Since Nietzsche proclaimed the death of God, traditional religion has had a tough time with the European intelligentsia, though millions of ordinary people went on believing in the dogmas and rituals they had inherited as changeless verities. Wilson's book is less a history of religion in the last century-and-a-half than a survey of the great atheists, agnostics and proto-modernist prophets such as Freud. It is a rich field, not only in thinkers and writers, but in major personalities: Ruskin, Marx, Hegel, Matthew Arnold et alii.
Science proved only a poor substitute for faith, but for rationalists it was a powerful crutch, while the rise of Marxism foreshadowed the time when clashing political ideologies would become what religious wars had been to Europe in the 16th and 17th centuries.