Alec d'Urberville's apostasy

Alec d'Urberville's apostasy is the collapse of his brief religious commitment under the pressure of his renewed pursuit of Tess. It begins with a choice that makes the conflict unmistakable: he abandons a public preaching engagement to visit her, then claims that his desire has displaced his faith. Later, he says he has stopped preaching altogether. The reversal exposes not only the instability of his conversion but also his habit of recasting his own choices as effects of Tess's presence.

The Broken Preaching Engagement

Alec arrives to see Tess after setting out for Casterbridge Fair, where he has undertaken to preach from a waggon at half-past two. The brethren expect him, and he has an announcement of the engagement, yet he admits that he will not go. His confession makes apostasy concrete before it becomes a settled change of life: he has chosen a private encounter over a public religious duty.

He presents that choice as a sudden yielding to passion, contrasting his conduct with Tess's refusal to preach a doctrine she does not believe. In his account, she can abstain without violating her conscience, while he believes he ought to preach but cannot sustain the obligation. He casts himself as a believer who trembles at his own failure, but his action is already decisive: the crowd at the fair will be left waiting while he stays with Tess.

Conversion Recast as Desire

Alec describes his return to religious enthusiasm as a conversion that had appeared to take him away from his former life. Now he says that seeing Tess has made the old passions rise again. The narration compares them to corpses waking in a resurrection, turning religious imagery back upon the desire that his reformation had seemed to bury. His faith, in this account, has not mastered his former impulses; those impulses have only lain dormant.

He also reshapes the history of his conduct toward Tess to make his present desire appear morally complicated. Alec says he never despised her because she withdrew from him quickly and resolutely when she understood the situation, and because she did not remain at his pleasure. He treats her refusal as the reason he respected her, then calls her a temptress when that memory returns to him as desire. The contradiction shifts responsibility away from his conduct and onto the woman he is pursuing.

From One Absence to Abandoning the Pulpit

The first missed engagement becomes a lasting withdrawal. When Tess later asks whether he has given up preaching, Alec says he has broken every engagement since the afternoon he was to address the drunkards at Casterbridge Fair. He imagines that the brethren may pray and grieve for him, but insists he could not continue after losing his faith without becoming a hypocrite. The religious breach is therefore not simply one failed appointment: by his own account, it has become a complete abandonment of his preaching work.

His explanation is again bound to Tess. He says that since she told him about her child, her image has haunted him, and that feelings formerly channelled into puritanical religion have suddenly flowed toward her instead. He declares the religious channel dry and makes Tess the cause of the change. The novel places that declaration beside his earlier failure to reach the fair: what he first described as a single act of backsliding has become, in his telling, a wholesale redirection of desire.

The Limits of Alec's Religious Change

The narration challenges Alec's self-description. His conversion had been whimsical and had perhaps been a search for a new sensation, temporarily stirred by his mother's death; reason, the narrator observes, had little to do with it. After leaving Tess, Alec moves in silence, unsettled by the possibility that his position is untenable. The force of Tess's reasoning has chilled his enthusiasm, and he turns over phrases she has passed on from Angel Clare, recognizing that Angel's arguments have inadvertently helped clear his way back to Tess.

This account makes Alec's apostasy more than a simple exchange of one conviction for another. His earlier religious fervour is shown as unstable, while his renewed pursuit is sustained by blaming Tess for the consequences of his own decisions. He abandons a promised sermon, then the engagements that follow, but describes the collapse as something she has done to him. The gap between his stated concern about hypocrisy and his repeated effort to make Tess responsible for his backsliding reveals how readily religious language becomes another instrument of self-excuse.