ggerate his own weakness, and that he
should have become a power among men is a remarkable triumph of the
influences which have given birth to Christian civilization.

The world into which the child came was one very adverse to him, and at
the same time very much in need of him. It was a world from which the
spirit of poetry seemed to have fled. There could be no stronger proof
of this than the occupation of the throne of Spenser, Shakespeare, and
Milton by the arch-versifier Pope. The Revolution of 1688 was
glorious, but unlike the Puritan Revolution which it followed, and in
the political sphere partly ratified, it was profoundly prosaic.
Spiritual religion, the source of Puritan grandeur and of the poetry of
Milton, was almost extinct; there was not much more of it among the
Nonconformists, who had now become to a great extent mere Whigs, with a
decided Unitarian tendency. The Church was little better than a
political force, cultivated and manipulated by political leaders for
their own purposes. The Bishops were either politicians or theological
polemics collecting trophies of victory over free-thinkers as titles to
higher preferment. The inferior clergy as a body were far nearer in
character to Trulliber than to Dr. Primrose; coarse, sordid, neglectful
of their duties, shamelessly addicted to sinecurism and pluralities,
fanatics in their Toryism and in attachment to their corporate
privileges, cold, rationalistic and almost heathen in their preachings,
if they preached at all. The society of the day is mirrored in the
pictures of Hogarth, in the works of Fielding and Smollett; hard and
heartless polish was the best of it; and not a little of it was
_Marriage a la Mode_. Chesterfield, with his soulless culture, his
court graces, and his fashionable immoralities, was about the highest
type of an English gentleman; but the Wilkeses, Potters, and
Sandwiches, whose mania for vice culminated in the Hell-fire Club, were
more numerous than the Chesterfields. Among the country squires, for
one Allworthy or Sir Roger de Coverley there were many Westerns. Among
the common people religion was almost extinct, and assuredly no new
morality or sentiment, such as Positivists now promise, had taken its
place. Sometimes the rustic thought for himself, and scepticism took
formal possession of his mind; but, as we see from one of Cowper's
letters, it was a coarse scepticism which desired to be buried with its
hounds. Ignora