Stephen Weldon, writing on a humanist site, argues that In many ways, the failure of nerve thesis was merely one version of an anticlerical view of history common during the Enlightenment period, a view that depicted the religionists as cowards and the rationalists as heroes. Murray's innovation was to encapsulate that attitude in a compelling argument, expressing historical causality in terms of individual psychology. Weldon goes on to point to the way Sidney Hook later took up the theme.
