Page:The poetical works of William Cowper (IA poeticalworksof00cowp).pdf/31

Rh knew him best by his shoe-buckle." This cruelty was at length discovered, the brute was expelled, and Cowper was removed from the school.

Meanwhile another trouble had fallen upon the child, inflammation of the eyes. Accordingly, he spent the next two years in the house of an oculist, leading a dull, and apparently not a healthy, life. However, his sight became better, and at ten years of age his father sent him to Westminster. Cowper has spoken at great length in his autobiography of the religious feelings and fancies of his boyish days. These need not detain us. Most children have strong though often transient religious impressions, and there is little in his account of his own which has not probably befallen other boys. Later in life he looked back upon his feelings through the light of his morbid fancies, and exaggerated their significance.

It would be more to the purpose if we could discover anything concerning the religious teaching which he received in his childhood, for unquestionably it left its mark upon him for many a year. All writers agree in holding that it was an evil time both in faith and practice. The company in which Mr. Pattison found himself in his excellent Essay on the Religious Thought of the 18th Century, has somewhat discredited that essay. But it is at any rate valuable for our present purpose, as gathering up into short compass the characteristics of the time in which young Cowper was brought up. "It was a period," writes Mr. Pattison in the opening of his essay, "of decay of religion, licentiousness of morals, public corruption, profaneness of language,—a day of rebuke and blasphemy. Even those who look with suspicion on the contemporary complaints from the Jacobite clergy of 'decay of religion,' will not hesitate to say that it was an age destitute of depth and earnestness; an age whose poetry was without romance, whose philosophy was without insight, and whose public men were without character; an age of 'light without love,' whose very merits were of the earth, earthy."

This is certainly true in the general, though there are certain qualifications which the author makes in the course of his essay. Our concern at this moment is with the theology of the period. And that may be summed up in a word—it was the period of the Evidences. Let us hear Mr. Pattison once more. "Dogmatic theology had ceased to exist; the exhibition of religious truth for practical purposes was confined to a few obscure writers. Every one who had anything to say on sacred subjects drilled it into an array of arguments against a supposed objector. Christianity appeared made for nothing else but to be 'proved;' what use to make of it when it was proved was not much thought about. The only quality in Scripture which was dwelt on was its credibility."

We may, then, fairly suppose that the worthy Rector of Berkhamsted was on a par with his brother clergy—that he would preach against the Deists, and marshal his arguments as well as he could; but that he would not go beyond