William Hale White ("Mark Rutherford") felt, along with countless other Victorians, that he had been born "a hundred years too late" to commit himself wholly to a religious creed. His crisis of faith and subsequent reevaluation of life are therefore familiar to students of Victorian literature, but both his quest for moral and religious freedom and his fictional exploration of that process are unique. Satisfied neither with wholesale rejection of his Calvinist heritage nor with the more attractive paths of the various substitute faiths of his time, White turned slowly to the faith of his ancestors and reinterpreted the vital center of sixteenth- and seventeenth-century Puritanism for a modern and secular age. Throughout his life White found that the attempt to penetrate to the living spirit and original necessity of Calvinism was precisely the "reaching after a meaning ... which constituted heresy." White's "heretical" formulation is that the reconciliation of the human and divine is the fundamental religious experience; he is then significant as the historian and interpreter of nineteenth-century nonconformity.
