of his highest inspiration was a pantheist; and the greatest of all,
Shelley, was a declared atheist. In fearless utterance, in unfaltering
zeal against the tyranny of Gods and Governments, Swinburne was like
Shelley. His drama Atalanta in Calydon (1865), even though a poet is
strictly not answerable for what the persons in his drama say, yet with
its denunciation of “the supreme evil, God,” heralded the coming

[209] of a new champion who would defy the fortresses of authority. And
in the following year his Poems and Ballads expressed the spirit of a
pagan who flouted all the prejudices and sanctities of the Christian
world.

But the most intense and exciting period of literary warfare against
orthodoxy in England began about 1869, and lasted for about a dozen
years, during which enemies of dogma, of all complexions, were less
reticent and more aggressive than at any other time in the century. Lord
Morley has observed that “the force of speculative literature always
hangs on practical opportuneness,” and this remark is illustrated by the
rationalistic literature of the seventies. It was a time of hope and
fear, of progress and danger. Secularists and rationalists were
encouraged by the Disestablishment of the Church in Ireland (1869), by
the Act which allowed atheists to give evidence in a court of justice
(1869), by the abolition of religious tests at all the universities (a
measure frequently attempted in vain) in 1871. On the other hand, the
Education Act of 1870, progressive though it was, disappointed the
advocates of secular education, and was an unwelcome sign of the
strength of ecclesiastical influence. Then there was the general alarm
felt in Europe by all outside the Roman Church,

[210] and by some within it, at the decree of the infallibility of the