s refers
to religion as the great despot and impostor of mankind.

The _Revolt of Islam_ stigmatises "Faith" as "an obscene worm." The
sonnet on the Fall of Bonaparte concludes with a reference to "Bloody
Faith, the foulest birth of time." Shelley frequently conceives Faith as
serpentine and disgusting. In _Rosalind and Helen_ he writes--

Grey Power was seated
Safely on her ancestral throne;
And Faith, the Python, undefeated,
Even to its blood-stained steps dragged on
Her foul and wounded train.

In the great and splendid _Ode to Liberty_ the image undergoes a
Miltonic sublimation.

Like one fierce cloud over a waste of waves
Hung tyranny; beneath, sat deified
The sister-pest, congregator of slaves.

Invariably does the poet class religion and oppression
together--"Religion veils her eyes: Oppression shrinks
aghast."--"Destruction's sceptred slaves, and Folly's mitred
brood."--"And laughter fills the Fane, and curses shake the Throne."

Mr. Herbert Spencer writes with learning and eloquence about the Power
of the Universe and the Unknowable. Shelley pricked this bubble of
speculation in the following passage:

What is that Power?
Some moonstruck sophist stood
Watching the shade from his own soul upthrown
Fill Heaven and darken Earth, and in such mood
The Form he saw and worshipped was his own,
His likeness in the world's vast mirror shown.

In one verse of the _Ode to Liberty_ the poet exclaims:

O that the free would stamp the impious name
Of ------ into the dust or write it there.

What is the omitted word? Mr. Swinburne says the only possible word
is--God. We agree with him. Anything else would be a ridiculous
anti-climax, and quite inconsistent with the powerful description of--

This foul gordian word,
Which, weak itself as stubble, yet can bind
Into a mass, irrefragably firm,
The axes and the rods that awe mankind.

"Pope" and "Christ" are alike impossible. With respect to "mankind" they
are but local designations. The word must be universal. It is _God_.

The glorious speech of the Spirit of the Hour, which terminates the
third Act of _Prometheus Unbound_--that superb drama of emancipate
Humanity--lumps together "Thrones, altars, judgment seats, and prisons,"
as parts of one gigantic system of spiritual and temporal misrule. Man,
when redeemed from falsehood and evi