Faraday: a man of contradictions

Faraday was a man of contradictions. He was a pillar of the establishment while belonging to a literalist Christian sect the Sandemanians founded in direct opposition to the state church. His work on electro-magnetic field theory contributed to the greatest change in our conception of the structure of reality since Newton. And yet the inventor of the electric motor, transformer and generator did not believe in atoms but thought the properties of chemical molecules were a result of combinations of force lines meeting at a point.