eternity and infinity; life is a brief drama; heaven and hell are behind the veil of phenomena; at every step our friends vanish into the abyss of ever present mystery.  To all such thoughts the writers of the eighteenth century seemed to close their eyes as resolutely as possible. . .  The absence of any deeper speculative ground makes the immediate practical questions of life all the more interesting.  We know not what we are, nor whither we are going, nor whence we come; but we can, by the help of common sense, discover a sufficient share of moral maxims for our guidance in life. . .  Knowledge of human nature, as it actually presented itself in the shifting scene before them, and a vivid appreciation of the importance of the moral law, are the staple of the best literature of the time."[11]

The God of the deists was, in truth, hardly more impersonal than the abstraction worshiped by the orthodox—­the “Great Being” of Addison’s essays, the “Great First Cause” of Pope’s “Universal Prayer,” invoked indifferently as “Jehovah, Jove, or Lord.”  Dryden and Pope were professed Catholics, but there is nothing to distinguish their so-called sacred poetry from that of their Protestant contemporaries.  Contrast the mere polemics of “The Hind and the Panther” with really Catholic poems like Southwell’s “Burning Babe” and Crashaw’s “Flaming Heart,” or even with Newman’s “Dream of Gerontius.”  In his “Essay on Man,” Pope versified, without well understanding, the optimistic deism of Leibnitz, as expounded by Shaftesbury and Bolingbroke.  The Anglican Church itself was in a strange condition, when Jonathan Swift, a dean and would-be bishop, came to its defense with his “Tale of a Tub” and his ironical “Argument against the Abolition of Christianity.”  Among the Queen Anne wits Addison was the man of most genuine religious feeling.  He is always reverent, and “the feeling infinite” stirs faintly in one or two of his hymns.  But, in general, his religion is of the rationalizing type, a religion of common sense, a belief resting upon logical deductions, a system of ethics in which the supernatural is reduced to the lowest terms, and from which the glooms and fervors of a deep spiritual experience are almost entirely absent.  This “parson in a tie-wig” is constantly preaching against zeal, enthusiasm, superstition, mysticism, and recommending a moderate, cheerful, and reason religion.[12] It is instructive to contrast his amused contempt for popular beliefs in ghosts, witches, dreams, prognostications, and the like, with the reawakened interest in folk lore evidenced by such a book as Scott’s “Demonology and Witchcraft.”