heavenly home, in the nineteenth century, becomes "the earthly home saved from the menace of time" (though not, surely, his further claim that "when God is dead, the cult of the dead becomes the only authentic religion," because this family seems so very much alive.)
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In the mid-nineteenth century, before the death of God has been announced, Christianity has already begun to turn into religiosity.
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Aries' point is very like Auerbach's, though whether we call it "thoroughly non-Christian" will depend on whether we equate Christianity with Christian theology. And in a curious way the point is also made by Dickens himself. At the moment of Paul Dombey's death, the term "old-fashioned," with which the novel has made such play, is reintroduced, in order to speak of "the old, old fashionDeath!." Immediately after that comes the final paragraph:
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 | | Oh thank God, all who see it, for that older fashion yet, of Immortality! And look upon us, angels of young children, with regards not quite estranged, when the swift river bears us to the ocean! (Chapter 16)
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One reason for the enormous emotional impact this had on contemporaries may be its ambivalence about Christianity. It does not actually profess belief in immortality: by calling it, so lovingly, a "fashion," the writing offers it as a beneficent invention, a doctrine devised to help us bear the pain of death. Yet this Feuerbachian claim is uttered not critically, not even sceptically, but with gratitude. And so the angels of young children could be seen as a human invention, a way we have taught ourselves to speak of dead children, and all the finer for that. What weakens the theology strengthens the consolation.
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Christianity, with the prominence given to sin, is not a sentimental religion, but it can be sentimentalized. When Paul is ill, and still at Dr. Blimber's, he thinks frequently of an uplifting religious picture:
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| | He had much to think of in association with a print that hung up in another place, where, in the centre of a wondering group, one figure that he knew, a figure with a light about its headbenignant, mild, and mercifulstood pointing upward. (
Dombey and Son
, chapter 14)
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Here is Jesus Christ without any theological content: not the son of God, not divine, certainly not crucified, not even supernatural: simply an
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