Earlier volumes of this work discussed a conflict between two bodies of thought operative in England in the last century and a half – the aggressive defence of Christianity which has been made from Newman onwards and the aggressive assaults on Christianity which has been made from Spencer onwards.

Volume I took the form of an intellectual autobiography in which the thinkers who influenced the author most between the 1940s and the 1960s were discussed as exponents of literature, morality, politics and religion. Volume II was historical, not autobiographical; it organized the thinkers it discussed not only as contributors to the resistance offered by Tractarianism and Roman Catholicism to liberalism, latitudinarianism and infidelity, but also as contributors to the dethroning of Christianity and its replacement by explicit types of anti-Christian doctrine.

Volume II described a polarized conflict in which hostages were not taken and there was little attempt at mutual understanding. It contrasted the secular attack on Christianity with the Christian counter-attack, made an historic crux of the contrast, and grouped the thinkers that it discussed around it. Thus Spencer, Lewes, Tyndall, Wells, Shaw, Murray, Morley, Frazer and D. H. Lawrence were leading representatives of the first; Newman, Gladstone, Keble, Liddon, Mansel, Manning, Pusey, Chesterton, Belloc, Mallock and Graham Greene were leading representatives of the second and would have been strengthened by Eliot, Salisbury, Waugh and Knowles if these had not already been discussed in Volume I.

Volume I had included thinkers who did not fit into either of these categories. Norman had a Tractarian nose for backsliding but was neither a Roman Catholic nor a High-Churchman.