Modern Skepticism: A Journey Through the Land of Doubt and Back Again

Modern Skepticism: A Journey Through the Land of Doubt and Back Again (1874) is Joseph Barker’s firsthand account of a life that carried him from the pulpit into organized unbelief and out the other side. Its subtitle, “A Life Story,” is exact: rather than a systematic treatise, the book narrates the stages of his own doubt and return.

Barker knew the secularist movement from the inside. He had edited freethinking journals and lectured widely, working alongside prominent freethinkers in Britain and the United States, and he writes with the candor of a man describing terrain he once mapped for others. He recounts what drew him toward skepticism, what he actually found when he lived by it, and the considerations that eventually turned him back toward Christianity.

The result is both a personal memoir and a considered reckoning with unbelief written by someone who had championed it. For readers drawn to accounts of doubt honestly confronted, Barker’s narrative is a substantial nineteenth-century example, told in his own voice.

Our public-domain edition presents Barker’s text in a clean, readable modern format with clear type, and we link to a free source as well.

This edition is set from the Project Gutenberg transcription of Joseph Barker’s Modern Skepticism: A Journey Through the Land of Doubt and Back Again, first published in 1874.

That choice is worth explaining, because most of our editions begin with a photographed page. A transcription made and proofread by people is better evidence of what the printer set than any scan of it, and it removes at a stroke the whole class of faults the rest of this library spends its effort on — the running head welded into a sentence, the page number inside a word, the letter the scanner could not tell from another. We checked the scan as well: the Google copy of the 1874 printing runs to 184,755 words against this text’s 180,592, and the difference is the title page, the analytical contents, the running heads and the publisher’s advertisements. The text itself is the same book.

We have not altered Barker’s spelling, punctuation or wording. The chapter headings are his printer’s, and several of them are long — “The Story Continued. What Followed Expulsion. Desperate Word Fighting. Abuse.” is one heading, not four — and they are given whole rather than trimmed to fit a table of contents.

The book’s analytical contents, which gives a paragraph of summary for each chapter, is not reproduced. It is a finding aid for a printed page of fixed length, and this edition has a working table of contents of its own.

Barker’s own numbered lists are set as lists. His closing section, “Concluding Remarks” — eleven pages of other men’s testimony to the Bible, from Newton to Washington — is kept as its own section, which is where the book puts it.

Prepared by T.S. Baker Books, 2026.