ll and Gilder on this side--these and many
others--have made most precious additions to our store of religious
poetry. The century has been one of great perturbations in religious
thought; the advent of the evolutionary philosophy threatened all the
theological foundations, and there was need of a thorough revision
of the dogmas which were based on a mechanical theology, and of a
reinterpretation of the life of the Spirit. In all this the poets have
given us the strongest help. The great poet cannot be oblivious of
these deepest themes. He need not be a dogmatician, indeed he cannot
be, for his business is insight, not ratiocination; but the problems
which theology is trying to solve must always be before his mind, and
he must have something to say about them, if he hopes to command the
attention of thoughtful men. Yet while we need not depreciate
the service that has been rendered by preachers and professional
theologians who have sought to put the facts of the religious
life into the forms of the new philosophy, we must own our deeper
obligation to the poets, by whose vision the spiritual realities have
been most clearly discerned.

It was Wordsworth, perhaps, who gave us the first great contribution
to the new religious thought by bringing home to us the fact that God
is in his world; revealing himself now as clearly as in any of the
past ages. The truth of the Divine immanence, which is the foundation
of all the more positive religious thinking of to-day, and which
is destined, when once its import has been fully grasped, to
revolutionize our religious life, is made familiar to our thought
in Wordsworth's poetry. To him it was simply an experience; in quite
another sense than that in which it was true of Spinoza, it might have
been said of him that he was a "God-intoxicated man"; and although his
clear English sense permitted no pantheistic merging of the human in
the divine, but kept the individual consciousness clear for choice
and duty, the realization of the presence of God made nature in his
thought supernatural, and life sublime. To him, as Dr. Strong has
said, it was plain that "imagination in man enables him to enter into
the thought of God--the creative element in us is the medium through
which we perceive the meaning of the Creator in his creation. The
world without answers to the world within, because God is the soul of
both."

"Such minds are truly from the Deity,
For they are Powers; and hence th