had sanctified all human life; if every sphere of Man's thought and action was in idea, and ought to be in fact, a channel through which God thought and God acted— then there was no subject which did not in the end run up into Theology, which might not in the end be made religious. I wished then to claim as belonging to the province of the Christian ministry, political, historical, scientific, and artistic work, in their connexion with Theology; and to an extent greater than I had hoped for, the effort, so far as I have carried it, has succeeded. The blame of many accustomed to hear nothing but sermons from the pulpit has been wholly outweighed in my mind by the fact of the attendance of many persons who were before uninterested in religious subjects at all. And then, neither the blame nor the praise of the present is any proof of the goodness or badness of a thing. The Poets themselves formed the only text book I have used, but in the two first lectures, when treating of the growth of the Poetry of Man and of Nature, I have had much help from an admirable Essay of Mr. F. Palgrave's, which appeared in the "Quarterly Review" of July, 1862. MANCHESTER SQUARE, STOPFORD A. BROOKE. LONDON, April, 1874. THEOLOGY IN THE ENGLISH POETS. LECTURE I. FROM POPE TO COWPER. THE Lectures which I begin to-day, and which I hope to be able to carry on Sunday after Sunday in the afternoons, are on the Theology which may be found in the English Poets. Spoken from this place, they will not enter into poetical criticism, or attempt to estimate the poet; for that would carry me too far from the main subject, within the limits of which I shall endeavour always to remain. The subject is delightful, and it is not difficult to define its special interest. The Poets of England ever since Cowper have been more and more theological, till we reach such men as Tennyson or Browning, whose poetry is overcrowded with theology. But the theology of the poets is different from that of Churches and Sects, in this especially, that it is not formulated into propositions, but is the natural growth of their own hearts. They are, by their very nature, strongly individual; they grow more by their own special genius than by the influence of the life of the |