The plummet of the finite in its depths.”
God and His attributes are undoubtedly the poet’s noblest themes, and to celebrate the greatness and glory of His works, the wonders of His power, and the riches of His grace, have the highest efforts of human genius in all ages been directed. From the time when Moses sung his song of triumph as the waters closed over Pharaoh and his host, when the Prophets uttered their rapt predictions, and the inspired Psalmist sent forth those strains of supplication and thanksgiving which are still sounding daily in our ears, and stirring our hearts to devotion, down to the period when Milton wrote his great epic,
“Of man’s first disobedience, and the fruit
Of that forbidden tree, whose mortal taste
Brought death into the world,”
has the lyre been consecrated to the service of religion—has religious poetry been the most beautiful and touching, as well as the most lofty and sublime of all poetry. As Dr. Caunter well observes, “The noblest epics which have elicited the poetic genius of different countries, have been based upon subjects either immediately connected with, or remotely allied to, religion. The authors of the Mahabarat and the Ramayana, two Hindoo epics of high celebrity and extraordinary magnitude, extending each to several hundred thousand lines, of the Iliad and the Odyssey, of the Inferno, of the Jerusalem Delivered, of the Paradise Lost and Regained, have, either directly or consequentially, all made the Deity and His illimitable perfections the subjects of their immortal song.”
And so it is; every true poet is essentially a religious poet; his religion may not be Christianity, his views of the divine nature and attributes may be distorted, and he may be altogether ignorant of the great truths of scripture revelation, yet there will ever be in minds of the greatest reach and capacity, a striving after that which is good and holy, and a knowledge, approximating to the truth, of the relationship between the Creator and the created; for
“Spontaneously to God will tend the soul,
Like the magnetic needle to the pole.”
Would that all whose “tranced hands have woke the lyre,” and chanted such strains as the world would not willingly let die, had had such clear views of the nature of the obligation which lay on them to dedicate their powers to the service of true religion, as our own Milton, who commenced his immortal epic thus:—