But the story does not end there, for Hindmarsh has shown that when the great Protestant missionary societies cranked up their global apparatus in the nineteenth century, evangelical conversions of the Western penitential kind (anxiety, awareness of sin, guilt, and joyful release) could not be reproduced in the same way in non-Western societies where centuries of catechetical and ecclesial indoctrination about sin had never happened. Native Americans, Africans, and Pacific Islanders in limited numbers could be brought to embrace Protestant Christianity of an evangelical stripe, but their conversion pathologies did not fit the prescribed European grids. Native Americans were prone to describe conversion in terms of deliverance from conjuring and alcohol abuse; Pacific Islanders could not be brought to emotions of abject misery before conversion, despite being practitioners of the grossest sins of cannibalism and infanticide; and African slaves were prone to see conversion to Christianity as part of an exodus-like journey from bondage to freedom. Therefore, religious conversion in the classic evangelical sense of an awakened introspective conscience producing anxiety and guilt relieved only by surrender to God resulting in a joyful new birth is really a product of a distinctive confluence of cultural circumstances in the eighteenth-century English-speaking world. But what is enchanting about evangelical conversion narratives, apart from the sense of joy and excitement with which they are recounted, is the fact that they brought together in a dynamic synthesis a person’s past religious tradition, his or her present experience, and the future aspiration to live a new life up to and including death itself. For example, November 2007 saw the 200th anniversary of the death of John Newton, slave trader and libertine, and the author of black and white evangelicalism’s most famous hymn, “Amazing Grace.” Newton’s religious conversion, recounted in his Authentic Narrative of Some Remarkable and Interesting Particulars (1764), is part picaresque adventure and part Damascus Road experience, but it did lay the foundation for a very different kind of life, succinctly expressed in his own epitaph. “John Newton clerk, once an infidel and libertine, a servant of slaves in Africa, was, by the rich mercy of our Lord and Saviour Jesus Christ, preserved, restored, pardoned, and appointed to preach the faith he had long labored to destroy.”⁴

As both Newton’s epitaph and Dinah Morris’s sermon make clear, the invitation to receive Christ and experience religious conversion was but the entry point to a life of faith and service of others. But how was that faith to be nourished and experienced? More particularly, what did early evangelical spirituality look like and what lessons can be drawn from it by the contemporary evangelical churches? In their efforts to mark out a distinctive spirituality and communal loyalty for their followers, early evangelical leaders went to extraordinary lengths to condense, edit, filter, reproduce, and disseminate spiritual classics of the Christian tradition. Within only a few years of the birth of Methodism, John Wesley, Dinah Morris’s white-haired saint, had issued more than 40 abridged and inexpensive editions of spiritual classics.

What is remarkable about Wesley’s list is its eclecticism. Among the authors represented in his reprints are the Roman Catholic mystics Thomas à Kempis and Gaston de Renty; the English Puritan John Bunyan; the Hallesian Pietist August Hermann Francke; the Moravian founder, Count Nicolaus Ludwig von Zinzendorf; the Scottish episcopalian Henry Scougal; the Anglican high churchman William Law; and the American Congregationalist Jonathan Edwards. A decade later Wesley completed his collection of texts in 50 volumes issued as A Christian Library: Consisting of Extracts from the Abridgements of the Choicest Pieces of Practical Divinity which have been publish’d in the English Tongue (1749–55). Nor was Wesley unique among evangelicals in these endeavors.⁵ Philip Doddridge supplied similar reading lists for younger clergy, and Joseph Milner later issued his influential five-volume history of the Christian church with an even wider net of Christian spiritual heroes, such as Ambrose and Augustine, Anselm and Bernard, Hus and Wycliffe, and Luther and Calvin. The point of all this was not merely to supply elite texts for the educated evangelical cognoscenti, but also to issue affordable and well-thumbed pocketbooks for the evangelical populace.

Of course all sorts of caveats need to be issued about this material. It was issued partly out of self-interest and competitive advantage to control a voluntary movement and guarantee its survival. He who controlled the tradition controlled everything. Moreover, he was “he,” because the ratio of men to women in the exemplary lives issued by John Wesley was 5:1, whereas the sex ratio in eighteenth- century Methodism was 3:2 in favor of women. This powerful asymmetry of male power and prescription and female following has been one of the most enduring, and disagreeable, features of the evangelical tradition.

However appropriate are the criticisms that need to be offered about evangelical attempts to connect the eighteenth-century revivals with the past, it was nevertheless a remarkable exercise in earthing a new movement in a surprisingly inclusive history of Christianity. Evangelical spirituality, with its roots in conversion, the Bible, the cross, and the Christian tradition, and with its characteristic emphases on discipline, testing, discernment, sanctification, and mission, was a powerful instrument of character formation for ordinary people.⁶ In the words of one recent writer, populist evangelicals employed spiritual discipline as an instrument of self-fashioning, freedom, and modernity. They employed spiritual discipline not as an instrument of self-repression, as Marxist historians like E. P. Thompson once alleged, but rather as a way of producing the necessary self-control within which personal agency could work more effectively.⁷ Far from being an oxymoron, therefore, evangelical spirituality drew from a surprisingly eclectic range of Christian sources and served as a means and a way to a better life for those who subjected themselves to its disciplines.

After calling her hearers to a new life, and a new set of spiritual disciplines, Dinah Morris, who as an awakened, lay-preaching woman was also the medium of her own message, finished her discourse by announcing a hymn. It has long been recognized that the most distinctive, characteristic, and ubiquitous feature of the evangelical message, indeed of the entire evangelical revival, was its transmission by means of hymns and hymn singing. If one were to choose a single artifact of eighteenth-century evangelicalism to lock away for posterity that would somehow capture its essence, one defensible choice would be John Wesley’s 1780 Collection of Hymns, for the Use of the People Called Methodists. For a movement that has attracted far more abuse than praise from scholars, the Collection of Hymns has commanded almost universal admiration. Bernard Manning described it as “a work of supreme devotional art by a religious genius”; Rodney Flew called it “a liturgical miracle”; Ernest Rattenbury considered it to be “a Methodist manifesto . . . a splendid summary of Methodist devotion”; and Carlton Young viewed it as one of the most beautiful pieces of “lyrical theology” ever written.⁸

John Wesley was an inveterate collector and publisher of hymns, beginning with A Collection of Psalms and Hymns, published in 1737 for the use of the infant Anglican colony in Georgia. It was the first Methodist hymnbook, the first Anglican hymnbook, and probably the first hymnbook published in America for use in public worship. (The most recently published hymnbook in America is the new hymnbook of the Memorial Church at Harvard, in which Charles Wesley and his fellow eighteenth-century evangelicals have by far the largest representation.) The Wesley brothers issued more than 30 hymnbooks: some with tunes, some without; some intended for special occasions, some for more general consumption; some intended for all “real Christians,” some only for Methodists. John was the selector, organizer, editor, and publisher; Charles was the prolific poet, writer, and lyricist. It is estimated that he composed some 9,000 hymns and sacred poems, some of which are classics of devotional literature, many of which are truly dreadful and easily forgettable. The point is that well before the 1780 Collection of Hymns, Methodism was a movement distinguished by its devotion to sacred songs.

Why was there such a mania for singing? The 1780 Collection of Hymns offers a way into this question. John Wesley’s preface is instructive. After carefully delineating the market objectives for the new volume (“a collection neither too large, that it may be cheap and portable, nor too small, that it may contain a sufficient variety for all ordinary occasions”), Wesley stated that the volume contained “all the important truths of our most holy religion, whether speculative or practical; yea to illustrate them all, and to prove them both by Scripture and reason. And this is done in a regular order. The hymns are not carelessly jumbled together, but carefully ranged under proper heads according to the experience of real Christians. So that this book is in effect a little body of experimental and practical divinity.”⁹ In Wesley’s words poetry was to be “the handmaid of piety” in quickening devotion, confirming faith, enlivening hope, and kindling or increasing the Christian’s love of God and humankind.

What is striking about the hymns as a body is the relative absence of systematic doctrine and their concentration instead on the Christian life as a pilgrimage, a journey from earthly despair to heavenly blessing. They are filled with personal pronouns, active verbs, and intense struggles. They are more winning than threatening, more appealing than damning. Hymns transmitted complex theological ideas in accessible language; they reached deep into the will and the emotions of believers through meter, rhyme, and melody; they defined for Methodism a religious content and style of a more vibrant and populist kind than was available through confessions of faith or chanted liturgies; in short, they supplied a poetic music of the heart for a religion of the heart. The medium and the message were in perfect harmony.

So far I have attempted to use George Eliot’s favorable portrayal of Dinah Morris as a window to open a conversation about some enchanting aspects of the evangelical tradition, namely, its emphasis on the new birth and the new life, its surprisingly eclectic spirituality, and its most characteristic form of expression, hymn singing. What then of the other side of the story? It is time now to return to the second of George Eliot’s accounts of evangelicalism, to what I have called her disenchantment narrative—her verbal rant against Dr. Cumming, published in the Westminster Review.

Dr. Cumming was minister of the Crown Court Church in London’s Covent Garden. Crown Court Church was one of the few Presbyterian churches in England claiming an affiliation to the Church of Scotland and was in a perilous state when Cumming was ordained to its ministry in September 1832.¹⁰ Cumming’s ministry in central London lasted for almost 50 years, and the Crown Court Church thrived for most of that period. Cumming, who had enjoyed a reputable academic career at Aberdeen University, was a devoted pastor, a prolific author, a fervent preacher, a formidable anti-Catholic polemicist, and a determined advocate of prophetical interpretations of the Bible, which were often placed in the context of a pessimistic interpretation of current events in Britain and the rest of the world. He was the Hal Lindsey and the Tim LaHaye of his generation.

This brand of evangelical Protestantism played out well in early Victorian London. Cumming attracted to the Crown Court Church a distinguished clientele, including a number of aristocratic families with Scottish connections. While at the peak of his powers, Cumming’s London citadel drew large crowds, and Cumming became a notable feature of London’s ecclesiastical landscape. The focus of Eliot’s attack on him was not so much his theological method, which she scarcely enjoyed, as it was the moral and spiritual implications of his writings, which she positively despised. According to Eliot, Cumming’s mind was not of the “pietistic order,” there was not the “slightest leaning toward mysticism in his Christianity,” his way of salvation was forensic and schematic, not experiential and redemptive, and his view of the world, and of his opponents, was relentlessly judgmental, often savagely so. “But of really spiritual joys and sorrows,” she writes, “of the life and death of Christ as a manifestation of love that constrains the soul, of sympathy with that yearning over the lost and erring which made Jesus weep over Jerusalem, and prompted the sublime prayer, ‘Father, forgive them,’ of the gentler fruits of the Spirit, and the peace of God which passeth understanding—of all this, we find little trace in Dr Cumming’s discourses.”¹¹

Comparing Cumming’s Calvinistic Protestantism with the enthusiastic Methodists, she states that while the Methodists were made amiably gullible by their “pietistic feelings” directed toward God’s glory, Cumming’s reliance on the doctrine of verbal inspiration of the Bible was a mental caste with more unfortunate moral consequences: “what is for them a state of emotion submerging the intellect, is with him a formula imprisoning the intellect, depriving it of its proper function—the free search for truth.” The mental habit of counting as truth only that which fits the grid of verbal inspiration, combined with an emotionally charged belief in personal salvation based upon propositions derived from scripture, was for Eliot somewhere near the heart of Cumming’s evangelical disease: “So long as a belief in propositions is regarded as indispensable to salvation, the pursuit of truth as such is not possible, any more than it is possible for a man who is swimming for his life to make meteorological observations on the storm which threatens to overwhelm him.”¹²

Eliot’s real complaint is not against Cumming’s theology, but against the grim moral implications of his teaching. She gives three examples. The first is a deficiency of love manifested in party spirit and a kind of evangelical tribal loyalty. She states that the larger proportion of what he had published was in reality a diatribe against Roman Catholics and infidels of all types, including skeptics and Muslims. The Christian love that he enjoins is, according to Eliot, “the love of the clan [fellow evangelicals], which is the correlative of antagonism to the rest of mankind.” In this way “Dr Cumming’s religion may demand a tribute of love, but it gives a charter to hatred; it may enjoin charity, but it fosters all uncharitableness.”

Eliot’s second example of Cumming’s moral perfidy comes from the results of his obsession with prophecy. The idea that God and Satan were playing out some cosmic game in which the human actors were moved around like chess pawns in order to serve some grand providential purpose was particularly offensive to Eliot. So too was Cumming’s attempted demonstration, based as it was on an evangelical interpretation of political and social events, that the second coming was imminent. Cumming’s preoccupation with the premillennial Advent was, according to Eliot, merely the “transportation of political passions on to a so-called religious platform.”

Eliot’s third example of the moral flaw at the heart of Cumming’s theological system is his insistence on the eternal punishment of unbelievers. According to Eliot, Cumming appeared to believe in eternal punishment, not out of heavy-hearted reluctance, but out of partisan belligerence. Not for him mere resignation to “the awful mystery of eternal punishment,” Eliot writes, nor even a search for refuge in the possibility of “annihilation for the impenitent,” but rather a full-blooded assertion of a gruesome doctrine: “Do we object, he asks, to everlasting happiness? Then why object to everlasting misery?—reasoning which is perhaps felt to be cogent by theologians who anticipate the eternal happiness for themselves, and the everlasting misery for their neighbours.”

Although Eliot’s optimistic humanism probably sits less well with readers who have just endured the ravages of a grimly violent twentieth century than with the liberal readership of the Westminster Review in early Victorian England, there is no denying that Eliot’s verbal attack on the unfortunate Dr. Cumming reads as one of the sharpest pieces of polemical prose in the English language, justifying George Henry Lewes’s opinion that Eliot had thus demonstrated her potential to be a truly great writer. Moreover, it is difficult to read Cumming’s work, the same corpus to which she had access, and not agree with most of her conclusions. Cumming’s printed sermons reek of unctuous self-righteousness, and are riddled with the crassest of stereotypes of Jews, Roman Catholics, Muslims, and atheists. His rhetorical affluence and anecdotal style, whatever their merits in pulpit delivery, do not translate well into cold print. What then accounts for a figure like Cumming, and why was he such a successful author among his evangelical constituency, and possibly beyond?

What marks out his published work from the generality of printed sermons in Victorian Britain is his relentless emphasis on biblical prophecy, and his ability to relate ancient writings to contemporary events. Cumming was obsessed with the second coming of Christ, and was persuaded by current events that the time was near. In an attempt to mark out the timetable of Christ’s return, Cumming matched the prophecies of the Book of Daniel with key events in world history, such as the appointment of Pope Boniface II as universal head of the church in 607 CE and the demise of papal powers during the French Revolution. In this way Cumming was able to fuse anti-Catholicism, disillusionment with the world order, and verbal inspiration of the Bible to produce a timetable for the wrapping up of time. It was this combination of world-weary pessimism and eager millennial anticipation that most annoyed Eliot.

We know from other sources that however lamentable some of Cumming’s published works were, he was not quite the moral monster of Eliot’s imagination. What accounts for Eliot’s bile is not so much the life and teaching of Cumming but her own disenchantment from a religious tradition that had shaped her youth. Cumming was the expression, not the cause, of her disenchantment, the complex reasons for which go beyond the scope of this paper. Indeed, disenchantment narratives, if not as ubiquitous as conversion narratives, are certainly not absent from the annals of evangelicalism. It is scarcely surprising that a religious tradition which attracted the loyalty of millions of people worldwide should have failed to sustain the faith of some of its own converts or capture the imagination of some of its own children. Many of its most famous leaders have experienced the shock and grief caused by the alienation from the tradition of their own children. Charles Wesley, the greatest poet and hymn writer of the evangelical revival, penned some of his most melancholic verses in response to his son Samuel’s conversion to Roman Catholicism.¹³ Even the first great generation of English evangelicals associated with the Clapham Sect seemed unable to produce family dynasties of evangelical longevity. “There is some pathos,” writes Ford K. Brown, “in the departure from the Protestant Reformation ranks of so many of the sons of the leaders—in the Protestant Evangelical families or among those sons and daughters of the Evangelicals who were brought up to write their names in England’s records, almost all. They were brought up with Christian love and confidence that they would take their place in the front line.”¹⁴ Yet the list of casualties is too impressive to be merely accidental:

In their university days, or before, or after, the children of the Clapham inner circle and the Evangelical directorate elsewhere, and the children of the lesser known or unknown Evangelical families who were also to become eminent Victorians, depart steadily for High Church, Roman Catholic Church, or no church: Macaulay and De Quincey, the sons of Babington and Gisborne and Stephen, the four sons of Wilberforce, the three daughters of Patrick Brontë, Marian Evans who called herself George Eliot, John Henry Newman, the son or sons of Charles Grant, Lord Teignmouth, Buxton, Lady Emily Pusey, Benjamin Harrison, Sir James Graham, John Gladstone, Sir Robert Peel and William Manning.¹⁵

Brown’s explanation for this great familial exodus is that the upper-crust leaders of the evangelicalism of the Clapham Sect, as befitted their social position, valued elegance, cultivation, and style as cohabitable companions with virtue, piety, and holiness. The evangelical generation that followed theirs, however, was dominated by the rising ranks of earlier populists who had an altogether different style. Having neither aristocratic panache nor rustic charm, the new generation of evangelical leaders, according to Brown, was altogether less appealing to the well-educated children of the Clapham Sect. As evangelicalism lost its style, the stylish lost their evangelicalism.

Over the last several years I have made a study of evangelical disenchantment through the lives of some of its most eminent and creative representatives, including the writers George Eliot and James Baldwin, the artists Vincent Van Gogh and John Ruskin, the social crusaders Theodore Dwight Weld and Elizabeth Cady Stanton, and the public intellectuals Francis Newman and Edmund Gosse.¹⁶ These are but the most notable examples of a tradition that has always recruited adherents vigorously and over time silently lost some of them to other traditions. It is my experience that the seminaries, divinity schools, and religious studies departments of the Western academy are full of ex-evangelicals.

The common themes and shared characteristics of disenchanted evangelicals not only reveal a good deal about the nature of the evangelical tradition—from an admittedly unusual direction— but also illuminate some of the common causes and consequences of disenchantment. Perhaps the most obvious point to emphasize is that the disenchanted were once enchanted by what they found in the evangelical tradition. Most were enchanted, and some remained enchanted, with the person of Jesus Christ and with his emphasis on love, forgiveness, and sacrifice. Most were led to this position through the influence of a mentor or a friend who not only pointed them to Jesus and the Bible, but who also exhibited qualities they admired. As evangelicalism moved beyond its first and second generations, it is not surprising that many of its adherents fetched up in positions that enabled them to influence and inspire the young. Schoolmasters and mistresses, clergymen and preachers, editors of periodicals and organizers of voluntary associations, leaders of classes and teachers of Sunday schools, college teachers and university professors all show up in the conversion narratives of young evangelicals. It is a tribute to the quality of those exemplary lives that earnest young people like George Eliot and Francis Newman were inspired to follow their example. Of course there are any number of hypocrites and egotists in the evangelical tradition, in both life and fiction, but they were more often at the margins than at the center of the tradition.

In most cases conversion was accompanied by a strong commitment to the person of Jesus Christ and an idealistic determination to make a difference in the world. Not only did the story of Jesus represent a compelling example of sacrificial love, Christianity itself also offered a model of empowerment, a way of escaping from the drab humdrum of families, localities, and social conventions. Disenchantment, on the other hand, often followed from the growing realization that evangelical Christianity was not only about following a heroic savior into a needy world, but also carried with it an inheritance of doctrines and dogmas, and precepts and propositions. Among the more serious converts, such as most of those represented in my study, conversion was followed by serious Bible reading and self-examination. This is where a degree of cognitive dissonance opened up, for they discovered that the Bible is not only a book of love and forgiveness, but also contains violence, judgment, and notions of eternal punishment. Some scholars have shown how Bible reading could be, ironically, a secularizing dynamic in the lives of Christians who were unable to square the love that attracted them to faith with the hard sayings of the biblical narratives. Among some thoughtful evangelicals, moral repudiation of biblical ethics preceded and was often more important than difficulties presented by biblical criticism and Darwinian evolution. These intellectual challenges did not so much cause doubt and infidelity as inform, rationalize, and justify them.¹⁷

Hard sayings and hard doctrines were often more difficult to accept for creative and intuitive personalities who chafed against theological systems. The more unappealing the doctrines, the more difficulties they presented. Some were challenged because of their perceived intellectual implausibility, and these included the doctrine of the Trinity, biblical inerrancy, and miracles. Some were challenged because of their perceived ethical mendacity, and these included substitutionary atonement, predestination, eternal punishment, and selective salvation for evangelical Protestants alone. Still others were challenged because they seemed to limit the sphere of human action in this world, and these included the various millennial schemes that treated life on earth as a mere warm-up act for the life to come. Nothing dimmed the ardor of young evangelical idealists more than the proposition that the earth was a failed experiment headed for divine elimination.

If the realization that fidelity to evangelicalism carried with it a necessary embrace of an unwelcome dogmatic system was perhaps the most troubling issue faced by the disenchanted, the unhappy relationship between evangelicalism and structures of power followed close behind. For those who became evangelicals partly out of an idealistic desire to reform “social evils,” the unpleasant reality that evangelicals were as likely to be on the side of the demons as the angels was hard to bear. Whether the issue was slavery, racial or gender inequality, or simple ethical probity in relation to sex or money, it seemed to many of the disenchanted that evangelicalism was as much collaborator as it was critic of the great social evils of their time. Nothing eroded the confidence of evangelical idealists more than the sober reality that many of their coreligionists were regrettably on the other side of what for them were the great issues of their time. The fact that their opponents defended their positions on slavery, race, gender, and sexual identity by an appeal to the Bible merely added insult to injury. One of the most consistent factors in disenchantment is the alignment of evangelical leaders of seminaries, churches, and voluntary organizations with what were regarded as reactionary forces.

Most of the people represented in my study were idealists. From Francis Newman’s desire to redeem Islam for Christ, to Theodore Dwight Weld’s campaign to end slavery in the United States, and from Sarah Grimké’s repudiation of the fecklessness of Southern plantation culture to Frances Willard’s desire to rid the world of alcohol, evangelicals were those who wanted to make a difference. That these aspirations are typical, not atypical of the tradition, can be deduced from many important books on evangelical social activism.¹⁸ But what happens when the desired goal is either perceived to be unobtainable, or is made more, not less, unachievable by evangelical means? Disappointment and frustrated idealism then became the midwives of evangelical disenchantment. So, too, were bad experiences with fellow evangelicals. George Eliot emptied her spleen on the hapless Dr. Cumming, Theodore Dwight Weld was outraged by the sexual scandals of some of the evangelical ministers he knew, and James Baldwin was less than enamored with some of the black preachers (including himself and his father) in his acquaintance. Nothing bred disenchantment faster than profound disillusionment with the lives, characters, and opinions of fellow evangelicals.

Given the artistic sensibilities and intellectual distinction of many of these figures, it is not surprising to discover that the closer evangelicalism sailed to dogmatism and exclusivity, the less acceptable it became to them. The evangelical tradition has always contained a diverse spectrum of adherents and opinions. Scholars have found it difficult to map and describe that spectrum without using anachronistic or inappropriate terms. Perhaps it is better not to think of a single spectrum but to think rather of a set of overlapping spectrums, some of which have to do with social class, style, and culture, while others relate to doctrines, denominations, and scriptural hermeneutics. Moreover, these spectrums are not fixed, but shift in response to cultural changes. Generally speaking, the more evangelical traditions feel under pressure from the surrounding culture, the more likely they are to adopt conservative and defensive positions, whether in theology, politics, or social behavior. In that sense evangelicalism has displayed fundamentalist proclivities long before, and long after, the term itself was used in the second decade of the twentieth century to describe those reacting against modernist theology and the implications of biblical criticism. In the lives of many disenchanted evangelicals there is no doubt that the narrower, more dogmatic, more sectarian, and more exclusive evangelicalism became, the less it appealed to those on the creative edges of the tradition. In short, those who embraced evangelicalism because of the openness of its message of love and forgiveness were just as likely to repudiate it for its emphasis on dogma and the letter of the law.

These polarities within evangelicalism have been addressed in an important recent book by W. R. Ward. He suggests that early evangelicals, deriving from the intellectual culture of the Enlightenment, were broadly united in their embrace of a hexagon of religious ideas: experiential conversion, mysticism, small-group religion, vitalist conceptions of nature, a deferred eschatology, and opposition to theological systems.¹⁹ He also shows how profoundly nineteenth-century evangelicals departed from the tradition they claimed to inherit. Biblical inerrancy, premillennial dispensationalism, propositional systems of all kinds, and bureaucratic denominationalism all eroded what was once an engaging intellectual culture. An infallible text read with wooden literalism, an instant millennium, an absence of mystery, a lack of interest in nature, priestly personality cults, and modernist soteriological systems are not what the early evangelicals had in mind.

These significant shifts within the evangelical tradition are precisely those which informed George Eliot’s inner civil war between the enchanting and disenchanting aspects of evangelicalism presented in her contrasting portraits of Dinah Morris and Dr. Cumming. How Eliot tried to resolve these tensions in her own life would require another paper, but perhaps the closest one can get to the settled religious convictions of the mature Eliot comes from a letter to Françoise D’Albert Durade in 1859. Partly mellowed by the critical acclaim she received from the publication of Scenes of Clerical Life and Adam Bede, partly occasioned by the personal happiness she found with George Henry Lewes, and partly out of a desire to make amends for her earlier vitriolic antagonism toward the evangelicalism that helped educate her teenage moral sensibilities, Eliot writes:

I think I hardly ever spoke to you of the strong hold Evangelical Christianity had on me from age fifteen to two and twenty and of the abundant intercourse I had with earnest people of various religious sects. When I was in Geneva, I had not yet lost the attitude of antagonism which belongs to the renunciation of any belief—also, I was very unhappy, and in a state of discord and rebellion towards my own lot. Ten years of experience have wrought great changes in that inward self: I have no longer any antagonism towards any faith in which human sorrow and human longing for purity have expressed themselves; on the contrary, I have a sympathy with it that predominates over all argumentative tendencies.²⁰

In this way, George Eliot, the slayer of Dr. Cumming, her very personal evangelical dragon, came to lie down, if only in fiction, with the lambs of Dinah Morris’s compassionate Christianity and the winsome religiosity it so engagingly represents.

David N. Hempton is the first full-time Alonzo L. McDonald Family Professor of Evangelical Theological Studies at Harvard Divinity School. This essay is adapted from an address he delivered in longer form on November 29, 2007, at HDS, to celebrate the endowed chair.