vation of thought and feeling. There is no baptisin of divine fire renewing and transfiguring the page of Literature. Christianity might nearly as well not have been, for aught of its spirit that breathes in many of these works of modern genius which have most interested and delighted the human mind. It is of our own literature we would be understood chiefly to speak; but the truth of our remark will perhaps be most readily admitted when applied to Modern Literature in general.

It may seem a harsh and Puritanical judgment which we thus pronounce. But the real question that concerns us is, not whether the judgment be harsh, but whether it be true. No good can come from mere evasion on such a subject. The truth is not the less true that we do not acknowledge it, and force ourselves to contemplate it. We remember the strong revulsion of feeling with which we first read John Foster's very minute and candid treatment of this subject, in his famous essay, "On the Aversion of Men of Taste to Evangelical Religion." It was hard to have one's idols so struck down, and their true character so unsparingly exposed. Even now, on reverting to the essay, we have been unable to read it, in some parts, without a kind of pain which must have led many, we fancy, indignantly to toss it aside. He brings forth, with such a clear yet mild prominence, the peculiarities of Christianity, and confronts them so clearly, yet boldly, with the characteristics of our polite Literature, as to leave no escape from conclusions which we would still fain repudiate. He presses the point of contrast in a manner at once so measured and forcible that it is impossible to resist the essential truth of his argument. We may regret it from our love of Literature, or despise it from our scorn of Christianity, but we will find it hard to repel it.

We do not, indeed, in some respects, coincide with Foster. We think that here, as often, the gloom of his temperament tinges the picture that he draws. He shuts out too much the lights which would relieve, and the pleasant colours which would soften it. Nay, we believe that the severity and exclusiveness of his own religion have led him to do some special injustice to the venerated names of Addison and Johnson. Still, with every abatement we may make of his representations, their substantial truth remains. There is the fact, which we cannot get rid of with the most tolerant latitudinarianism, that so much of our Literature is not characteristically Christian, but the reverse. Its genius is not only not consonant with that of the gospel, but often, though without any polemical purpose, quite hostile to it, so that every truly Christian mind must feel that the fascinations of Literature are not without their danger.

Not for one moment, indeed, would we be supposed to be

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ignorant of the beautiful uses of all true Literature. There is a morally exalting power, we believe, in all its genuine manifestations, apart from their relations to Christianity. It is the wondrous gift of genius to serve often as a moral teacher, even in its fall and degradation. The pure heart will gather at once delight and discipline from productions which may yet by no means mainly minister to elevated and Christian feelings. There is an inextinguishable element of truth and beauty in all genius, which, from amid whatever corruption, will rise upon the untainted soul, imparting a moral joy and strength of the most precious kind. Foster, we think, has discerned this too feebly and inadequately. He has made too little allowance for the good we may always extract from whatever the hand of genius, has touched with its magic or arrayed in its glory. Even admitting that there is so much alien to the spirit of the gospel in our past Literature, we are not inclined to view so gloomily as he does the consequences of this. That living familiarity with our best writers, both of poetry and prose, which alone can impart a true literary taste, may, we think, be cultivated with less danger to Christian habitudes of thought and feeling than he seems to believe. Still the fact is, in the main, as he has represented it. Whatever view we may take of its bearing, it is not, we feel, capable of being disputed. The significant truth remains, claiming our serious attention, that so great a part of our past Literature is un-allied with Christianity.

We scarcely think it can be necessary, at this day, and in the pages of this Review, to offer any explanation of the anxiety with which we are inclined to regard this fact. There are but few of our readers, we suppose, who do not recognise that Christianity ought to be associated with Literature. It is only possible, indeed, on the ground of infidelity, on the one hand, or of fanaticism, on the other, to maintain that they can be severed without mutual injury. Here, as in other respects, these extremes are found to meet. From opposite reasons, but to the same purpose, they hold that Literature has nothing to do with religion— the former scorning religion as an unreality, the latter treating Literature as a folly. Supposing we take our stand at either of these extreme points, we may consistently look with indifference on the separation of Literature and Christianity, or even advocate the propriety of the separation. But from no other point can we contemplate this subject indifferently. If we at once believe in Christianity, and in Literature, we cannot logically remain satisfied with their disjunction. It will not stand for a moment, on such a footing, to say, as we have sometimes virtually heard it said, that we have recourse to Literature, not to have our piety quickened, but our taste gratified; that we do not expect,

and do not desire, the devotion of a David in Dryden or Pope, or the spirit of the Gospels in Hume or Gibbon. Every one in his own place. We are content to take Pope and Dryden as they are. Nay, we think that any special infusion of religion into their pages would only have tended to disgust, as has been exemplified in the case of some other writers who have attempted an incongruous mixture of piety and poetry. This is a style of argument which, if now but little heard, and certainly scarce needing refutation here, does yet, we apprehend, silently influence many minds in contemplating the relations of Literature and Christianity. It is long after the neck of a fallacy is broken till it altogether expires. It drags out a lingering existence in a lower class of minds after it has long ceased to live in a higher. And a fallacy such as the one in question, which Johnson, in his day, took under his protection, in his well-known and often refuted remarks on sacred poetry, may be imagined to have some special vitality in it. It is one, however, which could only exist in an atmosphere of gross misconception as to the nature of Christianity. No sooner is it recognised, what indeed was so little recognised during the last century, that Christianity is by no means merely a system of notions, with its set phraseology, but a Life animating and pervading the whole mental and active being, infusing a totally new spirit wherever it penetrateschanging from its inmost centre the complexion of individual and social character-than it is seen that it must identify itself with literature wherever it really lives. Casting, as it does, a new glory on nature and humanity, transfiguring both in a more radiant and significant light, how can it fail, where it is really present, to interfuse and blend itself with every phase and aspect of Literature?

It has been often lamentably forgotten that man, however complex and diverse in his nature, with the most varied susceptibilities, each going forth in its own way and seeking nurture after its kind, is not and cannot be, in any of the essential relations of his being, contradictory. What heaps of errors on all questions have accumulated under the practical forgetfulness of this truth! How have we seen the functions of man's intellectual, moral, and religious nature isolated, and even opposed to each other, as if, instead of being a harmonious growth of powers, centering in a mysterious unity of consciousness, he were a mere ill-assorted congeries of accidents-a "mere bundle of dry sticks," as John Sterling somewhere says-with no interior principle of coherence! In our country we have perhaps especially suffered from this absurd mode of contemplating human nature under arbitrary divisions. Religion, Morals, Literature have, with us, been separated and marked off in the most rigorous and detailed

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manner. As we pass from our theological to our moral writers, and again to our writers of Belles Lettres, how often do we seem to enter, not only distinct, but altogether opposite spheres of thought and opinion! We contemplate man, not only under different, but frequently conflicting aspects. It is no easy matter sometimes to discern the same human Substantive under the several representations set before us. The coloured glasses of theology, moral sciences, and Literature exhibit often a quite contrary image, and a strange and sceptical confusion of feeling is apt to ensue in the mind of the student. It will not be supposed for a moment that we deny the necessity of classing the various functions of man's being, and considering them, to a certain extent, apart. It is only to the extreme and exclusive manner in which this has been often done,-whereby, as it were, all sense of men's spiritual unity has been lost, that we object. In whatever special capacity we regard man, whether as a religious, moral, or æsthetical being, we ought never to forget that all his qualities are only several characteristics or manifestations of the same spiritual essence, which, however we may ideally separate them for convenience, are never actually separated.

It is impossible to over-estimate the evil effects which have flowed from the opposite arbitrary and artificial mode of contemplation. One of the greatest of these, however, is undoubtedly the common and fixed notion that has come to prevail of there being a valid division of sacred and profane in human nature and human life. In all relations the fatal error has extended itself, that in redeemed Humanity there are yet parts which may be esteemed common or unclean. This is the radical apostasy, seen in its grossest shape in Popery, but from which no form of Protestantism has been as yet wholly exempt. Within the kingdom of God there is and can be no such distinction of sacred and profane. All is sacred within,-all is profane without it. This dualism Christianity recognises in the broadest manner. Upon this as its fundamental condition it rests. But within the sphere of its operation this dualism entirely disappears. Wherever the Gospel enters it renews from the most hidden sources the whole being. It exalts and hallows all with a most sacred anointing. A Christian man, therefore, can never legitimately have any pleasures or pursuits that are not Christian. In all moods and all relations, and not merely in special moods and circumstances, he must be religious. His common thoughts, and every-day sympathies, and not merely his most exalted and solemn aspirations, must go forth from a Christian centre, and partake of a Christian character. Christianity, where it asserts its true nature, is pervadingly operative over the whole life, the whole

sphere of human thought and feeling, and not only over some special section or moments of it.

It must be very obvious from this that Literature can never be legitimately dissociated from religion. It can never be a valid and consistent step to acknowledge that Christianity is good in its place, and Literature good in its place, but that their provinces are quite apart and dissimilar. This reasoning can only prevail in conjunction with the most mechanical and perverted notions of religion-where it is viewed as a mere factitious increment to human nature-an ornamental crown, as it were, to be worn on solemn occasions, instead of, as it really is, a sacred fire kindled within the most secret affections, and irradiating the whole being.

In exact accordance with this conclusion we find that the characteristically irreligious period of our Literature just corresponds with the age of a negative and mechanical Christianity. Then when we see poetry, and philosophy, and history, most thoroughly and unhappily alienated from a Christian spirit, we see Christianity itself most dead. The separation grew out of no inherent repulsion of the one to the other, but out of the decay and perversion of both. In our earlier Literature, awakened and matured under the fresh impulse of the Reformation,-and while that positive and living apprehension of divine truth which it called forth still survived, we see a Christian influence working with an animating and pervading force. It was only when the genuine conception of Christianity as a divine Life, which must penetrate and sanctify every department of human sentiment and affection, began to die away, that we see our Literature assuming a decidedly unchristian character. And men were then content with such a Literature, just because they were content with such a religion. Where the latter did not affect to govern and transform the whole character, but was regarded merely as a sort of appendage to it, (honourable or otherwise as it might be,) it was only natural that it should remain disjoined from Literature. It is only where Christianity fulfils its true mission, of entering into the inward life of humanity, and purifying it along the whole course of its development, that Literature, with every other form of this development, must own its sway and bear its stamp.

The aspects of our recent and existing Literature bear out the truth of these remarks. Since the appearance of Foster's Essay, British Literature has undergone many changes. He himself, in a note to one of the later editions, remarks on these changes, chiefly in regard to style,-"The smooth elegance, the gentle graces, the amusing, easy, and not deep current of sentiment of which Addison is our finest example, have been," he says, "suc