The Enlightenment was a time of vast change within the English population. This once torn nation was divided by religious divisions, and the roulette wheel of monarchs and kings finally slowed. England was once again becoming a unified front and found itself at the forefront of an evolving civilization. Laws were changing, people were gaining new rights and the power of free choice. Women could now have their say. Access to knowledge and literature became more and more abundant, and the world grew larger as new cultures were discovered in distant lands. As Dorinda Outram explains in Panorama of the Enlightenment, she proclaims that "the Enlightenment can also be seen as a global drama of cross-cultural contact, a consequence for both Europeans and indigenous peoples" (Outram 130). Yet the true nature of people had yet to be tested. Across England, people were beginning to question their faith in the Christian Church. The idea of ​​remaining faithful to a religion is evolving: “Religious conversion. What was essentially irrational was almost a parody of the Enlightenment” (Outram 182). People changed religions as often as they woke up for the day. The English population began to look to advances in science and medicine to explain these miracles. Great scientists were discovering the theories of relativity and the idea of ​​gravity and the universe as the days went by. Although many people “paid little attention to the dissemination of scientific knowledge” (Outram 241), the facts were that it existed. With the idea of ​​faith in a higher power crumbling with each passing year, people began to look to other sources for answers. This had a negative effect on the writers of that period, because we...in the middle of the diary......we are gone now. The conscious idea that we are nothing more than puppets for the maestro to control, as we do the dance of life through the world he has created, ceases to exist. These are the notions that Defoe challenges with each enduring line of Robinson Crusoe. It takes a man of fervent faith and strands him on an island of isolation with nothing but his ideas about God. He pushes this man to his limits. Crusoe's strength as a man is tested, his will as a person of God is shaken, and his notion of faith is buried in the sand of the island from which he was rescued. He only survives because of his own hands, not because of the hands of a creator. Although he was once a man of God, he leaves the island a man of himself. He now lives for himself, and no one else. Works CitedDefoe, Daniel. Robinson Crusoe. 1719. Ed. Evan R. Davis. Peterborough: Broadview, 2010. Print.