THERE cannot be a surer indication of the religious tendencies of a nation than the turn of its poetry. The lighter and easier styles, especially, show us whither the current is flowing. Tell us what young gentlemen and ladies are writing about, and we will hazard at least a conjecture as to the religious sentiment that soon will most prominently characterize not merely the words but the deeds of the coming age. Give us, therefore, this divine auxiliary on our side, and we will let you dictate, denounce, proscribe and even persecute, as you please. Providence has placed in our hands powers that laugh to scorn your petty dominion. Shall not mind prevail over matter? We will ensnare and lead away your captains, your chiefs, your mightiest men of war, your garrisons and your multitude; yes, and you yourselves; and bring about that you shall humbly and cheerfully keep for us the lines and fortresses you are now rearing, as you vainly suppose, against us.

For here and there shall spring up in the very midst of your array kindred spirits, that, catching but the distant sounds of our solemn strain, shall at once be drawn to it, as by a secret charm, which everywhere claims its own. No bulwark so strong, no partition so impermeable, shall obstruct its unseen attraction. When for the appointed time your eyes have marvelled at our mystic order, and in your ears have thrilled our heaven-blest tones, then shall your walls fall down, and we shall peaceably advance to occupy our destined heritage. To us must you come for "a cunning player upon the harp," to lay the evil spirit when it troubleth you. One by one, as the ministers of your wrath, and the messengers of your fierce decrees advance against us, soon as they list our awful theme, they shall throw aside their weapons and their defences, and enter the prophetic choir; till you at last, seeking us in the worst extremity of your rage, shall suddenly leave your earthly power and state, and in the humbler guise of peace and sanctity, crave an entrance to our company.

There is that intimate relation between religion and poetry, that it is not possible to think of them separately. They are so nearly the same, they occupy so entirely the same portion of the powers and affections, they are such natural rivals, that they must be either friends or foes; they must either help or injure one another; either be as one, or involve in natural contradictions and ruin the whole heart, mind, soul and strength of man. Ask what that is which men feel to be something above themselves, which ennobles them, and gives them the consciousness of being raised by an unseen power to a higher rank in the scale of beings; which diffuses a peculiar light and hue, in which they alone see the world and man; which is a refuge from anxiety, trouble and every earthly ill; which seems true grace, and loveliness, and harmony; which carries them into a heaven of its own, and shows them unutterable things; which seeks and pursues as it were a reality, an eternal existence in the midst of these perishing surfaces of things; which creates all things anew; which gathers a holy brotherhood, and enables the soul to recognize or to imagine beings like itself, or of its own sphere and consistence, whether in earth or where it knows not; which brings on a disrelish

and contempt of this visible frame and course; which purifies the motives, and shows in their proper light all that is petty and vicious, ever measuring discord by harmony, imperfection by perfection, deformity by beauty, meanness by sublimity; which they that have it, would part with for no prize of earth, and feel to be the best part of themselves? What is that but something religious? Yet is not poetry this?

A mind poetical, but not in its religion, must needs be in an habitual state of religious indifference or rebellion. Even if it contemplate the Deity and some portions of his works with a poetic eye, still, as it may do that without its poetry lightening and adorning that special track and way by which the Deity has willed that he should be approached by man, so it suffers the extreme peril of having its conscience and its reason at cross purposes with that almost master-faculty-its creative or poetic power.

One may see how integral a portion of the common nature of man poetry is, and how serious a mutilation and disability it is to be wanting in it, from the consideration how many religious motives and arguments there are, which cannot be felt and appreciated without the help of poetry. Thus the Bible is not merely written in an imaginative style, but appeals throughout to the imagination in an argumentative manner; as if it were an integral quality of the pious mind. Revelation and nature agree in the poetic beauty and majesty of circumstance, with which they are clothed. What a superfluity of splendor, what a needless exactitude of fitness, there seems in both of them! Why should the Almighty, then, we may reverently say, have been at such pains to speak to the eye and heart of man? Was it not possible for the things to be done, the warning given, or the message to be conveyed as truly and effectually with less pompous, or striking, or moving accompaniments?

The world, revelation tells us, was created not merely by the Almighty will, but with solemn successive fiats of creation;-four noble rivers watered Eden;-cherubims, with flaming swords that turned every way, kept our fallen parents from the tree of life;-the fountains of the great deep were broken up, and the windows of heaven were opened, and all the high hills that were under the whole heaven were covered, to drown the reprobate world;-the bow in the cloud was the token that man should not fear a return of that visitation ;-and so on from the beginning to the end of revelation ;-the Divine mercy and the Divine justice;whether the scene be earth or heaven ;-every word and deed of Omnipotence has been so spoken or so done, that the very manner, and sound, and look, quite apart from the purport of the thing, should win, or soothe, or please, or pain, or terrify; and leave some suitable and significant image impressed on the senses and memory of the church to the end of

time.

Had this been otherwise, if it be not profane to imagine it, there would have been an absolute discordance and contrariety between revelation and nature. Nature is not so much poetical as poetry itself. The philosopher proves nature to be utilitarian. Be it so. We will not quarrel with his argument, if he will only conduct it. with becoming reverence,

and not disparage his subject by rude familiarity and unnecessary illustrations from human contrivances. But there is a higher subject we should like to see taken up ;-the lessons to be gathered from the poetry of nature, apart from its evident usefulness; from its beauty; its scenic displays; its gorgeous pomp; its brilliant hues; its terrors and its soothings; its paroxysms and its calms; its risings and its settings, its openings and its closings; its awful unchangeableness and its ceaseless changes. How little of all this is necessary, as far as we can see, to mere animal subsistence and enjoyment! Man might have thriven and grown centuries old, surrounded by Serbonian bogs, and under a Cimmerian sky; or without the organ of sight, or faculties for apprehending beauty.

There is no purpose of mere animal life that might not have been answered quite as well without such a thing as beauty or grandeur being in the number of created things. A very few, and, weighed in some scales, very trifling changes would have made the difference, a difference to them that are blessed with eyes that see, and ears that hear, but no difference to the consistent utilitarian. A very little change in the constitution and laws of light would have made all nature of a dusky brown, or a sickly yellow: a very slightly different atmosphere would have excluded the sight and knowledge of the sun, moon and stars, without an utter exclusion of their light. Trees, shrubs and herbs of the field might have been all one shape and hue; the earth a dead level, with just fall enough for rivers and canals. The natural geography of the globe might have run in lines of latitude and longitude like the boundaries in the United States. Let some one write a book on the Catholicism of nature-its rites and ceremonies-its symbols-its infinite redundance of ornament-its boundless variety of form-its ceaseless importunity of praise. Let him exclude from count all that may be brought under the head of "utility," and there will still be a countless remainder of superfluous beauties. His work will have a sort of parallelism with Paley's more Protestant undertaking; but he need not fear encroaching on the province of that ingenious writer. On the contrary, he must purposely reject whatever can come under the Paleyan formula. His business will be with those features and qualities of the creation which are useless on mere physical principles; and only useful, and probably intentional, for their effect on the human soul, as outwardly conspiring with its inward instincts to produce and cherish the sense of the beautiful, the awful and the sublime; -qualities so completely beside the scope of Paley's argument, that we might suppose a mind entering fully into the Natural Theology without having any faculty at all for apprehending them, or knowing that there were such qualities impressed on the physical creation. Nay, we are not sure but that, could we suppose a being with all our tastes and other faculties, but without any knowledge of that creation which we see, except such as he could derive from the work we refer to, such a being would not only not conclude our world to be grand and beautiful, as well as life sustaining and pleasurable, but would even infer positively that it was something mean, grovelling, disgusting and mechanic.

We have said that the poetic instinct is a subsidiary part of the reli

gious instinct; that it is universal; and that nature and revelation are addressed to it. On what other supposition, we will ask, would it not be strange and hard, and almost cruel, that so many arguments in Scripture are addressed to certain feelings of the poetic class? How many sacred texts become mere poetic phrases, how many noble acts become mere empty romance, when tried by the severe rules which these latter times have thought it decent to apply to the inspired word! How many arguments become wholly irrelevant! We are directed not to be anxious about food and raiment, because the birds are supported without sowing, reaping and gathering into barns; and because lilies are very beautiful without the labor of spinning. We are commanded not to swear by the earth, because it is God's footstool. Wealth is personified, and expressed by the name of a false god. The whole manner of our Saviour's final entrance into Jerusalem, considered as a means of converting the Jews, was most strikingly contrary to the rules of right reason, the foal of an ass, the garments spread on the way, the branches carried before, the senseless greetings of children, the empty plaudits of a corrupt and fickle multitude. Again, what is meant by holiness being given not only to persons, but to things,-to inanimate matter, which can thereby undergo no change, and most probably in the course of events will be transferred to the vilest uses? Again, why is an honorable burial in the sepulchre of our ancestors, or in the land of our posterity, made so much of? We have heard very sensible people boast that they did not think it signified whether the mere manner of their death were sublime or ridiculous; or whether they were buried in a church or a dung-hill. The Almighty is first called the God of Abraham, Isaac and Jacob, as if he were not also the God of all his creatures; and then the vast doctrine of the immortality of the human soul is built on this slender foundation. The church is called a body, and a Divine Person is called its head. Then the church is called a chaste virgin, and is said to be married to that Divine Person; and that fanciful analogy being taken for granted, an argument is gratuitously derived back again of the sanctity of the rite of marriage. We have heard a rational theologian, whose arguments against Roman Catholicism received the highest sanction ever bestowed in this church, describe this analogy as the casual thoughts of a warm and capricious imagination, and with so little foundation in truth or sense, that it was a pity it had been introduced into the marriage service in the prayer-book. Again, why is it not only wrong, but shocking-in itself horrible, apart from any idea of inexpediency-that the gifts of God should be purchased with money, when it is not concealed that those gifts were from the earliest given to very improper persons, and used for very ill purposes? Again, let any one go through all the texts commonly argued in support of any alleged doctrine, he will find something like poetry necessary to discern the force and pertinence of every one of them, and to reject the arguments which may be urged against them. We think there is not a single Scripture text adduced in proof of the various articles included under the doctrine of the Trinity, which we have not heard in its turn contemptuously rejected as weak, popular and irrelevant, by grave theologi

ans, who nevertheless professed their entire belief in the doctrine, and that not on Catholic tradition, but on the Scriptural proof.

This last point reminds us of the common remark that the Jews, as orientals, and as an unphilosophical people, had more poetry than we of the race of Japhet; and that therefore they were dealt with more poetically than we are. This, of course, assures that as we are not poetical, we may therefore reasonably require more logical and mathematical proof than satisfied them; and should also in unison with this, our intellectual difference, deal with religion altogether in a more common sense and matter-offact way, and eschew whatever is liable to the charge of being fanciful, imaginative, semi-human, traditionary, and so forth, as being on that account contrary to the proper genius of our religion. But it may reasonably excite a misgiving that this matter-of-fact position is not the best way of viewing religious things even in our case, when we see that the way in which the Jews were dealt with was not so much accommodated to the poetical temper, as poetical above the temper, and was rejected by the mass of them, amongst other reasons, because they had not poetry enough. What, for example, could be more imaginative, more addressed to the higher faculties of the mind, as contrasted with common sense and exactness of reasoning, than the way in which the house and city of David were imposed upon the twelve tribes as the centre of unity, and the golden chain to bind together the ancient promises of God and their future fulfilment ? How many excellent Scripture proofs might have been adduced to prove that obedience to that line of kings was a needless self-subjection, and that the state of the ten tribes was, at least, justifiable! Nay, does not common sense preponderate on that side? So, also, of the peculiar manner and guise in which the prophets (and he who was greater than all, John the Baptist) declared their missions. They were more poetical than the mass of their hearers. So also, most remarkably, of the body of proofs from type and prophecy provided by Almighty wisdom for the verification of the Messiah, what a subjection of reason to our visionary fancies, to (scripturally) baseless anticipations, to indefensible, and almost indescribable feelings did it require! And, therefore, how few did receive the Messiah! They who were most occupied in the Scriptures most rejected Him, whereas they who received Him were generally persons with no opportunity of sifting texts, and who were obliged to receive traditionary interpretations. So far from the promise of the Messiah, in the complete form in which it existed at His coming, being especially addressed to the genius of the Jewish people, as distinguished from other nations, ancient or modern, we should rather say, that in what we call "Jewishness," i. e. the assemblage of ill qualities, which caused the Jews to reject their King, and which now is the root of their unbelief, a certain want of poetry is the prevailing feature.

One more observation on the poetry of the Bible and we have done. How many actions are there recorded and enshrined on the memory of the church which have no ground of precept, or use, and are utterly incomprehensible and absurd if tried by hard modern rules! Such as David pouring out unto the Lord the cup of water, which was the blood of the men that