Their theology is evidenced by Addison, Watts, and Parnell.  It is a Christianity that has not ceased to be stern and majestic.  In Addison’s Divine Ode, the planets of the firmament proclaim a Creator whose power knows no bounds.  In the hymns of Isaac Watts, God is as of old a jealous God, obedience to whose eternal will may require the painful sacrifice of temporal earthly affections, even the sacrifice of our love for our fellow-creatures; a just God, who by the law of his own nature cannot save unrepentant sin from eternal retribution; yet an adored God, whose providence protects the faithful amid stormy vicissitudes,—­

  Under the shadow of whose throne
  The saints have dwelt secure.

Spirits as gentle and kindly as Parnell insist that the only approach to happiness lies through a religious discipline of the feelings, and protest that death is not to be feared but welcomed—­as the passage from a troublous existence to everlasting peace.  In most of the poetry of the time, religion, if at all noticeable, is a mere undercurrent; but whenever it rises to the surface, it reflects the ancient creed.

Traditional too is the general conception of human character.  Man is still thought of as a complex of lofty and mean qualities, widely variable in their proportion yet in no instance quite dissevered.  To interpret—­not God or Nature—­but this self-contradictory being, in both his higher and his lower manifestations and possibilities, remains the chief vocation of the poets.  They have not ceased the endeavor to lend dignity to life by portraying its nobler features.  Addison, in The Campaign, glorifies the national hero whose brilliant victories thwarted the great monarch of France on his seemingly invincible career toward the hegemony of Europe, the warrior Marlborough, serene of soul amid the horror and confusion of battle.  Tickell, in his noble elegy on Addison, not only, while voicing his own grief, illustrates the beauty of devoted friendship, but also, when eulogizing his subject, holds up to admiration, as a type to be revered, the wise moralist, cultured and versatile man of letters, and adept in the art of virtuous life.  Pope, in the most ambitious literary effort of the day, his translation of the Iliad, labors to enrich the treasury of English poetry with an epic that sheds radiance upon the ideals and manners of an heroic age.  In such attempts to exalt the grander phases of human existence, the poets were, however, owing to their fear of enthusiasm, never quite successful.  It is significant that though most critics consider Pope’s Homer no better than a mediocre performance, none denies that his Rape of the Lock is, in its kind, perfection.