“What there is of a religious cast in the volume I have thrown towards the end of it, for two reasons; first, that I might not revolt the reader at his entrance, and secondly, that my best impressions might be made last.  Were I to write as many volumes as Lope de Vega or Voltaire, not one of them would be without this tincture.  If the world like it not, so much the worse for them.  I make all the concessions I can, that I may please them, but I will not please them at the expense of conscience.”  The passages of The Task penned by conscience, taken together, form a lamentably large proportion of the poem.  An ordinary reader can be carried through them, if at all, only by his interest in the history of opinion, or by the companionship of the writer, who is always present, as Walton is in his Angler, as White is in his Selbourne.  Cowper, however, even at his worst, is a highly cultivated methodist; if he is sometimes enthusiastic, and possibly superstitious, he is never coarse or unctuous.  He speaks with contempt of “the twang of the conventicle.”  Even his enthusiasm had by this time been somewhat tempered.  Just after his conversion he used to preach to everybody.  He had found out, as he tells us himself, that this was a mistake, that “the pulpit was for preaching; the garden, the parlour, and the walk abroad were for friendly and agreeable conversation.”  It may have been his consciousness of a certain change in himself that deterred him from taking Newton into his confidence when he was engaged upon The Task.  The worst passages are those which betray a fanatical antipathy to natural science, especially that in the third book (150—­190).  The episode of the judgment of heaven on the young atheist Misagathus, in the sixth book, is also fanatical and repulsive.

Puritanism had come into violent collision with the temporal power, and had contracted a character fiercely political and revolutionary.  Methodism fought only against unbelief, vice, and the coldness of the establishment; it was in no way political, much less revolutionary; by the recoil from the atheism of the French Revolution its leaders, including Wesley himself, were drawn rather to the Tory side.  Cowper, we have said, always remained in principle what he had been born, a Whig, an unrevolutionary Whig, an “Old Whig” to adopt the phrase made canonical by Burke.

  ’Tis liberty alone that gives the flower
  Of fleeting life its lustre and perfume,
  And we are weeds without it.  All constraint
  Except what wisdom lays on evil men
  Is evil.