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 so early turned to prose, it is not easy to
say. The verse of his early days rests upon the conviction, fundamental
to his later philosophy, that all the new ideas concerning men and the
world are a revelation of God. Wordsworth seems never consciously to
have broken with the current theology. His view of the natural glory and
goodness of humanity, especially among the poor and simple, has not much
relation to that theology. His view of nature, not as created of God. in
the conventional sense, but as itself filled with God, of God as
conscious of himself at every point of nature's being, has still less.
Man and nature are but different manifestations of the one soul of all.
Byron's contribution to Christian thought, we need hardly say, was of a
negative sort. It was destructive rather than constructive. Among the
conventions and hypocrisies of society there were none which he more
utterly despised than those of religion and the Church as he saw these.
There is something volcanic, Voltairean in his outbreaks. But there is a
difference. Both Voltaire and Byron knew that they had not the current
religion. Voltaire thought, nevertheless, that he had a religion.
Posterity has esteemed that he had little. Byron thought he had none.
Posterity has felt that he had much. His attack was made in a reckless
bitterness which lessened its effect. Yet the truth of many things which
he said is now overwhelmingly obvious. Shelley began with being what he
called an atheist. He e