nd standard of judgment, and the correspondence of the
change with fluctuations in the predominant philosophy of the time.--If we
commence with the author of the Paradise Lost, we listen to the last echo
of the poetry which had belonged to the great outburst of mind of the
earlier part of the seventeenth century, and of the faith in the
supernatural which had characterized Puritanism. His philosophy is Hebrew:
he hesitates not to interpret the divine counsels; but it is by the
supposed light of revelation. Doubt is unknown to him. The anthropomorphic
conception of Deity prevails. Material nature is the instrument of God's
personal providence for the objects of His care.--But if we pass to the
author of the Essay on Man, the revolution which has given artistic
precision to the form is not more observable than the indications of a
philosophy which has chilled the spiritual faculties. The supernatural is
gone. Nature is a vast machine which moves by fixed laws impressed upon it
by a Creator. The soul feels chilled with the desolation of a universe
wherein it cannot reach forth by prayer to a loving Father. Scripture is
displaced by science. Doubt has passed into unbelief. The universe is
viewed by the cold materialism which arraigns spiritual subjects at the
bar of sense.--If now we turn to the work consecrated by the great living
poet to the memory of his early friend, we find ourselves in contact with
a meditative soul, separated from the age just named by a complete
intellectual chasm; whose spiritual perceptions reflect a philosophy which
expresses the sorrows and doubts of a cultivated mind of the present day,
"perplext in faith but not in deeds."(94) The material has become
transfigured into the spiritual. The objective has been replaced by the
subjective. Nature is studied, as in Pope, without the assumption of a
revelation; but it is no longer regarded as a machine conducted by
material laws: it is a motive soul which embodies God's presence; a
mystery to be felt, not understood. God is not afar off, so that we cannot
reach Him: He is so nigh, that His omnipresence seems to obscure His
personality.

These instances will illustrate the difference which philosophy produces
in the classes of ideas in which the mind of an age is formed. In Milton,
the appeal is made to the revelation of God in the Book; in Pope, to the
revelation in Nature; in the living poet, to the revelation in man's soul,
the type of the infinite Sp