Religious faith during Victorian Era

The Victorian Era was a period of transition from religion to science, fact that has produced instabilities regarding the relationship between God and society. At the beginning of this Era, the science and the faith seemed to be in completely balance; the nature, the Work of God, and the Bible, the Word of God were seen as faces of the same coin. William Paley was the one that exposed a teleological argument in order to demonstrate the existence of God using the watchmaker analogy: “[…] we had never seen a watch made; that we had never known an artist capable of making one;” (Paley, 4). Paley uses the design of objects in nature as an argument to prove the existence of a creative God: “Ignorance of this kind exalts our opinion of the unseen and unknown artist's skill, if he be unseen and unknown, but raises no doubt in our minds of the existence and agency of such an artist, at some former time, and in some place or other.” (Paley, 4).

Despite the faith of many, faith that urge them to go to the church often and read the Bible, this period was confronted with major changes regarding the questions addressed to the Christianity. The opposition to the authoritarianism of Christianity came gradually because most of the science men were not against faith in the true sense of the word. A real blow to religious belief was Darwin's work, “On the Origin of Species” that introduced the scientific theory that every life form has evolved through natural selection: “the relationship, by which all living and extinct beings are united by complex, radiating, and circuitous lines of affinities into one grand system” (Darwin, 397).

“Pied Beauty” is a shortened sonnet based on the religious theme; the author has an attitude of gratitude celebrating the natural creation by means of praise and glorification. Gerard Manley Hopkins uses these religious expressions because they were traditional for a personal prayer. He gives praise to God’s omnipresence and omnipotence from the first lines, from where he starts to list the natural elements that he glorifies and which seem to him to be God's mirroring in nature, to the final lines, where he assumes that everything that is brought to existence by divine creation is beautiful: “He fathers-forth whose beauty is past change”. The source of all these elements with an unusual design is God, He is the power that contrasts and compares things and gives them unique pattern.