A brief mention at "The Little Professor" has put Henry Rogers's The Eclipse of Faith; or, A Visit to a Religious Skeptic on my list for re-reading. The book can be found at Project Gutenberg. Miriam notes that Google Books has Rogers's A Defence of "The Eclipse of Faith", albeit under the wrong title. I had not known of this work before. Interestingly, it's a response to F. W. Newman, whose work, Phases of Faith, is subjected to criticism in Rogers's work. (Project Gutenberg has that, too.) Newman's reply to Rogers is included with Rogers's "Defence".
Francis William Newman was the younger brother of John Henry Newman. John became a devout Anglican, and, via Tractarianism, a Catholic. Francis, on the other hand, went in almost the opposite direction, his religious views becoming Unitarian (and more and more vague in the process, to the extent that he's sometimes considered an agnostic). He seems to have been in general a somewhat unpleasant person; at least, if he was not, he did not leave the most accurate impression of himself in his writings.
In any case, I have a reading project, and the reason I've written this post is so that I'll have the links all handy:
F. W. Newman, Phases of Faith
Henry Rogers, The Eclipse of Faith
Henry Rogers, A Defence of "The Eclipse of Faith"
Another thing I'll be re-reading a bit more closely is Orestes Brownson's review of an American edition of Rogers's The Eclipse of Faith, which Google Books has here (October 1853, p. 417). Brownson's review is -- somewhat surprisingly -- a defense of Newman from Rogers, from a Catholic perspective. (The reason for this is polemical; he argues that Newman is a more consistent Protestant than Rogers.)
