, maintaining that several figures were actually unwitting skeptics. In an early paper he dissects Matthew Arnold's clumsy advocacy on behalf of the Anglican church; and in two hard-hitting essays he skewers the obscurantism and poor reasoning in the work of John Henry Newman, who began as a proponent of the Oxford Movement of High Church Anglicans and then migrated to the Roman Catholic church. Stephen expressed surprising sympathy for the American firebrand Jonathan Edwards, chiefly because Edwards had the courage of his convictions. Essays on Pascal, Voltaire, and Spinoza display Stephen's sophistication in dealing with these complex thinkers, while his essays on the atheist Charles Bradlaugh and the agnostic scientist Thomas Henry Huxley show his closely he identified with these figures. In all, Stephen's essays are invariably perspicacious and written with grace and elegance.