Christian'; finally, in 1858, the Jewish Disabilities Act allowed him to omit these words. Only in 1871, however, were Oxford and Cambridge opened to non-Anglicans.
Meanwhile geological discoveries and Charles Darwin's evolutionary theories increasingly cast doubt on the literal truth of the Creation story, and close philological analysis of the biblical text suggested that its origins were human rather than divine. By the end of the nineteenth century, many writers were bearing witness to a world in which Christianity no longer seemed fundamentally plausible. In his poetry and prose, Thoma s Hardy depicts a world devoid of benevolent providence. Matthew Arnold's poem 'Dover Beach' is in part an elegy to lost spiritual assurance, as the 'Sea of Faith' goes out like the tide: 'But now I only hear / Its melancholy, long, withdrawing roar / Retreating.' For Arnold, literature must replace religion as a source of spiritual truth, and intimacy between individuals substitute for the lost communal solidarity of the universal church.
The work of many twentieth-century writers shows the influence of a religious upbringing or a religious conversion in adulthood. T. S. Eliot and W. S. Auden embrace Anglicanism, William Butler Yeats spiritualism. James Joyce repudiates Irish Catholicism but remains obsessed with it. Yet religion, or lack of it, is a matter of individual choice and conscience, not social or legal mandate. In the past fifty years, church attendance has plummeted in Great Britain. Although 71 percent of the population still identified itself as 'Christian' on the 2000 census, only about 7 percent of these regularly attend religious services of any denomination. Meanwhile, immigration from former British colonies has swelled the ranks of religions once alien to the British Isles?Muslim, Sikh, Hindu, Buddhist?though the numbers of adherents remain small relative to the total population.
.
Index
1. The Eternal Female groand! it was heard all over the Earth, 121 'A cold coming we had of it, 2312 A flower was offerd to me, 93 A girl, 1639 A little black thing among the snow, 90 A map of every country known, 28
A simple Child, 248 A slumber did my spirit seal, 276 A snake came to my water-trough, 2278 A Sonnet is a moment's monument?, 1457 A square, squat room (a cellar on promo
tion), 1642 A sudden blow: the great wings beating still,
2039 A suspicion, a doubt, a jealousy, 2875 A thing of beauty is a joy for ever, 884 A touch of cold in the Autumn night?,
2008
A wind is ruffling the tawny pelt, 2587 About suffering they were never wrong,
2428 Abt Vogler, 1303 Achebe, Chinua, 2622, 2616 Adatn's Curse, 2028 Address to a Steamvessel, 223 Adlestrop, 1956 Adonais, 822 After Death, 1461 Afton Water, 138 Agard, John, 2542 Agnosticism and Christianity, 1436 Ah, Are You Digging on My Grave?, 1879 Ah! changed and cold, how changed and
very cold!, 1462 Ah Sun-flawer, 93 Ah! why, because the dazzling sun, 1314 Aikin, Anna Letitia, 582 Aikin, John, 582 Alastor; or, The Spirit of Solitude, 745 Alexander Pope, 572 Alfoxden Journal, The, 390 All 1 know is a door into the dark, 2825 All Religions Are One, 79 Alton Locke, 1572 Am I alone, 1535 Ambulances, 2569 Among School Children, 2041 An old, mad, blind, despised, and dying
King, 771 And did those feet, 123 And has the remnant of my life, 404
?and not simply by the fact that this shad
ing of, 2849 Andrea del Sarto, 1280 Angel in the House, The, 1586 Anonymous ('Poverty Knock'), 1574 Anonymous (['Proclamation of an Irish
Republic']), 1618 Anonymous ('Terrorist Novel Writing'),
600
Anonymous ('The Great Social Evil'), 1592
Another Epitaph on an Army of Mercenaries,
2468 Anthem for Doomed Youth, 1971 Apeneck Sweeney spreads his knees, 2293 Apologia Pro Poemate Meo, 1972 Apology for the Revival of Christian Archi
tecture in England, An, 2728 Apple-Gathering, An, 1464 April is the cruellest month, breeding,
2294 Araby, 2168 Arcadia, 2753 Aristocrats, 2458 Armistice Day, 2460 Arnold, Matthew, 1350, 1619 As from their ancestral oak, 771 As he knelt by the grave of his mother and
father, 2871 As I Walked Out One Evening, 2427 As if he had been poured, 2825 As Kingfishers Catch Fire, 1517 As the Team's Head Brass, 1959 At Francis Allen's on the Christmas eve?,
1127 At the British War Cemetery, Bayeux, 2459 Aubade, 2573 Auden, W. H., 2421 Auld Lang Syne, 137 Aurora Leigh, 1092 Austen, Jane, 514 Autobiographical Fragments (Clare), 861 Autobiography (Martineau), 1589 Autobiography (Mill), 1070 Autumn, 2008 Autumn resumes the land, ruffles the
woods, 2728 Ave atque Vale, 1500 'Ave you eard o' the Widow at Windsor,
1819 AWAKE! for Morning in the Bowl of Night, 1213 Ay, gaze upon her rose-wreathed hair, 976
A1 19
.
A120 / INDEX
Bagpipe Music, 2443
Baillie, Joanna, 212 Baked the day she suddenly dropped dead, 2532 Barbauld, Anna Letitia, 26
Bavarian Gentians, 2278
Beachy Head, 47 Beckett, Samuel, 2393 Beckford, William, 587 Behold her, single in the field, 314 Beneath an old wall, that went round an old castle, 71 Bennett, Louise, 2469 Bent double, like old beggars under sacks, 1974 Besant, Annie, 1577 Besant, Walter, 1605 Between my finger and my thumb, 2824 Binsey Poplars, 1519 Biographta Literaria, 474, 606 Birthday, A, 1463 Bishop Orders His Tomb at Saint Praxed's Church, The, 1259 Black Jackets,
