THEOLOGY IN

THE ENGLISH POETS.

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LECTURE I.

FROM POPE TO COWPER.

THE Lectures which I begin to-day, and which I hope to be able to carry on Sunday after Sunday in the afternoons, are on the Theology which may be found in the English Poets. Spoken from this place, they will not enter into poetical criticism, or attempt to estimate the poet; for that would carry me too far from the main subject, within the limits of which I shall endeavour always to remain. The subject is delightful, and it is not difficult to define its special interest.

The Poets of England ever since Cowper have been more and more theological, till we reach such men as Tennyson or Browning, whose poetry is overcrowded with theology. But the theology of the poets is different from that of Churches and Sects, in this especially, that it is not formulated into propositions, but is the natural growth of their own hearts. They are, by their very nature, strongly individual; they grow more by their own special genius than by the influence of the life of the

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world around them, and they are, therefore, sure to have a theology—that is, a Doctrine of God in his relation to Man, Nature, and their own soul-which will be independent of conventional religious thought. They will be, as poets, free from those claims of dogma which influence ordinary men from their youth up, and from the religious tendencies of surrounding opinion. Their theology will therefore want the logical order which prevails in confessions and articles; and as each will give expression to it in vivid accordance with his natural character, it will be a different thing in each.

The great interest, then, of looking into this subject lies in the freedom and individuality of the thoughts on a subject in which men are so seldom free or individual. We see theology, as it were, in the rough; as, at its beginnings, it must have grown up in the minds of earnest and imaginative men around certain revealed or intuitive truths, such as the Being of God or the need of redemption.

At the same time I shall confine the inquiry to their poetry. I shall not seek in their letters or in their everyday talk for their theology. For in their ordinary intercourse with men they were subject to the same influences as other men, and if religious, held a distinct creed or conformed to a special sect; and if irreligious, expressed the strongest denial of theological opinions. It is plain that in ordinary life their intellect would work consciously on the subject, and their prejudices come into play. But in their poetry, their imagination worked unconsciously on the subject. Their theology was not produced as a matter of intellectual co-ordination of truths,

but as a matter of truths which were true because they were felt; and the fact is, that in this realm of emotion where prejudice dies, the thoughts and feelings of their poetry on the subject of God and Man are often wholly different from those expressed in their everyday life. Cowper's theology in his poetry soars beyond the narrow sect to which he belonged into an infinitely wider universe. Shelley, when the fire of emotion or imagination was burning in him, is very different from the violent denier of God and of Christianity whom we meet in his daily intercourse with men. He does carry his atheism and hatred of religion into his verse, but these are the least unconscious portions of his poetry. When he is floating on his wings, he knows not whither, his atheism becomes pantheism, and his hatred of Christianity is lost in enthusiastic but unconscious statement of Christian conceptions.

Therefore I put aside the letters and conversations of the Poets as sources for these Lectures, except so far as they illustrate the treatment of theological subjects in their poetry.

The theological element in English poetry becomes strong in Cowper; but before lecturing on its development in him, it will be necessary to trace its growth up to his time, along the lines on which English poetry mainly ran. This will be the work of the first two lectures, and in carrying it out I shall lay down the mode in which the main subject will be treated.

The devotional element in our English Poetry which belonged to Donne, Herbert, Vaughan, and some of the Puritan Poets, died away in the critical school which

began with Dryden and ended with Pope. The "Religio Laici” of Dryden is partly a reproduction of the scholastic theology, partly an attack on the Deists, and it does not contain one single touch of personal feeling towards God. The "Essay on Man" is the preservation in exquisite steel-work of the speculations of Leibnitz and Bolingbroke. It is true the devoutness which belonged to Pope's nature modified the coldness of his philosophy, and there are lines in the Essay on Man which in their temperate but lofty speech concerning charity, are healthier than the whole of Cowper's Hymns, while the "Universal Prayer” is of that noble tolerance and personal humility which, whether it be called deistical or not, belongs to the best religion all over the world.

It has not been sufficiently said that Pope was sincerely devout in heart, just as it has been ignorantly assumed by many that the century in which he lived was irreligious. His age may seem so in contrast with the two centuries that preceded it, in which religious subjects took so overdue a part, and theological feeling ran into bitter uncharitableness. But it was most useful for the whole future of English religion and theology, that with the newly-awakened interest in science, philosophic inquiry and commerce, religion also should learn to extend its influence over other realms; and, in the re-action from intolerance which a wider intellectual life taught it, learn to do more justice to all opinions, and to teach and practise a wider charity. We have not so learned Christ as to call that irreligious. The work of the Latitudinarian School was distinctly a work of charity, and they and the scholars of the age of evidences are not

to be accused of want of religious feeling, because it seemed to them that to submit their faith to the challenge of free inquiry, and to establish a kindly tolerance for the sake of more united work for God, was better and more needful for the time than the zeal for doctrine which condemns one's neighbour, or the passionate expression of devotional feeling which tends to isolate oneself from one's neighbour. It is still more absurd to call the century irreligious, when we remember that in its very midstnot so much in opposition to this sober religion as in reaction from its lower tone in the less educated clergymen, and in the indignant desire to make a religion for the common people who were certainly neglected-the revived religious life of the personal soul took its rise with the preaching of Wesley.

With this movement, however, the critical school of Poets had nothing to do. They had written much before it arose ; they belonged not to the country and the people, but to the city and the cultivated classes, nor did they, any more than the theologians, speak much of their religious feeling, or indeed possess much. But it is a very different thing to say that they had no devotion, and the change, of which I shall speak, does not assume that there was no personal religion, but that there was no predominance of it, and that therefore it was not expressed. Now and then, to our surprise it breaks out, and it does so in the "Universal Prayer." Beginning with the ordinary and systematic view of God as universal Ruler, but graced with the wider charity of a Poet, it passes in the end into personal devotion. No one can read the following lines. without hearing in them something of the same melody