sulted their wants and interests, not its own pride
and arrogance. It first promulgated the equality of mankind in the
community of duties and benefits. It denounced the iniquities of the chief
Priests and Pharisees, and declared itself at variance with principalities
and powers, for it sympathizes not with the oppressor, but the oppressed.
It first abolished slavery, for it did not consider the power of the will
to inflict injury, as clothing it with a right to do so. Its law is good,
not power. It at the same time tended to wean the mind from the grossness
of sense, and a particle of its divine flame was lent to brighten and
purify the lamp of love!

There have been persons who, being sceptics as to the divine mission of
Christ, have taken an unaccountable prejudice to his doctrines, and have
been disposed to deny the merit of his character; but this was not the
feeling of the great men in the age of Elizabeth (whatever might be their
belief) one of whom says of him, with a boldness equal to its piety:

"The best of men
That e'er wore earth about him was a sufferer;
A soft, meek, patient, humble, tranquil spirit;
The first true gentleman that ever breathed."

This was old honest Deckar, and the lines ought to embalm his memory to
every one who has a sense either of religion, or philosophy, or humanity,
or true genius. Nor can I help thinking, that we may discern the traces of
the influence exerted by religious faith in the spirit of the poetry of
the age of Elizabeth, in the means of exciting terror and pity, in the
delineation of the passions of grief, remorse, love, sympathy, the sense
of shame, in the fond desires, the longings after immortality, in the
heaven of hope, and the abyss of despair it lays open to us.[122]

The literature of this age then, I would say, was strongly influenced
(among other causes), first by the spirit of Christianity, and secondly by
the spirit of Protestantism.

The effects of the Reformation on politics and philosophy may be seen in
the writings and history of the next and of the following ages. They are
still at work, and will continue to be so. The effects on the poetry of
the time were chiefly confined to the moulding of the character, and
giving a powerful impulse to the intellect of the country. The immediate
use or application that was made of religion to subjects of imagination
and fiction was not (from an obvious ground of separation) so di