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Christ , " granting him to have erred , he has in those instances only been detected , and most harshly condemned .
Then comes a list of qualities in which Unitarian piety is deficient , * no repentance towards God , " a piety without humility , without contrition , without love . This is mere ignorant rant . Without repentance , Unitarian ism allows the guilty no
hope . Without extolling humility , no man can believe in Jesus ; and the leading sentiment of our religion as the religion of Christ is this , " God is love / ' Mr . B . repeatedly speaks of mankind and himself in scripture language as " dust ; " acknowledges his entire obligation to the mercy of God ; deplores the weakness and folly and vice that stain our nature , and throughout his poems exalts the Deity and praises man only as the image of *
his Maker , and a 3 deriving all his power and goodness from him . But this is not enough . He should speak as sincerity will allow none but the vilest of mankind to speak of themselves . He should extol as mysteries the most blasphemous perversions of the doctrines of Jesus ; or he will have a piety without cant , which in this canting age is more galling to the saints than the most unlicensed
profligacy and depravity . Our Reviewer bolder grows as he proceeds to blacken the fair fame of his author , and charges him " with the almost total avoidance of the dialect of scripture . " By dialect , this nice discerner means the words or
language of the Bible . What a base , impudent and false charge is this ! In the first quotation in the review there are eleven passages ; in the second , there are three ; in the third , there are fifteen ; in the fourth , ten passages where the expressions are furnished by the Scriptures . And the whole volume is full of images and expressions taken from the Old and New Testament : not to mention the
versions noticed by the Reviewer of four portions of the Bible , and a beautiful version of the beginning of the xivth chapter of John which he
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has not noticed . The Reviewer must know this to be the case , or he must not know the compositions he was abusing , or he must be astonishingly ignorant of the language of holy writ ; and the blame does probably fall
equally upon his head and heart „ To complete the condemnation , this Reviewer decides , that " in the polite world / ' ( which I take to mean the intelligent part of society , ) ' Mr . B . ' s c Matins and Vespers 5 may rank with the Hebrew Melodies of Lord Byron , and the sicklier strains of Anacreon
Moore ; " and thus * damns him to everlasting fame" in a breath . If the Reviewer allude to the Sacred Melodies of Moore , which are most beautiful and often devotional , I pity his taste who can call , * ' O thou that driest the mourner ' s tears / ' or , " Go ,
let me weep , " or the fine martial song of Israel ' s triumph , " sickly strains . " And Mr . Bowring will willingly take his station by the side of the first poets of the age in the chaster efforts
of their muse , if the Reviewer can cast him , in the public opinion , into such company . What principles of taste , then , have guided this modern CEdipus so incorrectly and unjustly to judge ? It is a taste formed in the conventicle ,
and degraded by constant converse with the most faulty class of English poetry . And as this Reviewer is confident in his religious , so he boldly avows his poetic , creed . But give us , we say ( and affirm ) Sternhold and Hopkins , or the Scotch Psalms , rather than such melo-dramatic devotion as
this . " That a man with such taste should err in judging of poetry is to be expected , but that he should make the illiberal and unjust observations he has made upon Mr . Bowling ' s poetry , merely to abuse a sect , whose principles he does not understand , is
a melancholy proof of the power of bigotry to blight ail the best affections of our nature , to pervert the understanding , and to deprave the moral sense . Let him go and sing with the heart and understanding such devotional and affecting- strains of his chosen poets as these :
" A man was famous , and was had In es-ti-ma-tion , According as he lifted up His axe thick trees upon ,
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630 On the Eclectic Review of Bowing ' s Poems .
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Citation
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Monthly Repository (1806-1838) and Unitarian Chronicle (1832-1833), Nov. 2, 1823, page 630, in the Nineteenth-Century Serials Edition (2008; 2018) ncse.ac.uk/periodicals/mruc/issues/vm2-ncseproduct1790/page/14/
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