The Bourgeois Virtues: Ethics for an Age of Commerce

About it and about; but evermoreCame out by the same Door as I went in....Into this Universe, and Why not knowingNor Whence, like Water willy-nilly flowing;And out of it, and Wind along the Waste.I know not Whither, willy-nilly blowing.Or Thomas Hardy in 1866:If but some vengeful god would call to meFrom out the sky, and laugh....But not so. How arrives it joy lies slain,And why unblooms the best hope ever sown?—Crass Casualty obstructs the sun and rain.And dicing Time for gladness casts a moan....Wilson has given a lively and touching portrait of the European andespecially British men and women of the clerisy—and often enough of theclergy—who lost their faith then. John Maynard Keynes, writing in the1920s, portrayed the late 1860s as “the critical moment at which the Christiandogma fell away from the serious philosophical world of England, or atany rate of Cambridge.” 17 Early in the 1860s the soon-to-be economistAlfred Marshall was preparing for holy orders; by the end of the decade heand his fellows could not, Keynes writes, be called Christians. In praising thepassage, Joseph Schumpeter notes that in the 1860s “Christian belief, gentlyand without any acerbities, was dropped by the English intelligentsia.” 18Wilson takes his title, God’s Funeral, from another poem by Hardy, a poemwritten fifty years after “Hap.” Hardy in 1910 envisions Christians, as Feuerbachhad some seventy years before, projecting their anxieties into their God:I saw a slow-stepping train—Lined on the brows, scoop-eyed and bent and hoar—Following in files across a twilit plainA strange mystic form the foremost bore....Yet throughout all it symbolized none the lessPotency vast and loving-kindness strong....“O man-projected Figure, of lateImagined as we, thy knell who shall survive?”hope and its banishment 165This was a quarter century after the sad doubt in England had begun tospread beyond the clerisy. In the 1880s “the loss of faith which had hithertotormented only a few of the better-informed,” Wilson reports, “had reached