Page:Adams - Essays in Modernity.djvu/27

Rh the other had been for the actual Evangelical Church of England. What, then, he was now facing was in reality nothing very formidable from the intellectual and critical side. Its danger lay in its hold on his emotions. The amount of sheer thought, of powerful and fecund ideas, in both of the early phases of the movement was slight. Byron and Shelley speak through the heart and spirit, not through the brain. The social and religious creeds of Coleridge and Wordsworth scarcely count. It was no very aggressive and convincing criticism of life and nature, of Literature, and Art, and Science, which afflicted the Christianising poet of 'In Memoriam.' He admits quite ingenuously at the end that he never really quite meant it all.

'Whatever I have said or sung, Some bitter notes my harp would give, Yea, tho' there often seem'd to live A contradiction on the tongue,

Yet Hope had never lost her youth; She did but look thro' dimmer eyes; Or Love but played with gracious lies, Because he felt so fixed in truth.'

He reveals, again and again, all his childlike, commercial egotism with a perfect simplicity of primal shamelessness. 'Does Job serve God for nought?' Let science prove him not to be a little God in his own style, prove him not to have an eternal