I. THE RELIGION OF LETTERS, 1750-1850, . Blackwood's Magazine, Hesketh J. Bell, III. A TALE OF TWO STUDIOS, IV. THE LIVES AND LOVES OF Macmillan's Magazine, Nineteenth Century, . Fortnightly Review, . VI. DISCIPLINE. By Roy Tellet, Longman's Magazine, TO DO, For EIGHT DOLLARS remitted directly to the Publishers, the LIVING AGE will be punctually forwarded for a year, free of postage. Remittances should be made by bank draft or check, or by post-office money-order, if possible. If neither of these can be procured, the money should be sent in a registered letter. All postmasters are obliged to register letters when requested to do so. Drafts, checks, and money-orders should be made payable to the order of LITTELL & Co. Single copies of the LIVING AGE, 18 cents. While their mimic thunder rent With its roar the firmament, As they tacked and they manoeuvred in the bay: For our navy is the pride Of that sea without a tide, "All then precipitated themselves into the sea, with the exception of Vice-Admiral Sir George Tryon, who remained alone on the bridge." - (The Times, June 27.) And our home is on the deep amid the LET England mourn for him who met his On the gallant flagship came, Or the giant rush of tempest, such a blow Untimely gone, and grieve with them who weep With her admiral and crew she sank be- A loss irreparable with bitter tears. low ! Do you deem they should have died On a fierce and reddened tide, In the fury and the glory of the fight? With the ensign shot to rags, Let England still rejoice, for now she knows Though time and science change the face of war The stuff of English hearts they cannot change. Academy. MACKENZIE BELL. From Blackwood's Magazine. THE RELIGION OF LETTERS, 1750-1850. and fiction, and selecting some familiar. figures from the crowded canvas, let us see what they can tell us of the way i which religion was regarded, since 'they are to some extent imbued with the same spirit-the spirit of their age. It is not from the professed theologian, as we have before said, that we have most to learn. Seminarists, students, and ministers of religion of whatever or less WHEN We seek to understand what may be called the spirit of any age in matters of religion, it is not in the sayings and writings of professed theologians and divines, and still less in the utterances of religious disputants and leaders of parties, that we shall most surely discern it, but rather in the attitude of mind of thoughtful men outside creed, must needs be more the arena of controversy - men of let-guided by class prejudices and governed ters perhaps, but men of diverse inter- by class interests. They may instruet, ests and varied aims, who have no exhort, and convince, but they cannot personal ends to be served, no waver- give that unconscious impression, that ing disciples to conciliate, no law of casual revelation of a prevalent taste, edification to be observed. which, like some old portrait in an an It is true that those who for practical | tiquated dress, recalls the manners and purposes are most opposed to one an- transports us into the society of a byother have frequently most in common. gone age. Times of great religious disturbance are fruitful in instances of men who would have sent one another to the stake as the almost necessary expression of an equally fervent faith and an equally deep-seated intolerance conscience striking, as it were, the same note, though on minds of different metal. Nevertheless it is true that the temper of the religious enthusiast is that of a protest and a revolt, and it cannot be regarded as a reliable interpretation of the spirit of his times. If the history of a nation is found in its national songs, the history of its religion is written in no misleading character in dialogue and anecdote, in epistolary literature, in poetry and fiction. In 1760-80 Methodism had not spent its first fervor. Wesley was preaching up and down the country, and Newton and Cowper were writing their hymns at Olney. It was a flame, however, which, like a hearth fire, spread most rapidly in the open; it leapt from hamlet to hamlet, it was kindled in the hearts of cottagers and artisans. But though here and there this new religion numbered the rich and influential amongst its converts, it was for the most part despised or distrusted by the more highly educated members of the community; it affronted the orthodoxy of a political episcopate, and scandalized the sober-minded Anglicanism of the day. Evangelicalism within the At this end of the nineteenth cen- Church was as yet confined to a small tury, when religious activities are ab- minority, and the prevalent religion sorbing men's minds, and to some was that of cushioned pews, didactic extent usurping the place of contem- discourses, and comfortable divines; plative piety, it may not be uninterest- for the most part too well content with ing to cast our eyes back to a period this present world to awaken any ennot as yet too far removed from our thusiasm demanding personal and probown to the days of Dr. Johnson and ably inconvenient sacrifices. Of many Goldsmith, of the Coleridges and of the parochial clergy Crabbe probaCharles Lamb, of Wordsworth and bly drew a faithful portrait when he Southey, of De Quincey and Miss Aus- wrote of his "vicar :”ten, a period beginning with the publication of the first portion of " "The Rambler" in 1750, and ending in the religious and literary revolutions of the early decades of this present century. Glancing at some pages of biography Mild were his doctrines, and not one dis course But gained in softness what it lost in force. It sprang from innovation; it was then It must be right; I've done it from my Iland went so far as to wish to discover painted glass and cobwebs; but such anticipations were naturally doomed to disappointment at a time when an old oak chest was the only relic of antiquity allowed within the house, and that had been put away in a corner of the spare bedroom. Medievalism, whether in architecture or religion, had given way to a desire for utility and work both literally and metaphorically. A sense of propriety restrained religious impulses, and the Methodist revival was condemned by contemporary divines writing from the precincts of rectories and orthodoxy, as a "spiritual influenza" which could not but be repugnant to all reasonable persons. We may well feel sure, as we turn over the voluminous pages of these long Sir Walter Scott, that magician of the past, was indeed, at the opening of the nineteenth century, to fire the imagination of the young by his vivid presentations of a bygone faith; but though no writer has more forcibly portrayed convenience. Whitewash had done its the temper of the religious enthusiast, and the powerful influence which passionate self-sacrificing devotion to a creed may exercise upon the minds and fortunes of men, he was averse (almost to the point of intolerance) to any strong manifestation of religious feeling. "I have been always careful," he writes in his diary, "to place my mind in the most tranquil posture it can assume during my private exercises forgotten sermons, that they were in of devotion." He purposely refrained from indulging his imagination on spiritual subjects, and his religion has been described as cold and conventional, but it was of a nature which could well withstand the repeated strokes of adversity. It triumphed alike over bodily weakness and failing mental powers, and found its truest expression in his last conscious words of leave-taking to Lockhart. "My dear, be a good man, be virtuous, be religious, be a good man. Nothing else will give you any comfort when you come to lie here." no danger of catching the complaint. It was a common belief, not uncharacteristic of the times, that poor Cowper was driven mad by too much religion; whereas, to those who knew him best, it was evident that it was to the consolations of religion alone he owed his intervals of peace and sanity. But a life spent in good works, in prayer and psalm-singing, would not improbably strike an unawakened conscience as inconsistent with the rational occupations of an educated man. Hannah More, whom we are perhaps In his romances he had painted rather too apt to think of merely as a Catholicism in some of its attractive writer of tracts and a Sunday-school aspects, but it was with the pencil of teacher, was at first almost as much the artist, not the pen of the disciple, afraid of Methodism as if she had been and in his diary he expresses a hope a bishop. She was naturally fond of that " unopposed the Catholic super- society, an agreeable woman, the friend stition may sink into dust." In Great of Johnson, Garrick, Horace Walpole, Britain, at least, it would have seemed and Sir Joshua Reynolds; and she benot impossible that his wish might began her literary career by writing vers fulfilled; so far as practical use was de société and dramas, brought out with concerned, it was as yet as much a success upon the stage under Garrick's thing of the past as the ruined abbeys supervision. It is true that, even in scattered about the country, or the discarded suits of armor which had hung upon their walls. We find, it is true, that General Tilney talked of preserving the Gothic forms of the windows in Northanger Abbey with reverential care, and Catherine Mor those days, she had scruples as to following some of the customs of the fashionable world. When there was to be music on Sunday evening, Garrick called her "a Sunday woman," and advised her to retire to her room — he would recall her when the music was It untouched by the worldliness and Erastianism of the day—what truth and simplicity of faith, what unaffected piety, do we not find blossoming spourtaneously in unexpected places! wears indeed a sober livery which is somewhat out of date; it expresses itself in more or less sententious language, but it obtains the respect even of those least likely to put it into practice. It may be somewhat ponderous, but it is never contemptible; and we are not at all surprised to be told, for instance, that the Vicar of Wakefield did not preach to his fellow-prisoners in vain, but that "after less than six days some were penitent and all were attentive." over; and when Horace Walpole was all up to vice and barbarism?" To do ill he sent her a book as a peace-offer- him justice, the bishop appears to have ing, and said, "I am sorry I scolded been able to contemplate the dangerous poor Hannah More for being so reli- possibility which she feels honestly gious; I hope she will forgive me." obliged to put before him, without But it is clear that her religion was not alarm. Indeed, at a time when many of a character to cause any constraint parishes had no resident curate (though, between herself and her friends from as Hannah remarks, the livings were whom she differed. She could bear to worth nearly £50 a year), one would be scolded and laughed at, and could have imagined that the bishops might lightly wrest her critics' weapons from have had greater difficulties to contend them in self-defence. Though so often with than a superabundance of zeak deprived of the social life and surround- Clerical activity was, generally speakings most congenial to her, passing her ing, at a low ebb. And yet when we summers amongst the rough miners of go outside what may be called the Cheddar and stocking-makers of Ax-"profession "— leaving out of account bridge, writing tracts with unprepos- also those many devoted and saintly sessing titles, "The Two Shoemakers," characters who pursued their calling "Black Giles the Poacher," etc., she yet never got out of touch with the culture and society of her day; and though Sydney Smith might find easy subjects for ridicule in many pages of her last secular literary effort of any importance, "Colebs in Search of a Wife," it went through no less than thirty editions before her death, and was eagerly read not only by those members of the fashionable world against whose habits of life and modes of thought it was principally directed, but also by influential critics and leaders of public opinion, who, many of them, authoritatively confirmed the popular verdict. That a woman with so many special gifts, and wielding so facile a pen, should give herself up to the work of reclaiming Religion was not, in fact, treated the vicious and teaching the ignorant, even by worldly people with superficial is a strong testimony to the force of levity; it was not lightly attacked or religious principle, all the more remark- defended, and with a certain quiet digable since Hannah and her sisters were nity it took the first place, as of right, neither fanatics nor enthusiasts. Inde- in the minds of serious men. Not of fatigable workers, they took up the those only especially dedicated to its task which was being left undone with service (such dedication, as we shall relentless energy, and they carried it see further on, was often of but little on with unabated zeal and persever-account), but rather as the supreme ance. They defended the excesses of principle acknowledged if not obeyed their followers without acrimony, even by "those ingenious persons and blamed, without exaggeration, the called wits," in which, as Vaughan apathy of those who should have been says in his day, the kingdom “did their chief supporters. "Can the pos- abound." To take one familiar examsibility that a few should become en- ple: Dr. Johnson as we know him, thusiastic," Hannah writes to the bishop says one of his biographers, was a man in defence of her converts, "be justly of the world, though a religious man of pleaded as an argument for giving them the world. His feelings, at once deep |