eir loose and unmoralized freedom, the inherent dangers which attach
to the proclamation of spiritual liberty, and they furnish a clear
historical illustration of the truth that progress toward a religion
grounded upon the inner life of man can only be slowly and painfully
achieved.

{321}

The religious poets of this period, on the other hand, furnish clear
evidence of the constructive, organizing and fusing power of these
newly dawning spiritual insights, as they worked upon the minds of
highly gifted and endowed persons. Poets are not Reformers. They do
not consider themselves "commissioned" to reconstruct old systems of
thought, old forms of faith and old types of church-organization, or to
re-interpret the Gospel, the way of salvation and the communion of
saints. Their mission is a different one, though it is no less
spiritual and, in the best sense of the word, no less practical. The
poets are always among the first to feel the direction of spiritual
currents, and they are very sure voices of the deeper hopes and
aspirations of their epoch. All the religious poets of this particular
period reveal very clearly the influence of the ideas which were
central in the teaching of the spiritual leaders whom we have been
studying. The reader of Milton needs no argument to convince him of
the fact that, however far removed the great poet was in most points of
view from the contemporary Quakers, he nevertheless insisted
emphatically, as they did, on the illumination of the soul by a Light
within; "a celestial Light," he calls it in _Paradise Lost_, which
shines inward and irradiates the mind through all her powers, and
supplies an inward sight of things invisible to sense[2]--a Light which
steadily increases as it is used by the obedient soul.[3] The origin
of this inward Light, according to Milton's thought, is the eternal
Word of God, who is before all worlds and who is the source of all
revelation, whether inward or outward: the Spirit that prefers

Before all temples the upright heart and pure.[4]

The minor religious poets of the period had not, however, formed their
intellectual outlook under the imperial sway of theological systems of
thought in anything like {322} the degree that Milton had. They
reflect the freer and less rigidly formulated currents of thought.
"All divinity is love, or wonder," John Donne wrote in one of his
poems. No phrase could better express the intense religious life of
the g