The High Church movement was designed to align the Church of England with the "Catholic" side of Anglicanism. The thinking here was that traditional practices were the standard by which faith could be expressed and that supreme authority resided in the Church. The Middle Church movement cared less for tradition and believed that faith could be expressed in various ways, including through social action. The Low Church Movement believed that evangelicals were a force that could reform the church from within and without. Individual and biblical bases of faith were hallmarks of this movement. Evangelicals tackled serious issues of the day: housing and welfare of the poor, as well as social reform. They also believed in spreading the gospel around the world by any means necessary.
The growing reliance on science to explain the nature of man and his relationship with his world opened the doors for further examination of traditionally held beliefs. The publication of Darwin's Origin of Species (1859), which suggested that species evolved from common ancestors that could be found through scientific research, challenged the belief that God created each species individually and separately from every other species. The agnostic movement, which relied on scientific evidence and reason to find universal truths and which held that the existence of God could not be empirically proven, took hold and gained momentum.
From these ideological splits, religious liberals and conservatives battled over fundamental questions of faith and religious practice. In Hardy's work, we can see that this debate was one that he entered into. In Tess of the d'Urbervilles, Hardy's protagonist finds herself in a world where she questions religion, questions faith, looks for meaning in life, and searches for the truths that mankind has sought for centuries.
