fantastic result, it would in the next place be very sad to consider, that these fallacies have been insinuated by the charms of poetry into countless thousands of minds, with a beguilement that has, first, diverted them from a serious attention to the gospel, then confirmed them in a habitual dislike of it, and finally operated to betray some of them to the doom which, beyond the grave, awaits the neglect or rejection of the religion of Christ. You have probably seen Pope cited as a christian poet, by some pious authors, whose anxiety to impress reluctant genius into an appearance of favouring christianity, has credulously seized on any occasional verse, which seemed an echo of the sacred doctrines. No reader can exceed me in admiring the discriminative thought, the shrewd moral observation, the finished and felicitous execution, and the galaxy of poetical beauties, which combine to give a peculiar lustre to the writings of Pope. But I cannot refuse to perceive, that almost every allusion in his lighter works to the names, the facts, and the topics, that specially belong to the religion of Christ, is in a style and spirit of profane banter; and that, in most of his graver ones, where he meant to be dignified, he took the utmost care to divest his thoughts of all the mean vulgarity of christian associations. "Off, ye profane !" might seem to have been his signal to all evangelical ideas, when he began his Essay on Man; and they were obedient, and fled; for if you detach the detail and illustrations, so as to lay bare the outline and general principles of the work, it will stand confest an elaborate attempt to redeem the whole theory of the condition and interests of man, both in life and death, from all the explanations imposed on it by an unphilosophical revelation from heaven. And in the happy riddance of this despised though celestial light, it exhibits a sort of moon-light vision, of thin impalpable abstractions, at which a speculatist may gaze, with a dubious wonder whether they be realities or phantoms; but which a practical man will in vain try to seize and turn to account; and which an evangelical man will disdain to accept in exchange for those forms of truth which his religion brings to him as real living friends, instructors, and consolers; which present themselves to him, at his return from a profitless adventure in that shadowy dreary region, with an effect like that of meeting the countenances of his affectionate domestic associates, on his awaking from the fantastic succession of vain efforts and perplexities, among strange objects, incidents, and people, in a bewildering dream.-But what deference to christianity was to be expected, when such a man as Bolingbroke was the genius whose imparted splendour was to illuminate, and the demigod whose approbation was to crown, the labours which, according to the wish and presentiment of the poet, were to conjoin these two venerable names in endless fame ? I it be said for some parts of these dim speculations, that though christianity comes forward as the practical dispensation of truth, yet there must be, in remote abstraction behind, some grand, ultimate, elementary truths, which this dispensation does not recognise, but even intercepts from our view by a system of less refined elements, in which doctrines of a more contracted, palpable, and popular form, of comparatively local purport and relation, are imposed in substitution for the higher and more general and abstracted truths-I answer, And what did the poet, or "the master of the poet and the song," know about those truths, and how did they come by their information. * He is so named somewhere in Pope's Works. A serious observer must acknowledge with regiet, that such a class of productions as novels, in which fo ly has tried to please in a greater number of shapes than the poet enumerates in the Paradise of Fools, is capable of producing a very considerable effect on the moral taste of the community. A large proportion of them however are probably of too slight and insipid a consistence to have any more specific counteraction to christian principles than that of mere folly in general; excepting indeed that the most flimsy of them will occasionally contribute their mite of mischief, by alluding to a christian profession, in a manner that identifies it with the cant by which hypocrites have aped it, or the extravagance with which fanatics have inflated or distorted it. But a great and direct force of counteracting influence is emitted from those, which eloquently display characters of eminent vigour and virtue, when it is a virtue having no basis in religion; a factitious thing resulting from the mixture of dignified pride with generous feeling; or constituted of those philosophical principles which are too often accompanied, in these works, by an avowed or strongly intimated contempt of the interference of any religion, especially the christian. If the case is mended in some of these productions into which an awkward religion has found its way, it is rather because the characters excite less interest of any kind, than because any which they do excite is favourable to religion. No reader is likely to be impressed with the dignity of being a christian by seeing, in one of these works, an attempt to combine that character with the fine gentleman, by means of a most ludicrous apparatus of amusements and sacraments, churches and theatres, morning-prayers and evening-balls. Nor will it perhaps be of any great service to the christian cause, that some others of them profess to exemplify and defend, against the cavils and scorn of infidels, a religion of which it does not appear that the writers would have discovered the merits, had it not been established by law. One may doubt whether any one will be more than amused by the venerable priest, who is introduced probably among libertine lords and giddy girls, to maintain the sanctity of terms, and attempt the illustration of doctrines, which these well-meaning writers do not perceive that the worthy gentleman's college, diocesan, and library, have but very imperfectly enabled him to understand. If the reader even wished to be more than amused, it is easy to imagine how much he would be likely to be instructed and affected, by such an illustration or defence of the christian religion, as the writer of a fashionable novel would deem a graceful or admissible expedient for filling up his plot. One cannot close such a review of our fine writers without melancholy reflections. That cause which will raise all its zealous friends to a sublime eminence on the last and most solemn day the world has to behold, and will make them great for ever, presented its claims full in sight of each of these authors in his time. The very lowest of those claims could not be less than a conscientious solicitude to beware of every thing that could in any point injure the sacred cause. This claim has been slighted by so many as have lent attraction to an order of moral sentiments greatly discordant with its principles. And so many are gone into eternity under the charge of having employed their genius, as the magicians their enchantments against Moses, to counteract the Saviour of the world. Under what restrictions, then, ought the study of polite literature to be conducted? I cannot but have foreseen that this question must return at the end of these observations; and I am sorry to have no better answer to give than before, when the question came in the way, inconveniently enough, to perplex the con clusion to be drawn from the considerations on the tendency of the classical literature. Polite literature will necessarily continue to be a large department of the grand school of intellectual and moral cultivation. The evils therefore which it may contain, will as certainly affect in some degree the minds of the successive pupils, and teachers also, as the hurtful influence of the climate, or of the seasons, will affect their bodies. To be thus affected, is a part of the destiny under which they are born, in a civilized country. It is indispensable to acquire the advantage; it is inevitable to incur the evil. The means of counteraction will amount, it is to be feared, to no more than palliatives. Nor can these be proposed in any specific method. All that I can do, is, to urge on the reader of taste the very serious duty of continually recalling to his mind, and if he be a parent or preceptor, of cogently representing to those he instructs, the real character of religion as exhibited in the christian revelation, and the reasons which command an inviolable adherence to it. FINIS. R. Clay, Son, and Taylor, Printers, |