Religion was a game in the same sense in which politics was a game because both were skirmishes played out on the fringes of society, with society itself secure and invulnerable. Men could differ about the lesser issue of religion so long as they agreed upon the larger issues of manners and morals. It was the right of Englishmen (and the duty of liberals, Mill seemed to suggest) to indulge their idiosyncratic views about Arianism or Erastianism, the Thirty-Nine Articles and Apostolic Succession, church establishments and religions of humanity, so long as they comported themselves as decent, upright, law-abiding Englishmen. The Tractarians, to be sure, took their differences, and religion itself, more seriously and, for awhile, it seemed that they would break through the religious consensus. But the conversions of Newman, Ward, and the others had a sobering effect on the rest and, once the converts withdrew to the parochial confines of Catholicism, they ceased to be a center of contention or a threat to the “prevailing tone …of quiet good sense.”
To Stephen, agnosticism was superior to religion because it was the more sporting and manly way of playing the game of life. For the agnostic, there were none of the easy subterfuges, the cheap consolations of religion. The agnostic had to be courageous without being foolhardy, self-sufficient but not proud. He had to know when to stand alone and when to join with others, how to exploit his good fortune and how to retreat before bad. And, he had to understand that the secret of thinking was in the doing and that to be deliberate was to be decisive. The good agnostic, in short, was the good sportsman because he knew only one rule: “The play should be played out, and as well as it could be done.”
It is not surprising that Stephen, interpreting agnosticism in this way, saw, in it, a philosophy peculiarly congenial to the English…
From: “Leslie Stephen: The Victorian as Intellectual,” in Victorian Minds by Gertrude Himmelfarb (New York: Alfred A. Knopf, 1968), pp. 207-208.
