To have our reason sound and sure?
Then let us keep our bosoms pure
Our fancies’ favourite flights suppress;
Prepare the body to endure,
And bend the mind to meet distress,
And then His Guardian care implore,
Whom demons dread and men adore.”
As the doctor recommends a moderate and temperate life as the best preventive of disease, and distrusts strong remedies and universal panaceas, so Crabbe (true to the best medical tradition) regards the pastoral work of healing the soul. Tolerant in most respects, he is severe on what the eighteenth century styled “enthusiasm,” and on sentimentalism in religion generally.
Thus, in “The Borough” we have in the letter on religious sects a description of the contempt the Calvinistic Methodists had for Church teaching:
“Hark to the Churchman; day by day he cries: