I would rather be
  A pagan, suckled in a creed outworn—­

and if he had never made it, I do think that its significance would have occurred to me, by a sort of instinct, in connection with this discussion.  Certainly I would rather be a pagan whose religion was actual, earnest, continual—­for week days, work days, and song days—­than I would be a Christian who, from whatever motive, shrank from hearing or uttering the name of Christ out of a ‘church.’  I am no fanatic, but I like truth and earnestness in all things, and I cannot choose but believe that such a Christian shows but ill beside such a pagan.  What pagan poet ever thought of casting his gods out of his poetry?  In what pagan poem do they not shine and thunder?  And if I—­to approach the point in question—­if I, writing a poem the end of which is the extolment of what I consider to be Christian truth over the pagan myths shrank even there from naming the name of my God lest it should not meet the sympathies of some readers, or lest it should offend the delicacies of other readers, or lest, generally, it should be unfit for the purposes of poetry in what more forcible manner than by that act (I appeal to Philip against Philip) can I controvert my own poem, or secure to myself and my argument a logical and unanswerable shame?  If Christ’s name is improperly spoken in that poem, then indeed is Schiller right, and the true gods of poetry are to be sighed for mournfully.  For be sure that Burns was right, and that a poet without devotion is below his own order, and that poetry without religion will gradually lose its elevation.  And then, my dear friend, we do not live among dreams.  The Christian religion is true or it is not, and if it is true it offers the highest and purest objects of contemplation.  And the poetical faculty, which expresses the highest moods of the mind, passes naturally to the highest objects.  Who can separate these things?  Did Dante?  Did Tasso?  Did Petrarch?  Did Calderon?  Did Chaucer?  Did the poets of our best British days?  Did any one of these shrink from speaking out Divine names when the occasion came?  Chaucer, with all his jubilee of spirit and resounding laughter, had the name of Jesus Christ and God as frequently to familiarity on his lips as a child has its father’s name.  You say ’our religion is not vital—­not week-day—­enough.’  Forgive me, but that is a confession of a wrong, not an argument.  And if a poet be a poet, it is his business to work for the elevation and purification of the public mind, rather than for his own popularity! while if he be not a poet, no sacrifice of self-respect will make amends for a defective faculty, nor ought to make amends.

My conviction is that the poetry of Christianity will one day be developed greatly and nobly, and that in the meantime we are wrong, poetically as morally, in desiring to restrain it.  No, I never felt repelled by any Christian phraseology in Cowper—­although he is not a favorite poet of mine from other causes—­nor in Southey, nor even in James Montgomery, nor in Wordsworth where he writes ‘ecclesiastically,’ nor in Christopher North, nor in Chateaubriand, nor in Lamartine.