Dickinson, Goldsworthy Lowes, 1862-1932 / 2008-10-01 00:00:00

These had long been assailed in prose;
and under the influence of the attacks, within the pale of the Church
itself, some ministers had suppressed or modified the sterner aspects of
the creed,--a movement which Young's satires had ridiculed in the person
of a lady of fashion who gladly entertained the notion that the Deity
was too well-bred to call a lady to account for her offenses. Jenyns
versified this effeminization of Christianity, charged orthodoxy with
attributing cruelty to God, and asserted that faith in divine and human
kindness would banish all wrong and discord from the world. In 1735 a far
more important poet of sentimentalism arose in Henry Brooke, an
undeservedly neglected pioneer, who, likewise drawing his inspiration
from Shaftesbury, developed its theories with unusual consistency and
fullness. His _Universal Beauty_ voiced his sense of the divine immanence
in every part of the cosmos, and emphasized the doctrine that animals,
because they unhesitatingly follow the promptings of Nature, are more
lovely, happy, and moral than Man, who should learn from them the
individual and social virtues, abandon artificial civilization, and
follow instinct. Brooke, in the prologue of his _Gustavus Vasa_, shows
that he foresaw the political bearings of this theory; it is, in his
opinion, peculiarly a people "guiltless of courts, untainted, and unread"
that, illumined by Nature, understands and upholds freedom: but this was
a thought too advanced to be general at this time even among Brooke's
fellow-sentimentalists.
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