to overthrow the French Republic and to rupture
the new German Empire were sufficiently disquieting. Against this was to
be set the destruction of the temporal power of the Popes and the
complete freedom of Italy. This event was the sunrise of Swinburne's
Songs before Sunrise (which appeared in 1871), a seedplot of atheism and
revolution, sown with implacable hatred of creeds and tyrants. The most
wonderful poem in the volume, the Hymn of Man, was written while the
Vatican Council was sitting. It is a song of triumph over the God of the
priests, stricken by the doom of the Pope's temporal power. The
concluding verses will show the spirit.

"By thy name that in hellfire was written, and burned at the point of
thy sword, Thou art smitten, thou God, thou art smitten; thy death is
upon thee, O Lord. And the lovesong of earth as thou diest resounds
through the wind of her wings-- Glory to Man in the highest! for Man is
the master of things."

[212]

The fact that such a volume could appear with impunity vividly
illustrates the English policy of enforcing the laws for blasphemy only
in the case of publications addressed to the masses.

Political circumstances thus invited and stimulated rationalists to come
forward boldly, but we must not leave out of account the influence of
the Broad Church movement and of Darwinism. The Descent of Man appeared
precisely in 1871. A new, undogmatic Christianity was being preached in
pulpits. Mr. Leslie Stephen remarked (1873) that "it may be said, with
little exaggeration, that there is not only no article in the creeds
which may not be contradicted with impunity, but that there is none
which may not be contradicted in a sermon calculated to win the
reputation of orthodoxy and be regarded as a judicious bid for a
bishopric. The popular state of mind seems to be typified in the well-
known anecdote of the cautious churchwarden, who, whilst commending the
general tendency of his incumbent's sermon, felt bound to hazard a
protest upon one point. 'You see, sir,' as he apologetically explained,
'I think there be a God.' He thought it an error of taste or perhaps of
judgment, to hint a doubt as to the first article of the creed."

The influence exerted among the cultivated

[213] classes by the aesthetic movement (Ruskin, Morris, the Pre-
Raphaelite painters; then Pater's Lectures on the Renaissance, 1873) was
also a sign of the times. For the attitude of these critics, artists,
and poets