What, then, is the defect which will for ever prevent Shakspere from receiving the entire homage of the heart of man? In a sentence, the mirror is turned towards earth alone, and in its very completeness hides heaven from the view. "It would be impossible," says a contemporary writer, "to find a more remarkable example of a genius wide as the world, yet not in any sense above the world, than our great English poet's." And again, "it would be almost impossible to find any great Christian poet whose type of imagination is so entirely and singularly contrasted with that of the Bible, or in whom that peculiar faculty which, for want of a better term, we are forced to call the thirst for the supernatural, is more remarkably absent."
This statement we accept, in full remembrance of the morals manifold, the theological references, and Scriptural parallels, which are scattered through the poet's writings. Bishop Wordsworth, of St. Andrew's, and others, have spent much labour, not altogether unprofitably, in showing that Shakspere knew his Bible: while, oddly enough, among the passages expunged by the estimable Bowdler, the Biblical references occupy a considerable place, as though it had been profanity to introduce them in such a connexion! The most is made of Shakspere's religiousness by the present Archbishop of Dublin, in a sermon preached at Stratford-upon-Avon at the Shakspere Tercentenary, in 1864.
He knew the deep corruption of our fallen nature, the desperate wickedness of the heart of man; else he would never have put into the mouth of a prince of stainless life such a confession as this: 'I am myself indifferently honest: but yet I could accuse one of such things that it were better my mother had not borne me.... with more offences at my beck than I have thoughts to put them in, imagination to give them shape, or time to act them in.' He has set forth the scheme of our redemption in words as lovely as have ever flowed from the lips of uninspired man:—
'Why, all the souls that live were forfeit once,
And He that might the vantage best have Look,
Found out the remedy.'
He has put home to the holiest here their need of an infinite forgiveness from Him who requires truth in the inward parts:
'How would you be,
If He, which is the top of judgment, should
But judge you as you are?'
"He was one who was well aware what a stewardship was his own in those marvellous gifts which had been entrusted to him, for he has himself told us:—
'Heaven does with us as we with torches do,
Not light them for themselves: for if our virtues
Did not go forth of us,'twere all alike
As if we had them not.'
And again he has told us that
'Spirits are not finely touched
But for fine issues:'