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Constitution, was more tolerant than most of its European counterparts.
In 1876 leading Protestants would have agreed with Rev. Henry

 

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Ward Beecher of Brooklyn, who declared during a celebration of the nation's centennial that Americans were now richer, wiser, and more devout than ever before. To Beecher and millions of his fellow citizens, the Union victory in the Civil War proved that God had tested but ultimately blessed America. During the next quarter century, even the smuggest American (and Beecher was surely a contender for the title) had reason to wonder about God's purposes, let alone His nationality. Shrewd entrepreneurs created an impressive industrial plant, managed financially potent oligopolies, and attracted cheap labor from the American and European countryside. Yet prosperity trickled down slowly and sometimes collapsed altogether. With good reasonand inflated rhetoricsmall farmers and industrial workers blamed the conspicuously consuming elite for unemployment, injury, and impoverishment. After a deep depression began in 1893, American society faced another great test. To many observers the fall of Rome seemed a truer parallel than Christ's entry into Jerusalem.
Extraordinary as these social changes were, they probably created less anguish among leading Protestants than did the intellectual challenges to casually accepted religious beliefs. That only a minority of Protestant clergy ultimately endorsed a social gospel suggests that it was easier to ignore conspicuously consuming sinners than to ignore proponents of Darwinism and biblical higher criticism. The theory of evolution, widely known by the 1880s, implied that mankind was only slightly superior to apes rather than slightly inferior to angels. Although higher criticismthe study of the Bible in texts as close to the original as possiblewas not so widely disseminated as Darwinism, it was no longer confined to Enlightenment infidels. Bolstered by German and French scholarship, pastors fresh from divinity school could tell their congregations that the Book of Isaiah was written by several people, none of whom was named Isaiah. In other words, higher criticism undermined faith in the Bible as God's word in any simple sense . If pastors tended to discuss these twin challenges gingerly after wrestling with their own doubts, Robert G. Ingersoll and his fellow militant agnostics bluntly told surprisingly large audiences that religion was an unscientific delusion.
These challenges produced a split within Protestantism that ultimately widened into a chasm. Theological liberals adapted to intel-

 

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lectual modernity. Accepting higher criticism, they were skeptical of Old Testament history and New Testament miracles. The "days" of creation in Genesis might have stood for millions of years of evolution; perhaps Jesus himself was only an admirable mortal rather than God's divine son. Similarly, biblical references to the coming kingdom of God could be read as admonitions to build a good society here and now rather than as predictions of Jesus' eventual return. Forsaking the notion of original sin, most liberals believed that mankind was moral enough to create a good society. Finally, though theological liberals were not so oblivious to evil as fundamentalist and neo-orthodox critics maintained, they generally embraced the prevailing idea of progress.
In all essentials, theological conservatism was the opposite of theological liberalism. The Bible, perhaps marred by mistranslation, nonetheless remained God's word, "inerrant" in the original texts and accessible to all. God's son, Jesus, died to atone for humanity's sins. God's kingdom was no metaphor for protective tariffs or social work; rather it was a sinless world to be established after Jesus' Second Coming. Contemporary men and women, as sinful as Adam and Eve, could not make this world substantially better. Indeed, theological conservatives expected conditions to worsen until Jesus