as some have been apt to think. Throughout its course there was no period in which verse of a more or less religious cast failed either to be produced or to find a very considerable number of readers. Yet it is equally certain that, until it began to draw near its close, the predominating influences of the age were essentially prosaic, and very unfavourable to any poetry which required for its due appreciation anything more than sound reason and ordinary practical sense. The state of feeling which existed among the cultivated classes in England encouraged poetry of a satirical, moral, or didactic character; it applauded art, polish, and correctness; it was willing to listen, not too intently, to the voice of its counsellors when they discoursed, either in verse or prose, upon the wisdom of virtue and the folly of vice, upon the reasonableness of religious life and the happiness which attends it, and upon the evil consequences which a contrary course must bring. But there was little intensity either of thought or feeling, little spiritual activity, little to stir the soul and excite the imagination. Man cannot live with the mysteries of life around him, and that of death in front, without such reflections on time and eternity and the meaning and object of existence, as cannot be altogether prosaic or commonplace. A Christian faith cannot, in all its leading features, be otherwise than sublime. Where Christianity, however depressed, is still a great power, there can be no age so wanting in depth of spiritual sentiment as to be altogether without materials for a religious poetry of a very high order. There were no influences in the eighteenth century so uncongenial to success that a truly great religious poet, if such a one had arisen, could not have triumphed over them. But, apart from the spiritual and moral grandeur inherent to it and inalienable from it, Christianity had certainly, through various causes, come to be generally regarded from a lower and, so to say, a more worldly level than has been at all usual. It will be readily understood that when theology was in this condition, theological poetry was very apt to be either vague and impersonal, or frigid and deficient in warmth, or to have an air of being somewhat unreal and conventional. In the latter case an attempt might probably be made to conceal the deficiency by a turgid, declamatory style. All these faults did, in fact,

abound. Perhaps in this chapter the attention of the reader has been too much directed to passages of merit, and too little to others which might have exemplified characteristic blemishes. But the former is by far the most grateful task; and to have done both might have exceeded our necessary limits. All, however, who have any knowledge of the poetical literature of the period under review will be well aware that the deficiencies here noted were very common. The solemn litany of sacred song was at all times far indeed from being silent, and its notes were often worthy of the greatness of its theme; but throughout a great part of the century it certainly fell short in copiousness, richness, and fervour, both of a preceding and of a subsequent age.

It will have been noticed that some of the best sacred poetry which the century produced had its origin in quarters which lay apart from the main current of popular thought. Ken, deprived of his bishopric, and singing to his lute in the quiet seclusion of Longleat, belonged rather to the Churchmen of George Herbert's day. Norris was the last survivor of the noble school of Oxford and Cambridge Platonists. The sympathies of Hickes, and Hamilton, and Walter Harte were all with the dispossessed adherents of the Stuart rule. Elizabeth Rowe, Byrom, and Blake, however much they might differ from one another, were all in a greater or less degree mystics, little understood by their own contemporaries. Among the hymn writers whose compositions form by far the most distinctive and prominent feature in the sacred poetry of the century, Watts, Doddridge, and others, were Dissenters. And though Methodism rose up in the very bosom of the English Church, it was too generally treated as an alien and an enemy; and the rich accompaniment of sacred song by which, through the talents of Charles Wesley, its rise and progress was attended, was for a long time neglected and discarded by the rulers of the National Church. Toplady, Newton, Cowper, and the other Evangelical hymn writers might have shared the same fate if Wesleyanism had not prepared the way for them, and created just that stir in the waters of which the spiritual life of the country stood so greatly in need. As it was, it cannot be said that Evangelicalism was in any way in discord with the.

prevalent development of popular religious thought towards the latter part of the century. And throughout the period, if a good deal of its graver poetry was not that which the age could best appreciate, there was also a very considerable residuum which fairly and genuinely represented the predominant style of thinking among educated people upon religious questions in which they were seriously interested.

The last decade of the century stands in many respects on a very different footing from the rest. In none is this distinctiveness more marked than in the general character of its poetry. When so much that was old seemed rapidly passing away, and the new was so full of promise to some, so suggestive of fear and disquietude to others--when faith and hope, however much alloyed by visions of earth, were at all events vivid with life, and when religious doubts, on the other hand, were no longer mere speculative difficulties, benumbing action rather than actively opposing it, but giants in the path with whom mortal combat was inevitable-when the foundations of society were in a state of upheaval and commotion, and all questions, divine and human, were being boldly canvassed-when great virtues and great wickedness came into strong collision-when brilliant promises were rudely checked, and when it seemed to others that glorious light might rise up suddenly out of utter darkness—at such a time it was not possible that great ideas should lose their strength through mere inactivity and torpor. To the partisans of the new, conceptions of Christian freedom, Christian brotherhood, and the like, had become pregnant with meanings they had never dreamt of before. The partisans of the old learnt to treasure with a greater love blessings which, through familiar use, they had thought little of before—to appreciate the advantages they possessed, to overlook their deficienciesto cling to all noble traditions of the past with a tenacity proportioned to their newly-awakened fears. It was a time for revived enthusiasm and increased intensity of thought. The period of acute suspense passed quickly away, and caused very little outward change in England. Ancient feeling and established ideas, both in religion and in politics, were confirmed rather than shaken by the dangers which had so closely threatened them. But in religion, as in politics, a real change

had taken place-more sensible in its after results than in its immediate issues. The eighteenth century had practically expired before its years had arrived at their natural term. Its latest portion belongs more to the present than to the past in nothing more so than in its poetry. Poetry, by virtue of that imaginative faculty which is closely akin to prediction, may often lay claim to advance in the van of

human movement.

VOL. II.

BB

C. J. A.

CHAPTER IV.

POPULAR CHURCH CRIES.

THE eighteenth century has been termed 'Sæculum rationalisticum; and if that phrase might be translated, not 'the age of reason,' but the age of reasonableness,' it would express the characteristic on which all parties, orthodox and unorthodox alike, most prided themselves. The subject, however, of the present chapter would seem to form an exception to the general rule. 'Reasonable' is about the last epithet one would apply to those popular Church cries which hold a painfully prominent place in the ecclesiastical history of the period. The sad scenes to which these cries too often gave rise suggest at the first glance no other reflection than that of the old poet

Tantum religio potuit suadere malorum !

A grand old institution dragged through the mire,-a venerable name turned into a mere watchword of party strife, or, worse still, made a pretext not only for violent and unreasoning abuse, but for shameful and cruel outrages upon life, property, and freedom,—these are sights which may well make a Churchman blush.

Yet even this most unlovely picture is not altogether without a redeeming feature. The unscrupulous politicians who utilised the name of the Church for their party purposes, and the senseless mobs who were hounded on to perpetrate in the name of the Church acts which every line of the Church's teaching emphatically condemns, only represent one side of the case. The question still remains, How came it that the name of the Church exercised so potent a spell? What was

'By Dr. Cave. See Mr. Pattison's Essay, in Essays and Reviews.