English Poetry in the Eighteenth Century [pp. 30-50]

THE PRINCE TON RE VIEW.
The influences which made the intellectual atmosphere into
which Pope was born, and which he drank in during early manhood, are on the philosophic side summed up in the metaphys
ics of Locke. His derivation of all our knowledge from external
sources, his denial of all inward fountains of belief, his hatred of
everything that approached to mysticism, his unsparing exposure of the folly of enthusiasm-all these exactly represent the
thoughtful side of Pope's generation. Severe and unflinching
reason was the one organ of truth; nothing to be avoided so
much as any intrusion of emotion or imagination, nothing so
admired as the triumphant march of the inductive philosophy.
Before it the universe had widened out into infinity; in that infinity law was everywhere, and gravitation ruled the remotest stars.
The bewildering vastness of the newly unfolded universe not
only banished ancient superstitions, but unsettled many stable
beliefs.
When Pope reached manhood deistic notions were in the
air; they were the atmosphere which educated men breathed,
whether they consciously adopted them or not. The sufficiency
of natural religion for man and the difficulties of Christianity
were urged with a power and ability that was quite new in
modern times. And tho the ablest intellects did not succumb
to deism, and tho the deists were even persecuted and treated
with social contempt, tho Addison, Swift, and Pope turned their
backs on them as social outlaws, yet neither these writers nor the
regular divines escaped the chilling touch of deism. Theologians
like Tillotson labored to show that Christianity was only common-sense sanctioned by miracles and confirmed by rewards and
punishments. Instead of the wild religious vagaries of the seventeenth century, the educated shrank with morbid dread from
extravagance and enthusiasm, recoiled alike from Romanism
and puritanism, and the divines dealt out no spiritual food but
dull moralizing sermons. There were indeed divines of another
sort than Tillotson-Bishop Butler, working in the deep places
of thought to undermine the scepticism of his day; William
Law, lifting up his voice for a more warm and vital, if for a mystical, religion. But these were prophets crying from the wilderness to a generation which heeded them not. Whatever ability
there may anywhere have been, the spirit of the age was prosaic
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