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that "the poets even more than the theologians are the representative men of their own age, the most prophetic men of their own time." Yet I can quite understand that, when I propose to take Shakespeare as England's representative poet for my purpose to-day, some such objections as these should be put to me.

Can you speak, even in the Shelley sense, of Shakespeare as a national prophet? Can you speak, indeed, in any representative sense at all, of Shakespeare as even a religious man, a good man? It is true, of course, we are well aware, that in the plays of Shakespeare there is much allusion to religious institutions and to religious traditions. Prominent among his dramatis personæ are the official representatives of religion-monks and friars, bishops and cardinals. In his poetry there is even mention of saints, although none, at least of the male sex, are ever presented to us in person. Biblical ideas, biblical phrases are quite common, for Shakespeare certainly knew his Bible. It did not need the book of painful quotation by Bishop Wordsworth of St. Andrews to prove that. Any pupil of the Stratford Grammar School of his day, would probably show a similar familiarity with the words of Scripture. But there is no real sense of religion in all this, no expression at anyrate of any deep personal religious conviction. Shakespeare does not even put the expression of such conviction into the mouths of his characters. His clergy, for example, if they have any wisdom at all, have an earthly, not a spiritual wisdom. Friar Lawrence culls his herbs like a more benevolent Medea. Cardinal Wolsey flings away ambition with a profoundly Pagan despair. Juliet goes to shrift, it is true, but it is to

arrange her love affairs. Ophelia ought to go to a nunnery to forget hers. Hamlet sees a true ghost-the representative apparently of hidden ultimate power, a messenger of divine justice-but he is so little Christian that shortly after he is ready to die with a sacred duty still consciously undone. And so on, and so on. Now, in answer to objections such as these, let me say this.

And in the first place let me read to you this passage from a thoughtful writer of the last generation :

"If," says the late Mr. Walter Bagehot" if the underlying and almighty essence of this world be good, then it is likely that the writer who most deeply approached to that essence will be himself good. There is a religion of week-days as well as of Sundays, of 'cakes and ale' as well as of pews and altar-cloths. This England lay before Shakespeare as it lies before us all, with its green fields and its long hedgerows, and its many trees, and its great towns and its endless hamlets, and its motley society, and its long history and its bold exploits, and its gathering power, and he saw that they were good. To him, perhaps, more than any one else, has it been given to see that they were a great unity, a great religious object; that if you could only descend to the inner life, to the deep things, to the secret principles of its noble vigour, to the essence of character, to what we know of Hamlet and seem to fancy of Ophelia, we might, so far as we are capable of so doing, understand the nature which God has made. Let us then think of him,

* "Twelfth Night," iii. 2.

not as a teacher of dry dogmas, or a sayer of hard sayings, but as

A priest to us all

Of the wonder and bloom of the world'*.

a teacher of the hearts of men and women: one from whom may be learned something of that inmost principle that ever modulates

With murmurs of the air,

And motions of the forest and the sea,

And voice of living beings, and woven hymns

Of night and day and the deep heart of man.'"†

Mr. Bagehot, I think, is right. Shakespeare was not a prophet or a preacher, of course, in the ordinary sense, but perhaps he was something better and higher. He rises above mere morals, and preaches to us, prophesies to us, of life. He gives us men and women to know, instead of maxims or proverbs.

The Gospel of Jesus Christ, remember, is not theology only, not morality only, but the story of a Personality, of a Life; of a Personality and a Life in which all men can see the perfection of human character, the divinity of forgiveness, of perpetual mercy, of constant patience, of everlasting gentleness, the stainless purity of thought and motive, the clear-sighted perception of a soul of goodness even in things evil, the unfailing sense of the equal providence of justice, the royalty of witness to the sovereignty of truth. Now is there any prophet of our modern dispensation who knew these things

* Matthew Arnold, "Youth of Nature."

+ Shelley, "Alastor."

better, or could prophesy of them more vividly through life, through "words made flesh," than did Shakespeare?

In an evil day too, remember, Shakespeare prophesied ; he taught the most gracious and gentle precepts-too good, I fancy, almost to have been listened to if men had quite known what they were receiving. There are some things in Shakespeare I almost think that he might have been burnt for had he been a theologian, just as certainly that there are things about politics, about civil liberty, which, had he been a politician, would have brought him to the block.

But God made him a player, and neither of these other things. And so he could teach a message to his age which it much needed-lessons of peace, gentleness, mercy, patience, long-suffering, tolerance. Shakespeare was no priest, it is true; he waved no censer, yet who can tell, when we consider the thousands of souls who have learnt the lessons of Shakespeare, how much he has done to humanise, and therefore to Christianise, mankind? His doctrine may not be preached to men in set dogma and maxim. It may rather perhaps distil as dew. Yet many a man who has read the "Merchant of Venice," or pondered over that sad drama of a sinful soul in "Macbeth," or in "King Lear," has been startled and terrified at the thought that the folly of the king and the ingratitude of his daughters are no mere accidents in an evil world; or who has watched in "Hamlet" that terrible attempt of the wicked king to pray; or who in "Measure for Measure" has grasped the key to that marvellously sad, but most moral story, in the lines

"He who the sword of Heaven would bear

Must be holy as severe"

has heard sermons more conscience-piercing probably than any homilies of the pulpit, lessons, I venture to think, as poignant and as tender as any that have fallen on the world since the days of the apostles.3

There is, moreover, a further consideration which I would venture to advance in answer to those who find it difficult to accept Shakespeare as in any sense a fair representative of the religious attitude of Elizabethan Englishmen towards Christ and Christianity. And it is this: I will put it in the form of a question to the students of Elizabethan Church history;-I may take it for granted that such student will be familiar with the distinctive notes of modern English Churchmanship (1) the personal devotion of the individual soul to Jesus Christ as the central object of worship and as the central motive of Deity; (2) the sober standard of Christian character as governed by a traditional and religious reverence for the heroes of faith, the saints of God; (3) the ideal life of a faith which can only be lived in its fulness in a society— in a Church, of which Christ is the only and the immortal Head;—and I will ask such student where, in the writings of the prominent theologians of the sixteenth century in England, do you find the expression of these distinctive notes?

You will, I think, find them with difficulty. In the opening scenes of the Reformation drama you will, it is true, find them in the sayings of men like Dean Colet and Grocyn, like Sir Thomas More and Erasmus.

"Gracious God!" exclaims Colet in one of his sermons, "here may one perceive how clean and how

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