When Robert Butterworth claims in Dickens, Religion, and Society (2016) that “Dickens’s religion is absolutely central to his work” and further identifies five aspects in which “Dickens’s religion goes to the very core” of his novels, he rests his argument on half a century of recent studies of Dickens’s religion.1 While Butterworth’s premise (that religion is all-important) grasps the essence, his conclusion that Christianity is the solution to all the social problems depicted in Dickens’s fiction remains unsettling. Butterworth’s careful examination of Bleak House and Little Dorrit, for example, gives the impression that religion is a remedy against a particular evil, as if religion is something ready-made for us to understand and to utilize, something outside of human existence itself. I contend, on the contrary, that religion for Dickens is, to use George Eliot’s idea of the role of art in “The Natural History of German Life,” something that “surprises even the trivial and the selfish into that attention to what is apart from themselves, which may be called the raw material of moral sentiment” (110). I would suggest, therefore, that religion is something Dickens wishes his characters and his readers to be informed by, to participate in, something I would call

中文翻译：

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选择的语法：查尔斯·狄更斯的真实宗教

当罗伯特·巴特沃斯在《狄更斯、宗教和社会》（2016 年）中声称“狄更斯的宗教是他作品的绝对核心”并进一步确定了“狄更斯的宗教进入其小说的核心”的五个方面时，他的论点基于近半个世纪的狄更斯宗教研究。1 虽然巴特沃斯的前提（宗教是最重要的）抓住了本质，但他关于基督教是狄更斯小说中描述的所有社会问题的解决方案的结论仍然令人不安。例如，巴特沃斯对 Bleak House 和 Little Dorrit 的仔细研究给人的印象是，宗教是对抗特定邪恶的一种补救措施，就好像宗教是一种现成的东西，供我们理解和利用，某种超出人类存在本身的东西。相反，我认为狄更斯的宗教是，使用乔治·艾略特 (George Eliot) 在《德国生活的自然史》(The Natural History of German Life) 中关于艺术作用的观点，“即使是琐碎和自私的人也会惊讶于对自己以外的事物的关注，这可以称为道德情感的原材料”（110）。因此，我认为宗教是狄更斯希望他的人物和读者被告知、参与的东西，我称之为