great beauty of personal character and piety.
Yet it was completely cut off from any living relation
to the thought of the age. There was among its
representatives no spirit of theological inquiry.
There was, if anything, less probability of theological
reconstruction, from this quarter, than from the circles
of the older German pietism, with which this English
evangelicalism of the time of the later Georges had
not a little in common. There had been a great
enthusiasm for humanity at the opening of the period
of the French Revolution, but the excesses and atrocities
of the Revolution had profoundly shocked the English
mind. There was abroad something of the same
sense for the return to nature, and of the greatness
of man, which moved Schiller and Goethe. The
exponents of it were, however, almost exclusively
the poets, Wordsworth, Shelley, Keats and Byron.
There was nothing which combined these various elements
as parts of a great whole. Britain had stood
outside the area of the Revolution, and yet had put
forth stupendous efforts, ultimately successful, to
make an end of the revolutionary era and of the Napoleonic
despotism. This tended perhaps to give to Britons
some natural satisfaction in the British Constitution
and the established Church which flourished under it.
Finally, while men on the Continent were devising
holy alliances and other chimeras of the sort, England
was precipitated into the earlier acute stages of the
industrial revolution in which she has led the European
nations and still leads. This fact explains a
certain preoccupation of the British mind with questions
remote from theological reconstruction or religious
speculation.
THE POETS
It may now sound like a contradiction if we assert
that the years from 1780 to 1830 constitute the era
of the noblest English poetry since the times of great
Elizabeth. The social direction of the new theology
of the present day, with its cry against every kind
of injustice, with its claim of an equal opportunity
for a happy life for every man—this was
the forecast of Cowper, as it had been of Blake.
To Blake all outward infallible authority of books
or churches was iniquitous. He was at daggers
drawn with every doctrine which set limit to the freedom
of all men to love God, or which could doubt that
God had loved all men. Jesus alone had seen the
true thing. God was a father, every man his child.
Long before 1789, Burns was filled with the new ideas
of the freedom and brotherhood of man, with zeal for
the overthrow of unjust privilege. He had spoken
in imperishable words of the holiness of the common
life. He had come into contact with the most
dreadful consequences of Calvinism. He has pilloried
these mercilessly in his ‘Holy Tulzie’
and in his ’Holy Willie’s Prayer.’
Such poems must have shaken Calvinism more than a
thousand liberal sermons could have done. What
Coleridge might have done in this field, had he not