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    then with persecution in all its . forms , of word as well as of deed , and let us Strive to communicate by gentleness and intreaty , by argument and evidence , the higher blessings of which as Christians we are made partakers . Had such been the views of the priesthood of this kingdom they would have better appreciated than they did the character of Lord Byron in" respect tc * religion — they would have persecuted him less with their scorpiontongues— his name would have stood higher-in the estimation of the people , and his heart been saved from many a depraving influence . Outlawed by the clergy the noble poet was driven to defy in word that which he felt

    strongly in his soul , and by efforts to represent himself as bad at least as he was represented by the priests ; and thus he actually rendered himself worse than he otherwise would have been . Still Lord Byron was not destitute at any period of his life of the power of religion . As a sentiment he felt it in his earliest—in his worst—in his best , that is , his latest days . Nor do we doubt that he knew more of the power of religious emotion than many of

    those who misunderstood and maligned his character . A true poet must be devotional . The religious feelings are an inherent element in the poet's soul . The spirit of poetry is intimately allied with the spirit of religion ; they are based on the same lofty susceptibilities ; they are kindled by the same imagination , and fed by the same affluence of feeling . Inspiration transmutes the man into the poet , and without inspiration no one can be fervently devotional . The fine susceptibilities of Byron ' s soul received , at

    an early period of his life , a devotional dye from those fountains of devotional feeling which many of the writings of the Old-Testament Scriptures so abundantly supply . This baptism into religion was too congenial with his innate dispositions , and too pervasive in its influence for him ever in after life to lose its sanctifying power . At an early period indeed he was led by the strength of his native genius to shake himself free from the shackles of human creeds with their absurd and stultifying dogmas . Yet evidence is

    not wanting to shew that he even then knew how to discriminate between religion and its forms , reverencing his Maker while he renounced the impositions of his fellow-mortals . During his youth and his early manhood , the friends of his bosom were men fitted not to strengthen but impair his religious convictions , and at this period of his life he indulged in a style of speaking on religious matters , reckless , offensive , and disgusting . Often we doubt not his heart belied his

    tongue—In his detestation of hypocrisy Lord Byron ran into the opposite extreme of self-depreciation , and especially on subjects of religion , took a strange and a culpable pleasure in exhibiting himself in the darkest colours . But even in his wildest excesses he was not destitute of religious feeling . He denied ,

    we know , the current opinions of the religious world ; he doubted of the soul ' s immortality ; but he was never without God in the midst of his own creation ; he was not , as his enemies asserted , an Atheist ; he was not an Atheist even in profession , much less in feeling * No ; his soul was too keenly alive to the beautiful and the sublime in the works of , creation to allow him to

    entertain serious doubts gf the existence of a Creator * Nor was he a willing believer in the mortality of man . He felt his creed to be cold and uncomforting—he felt the insufficiency of this world to satisfy the wants of his soul . There was in him an intense and incessant craving after a higher and purer and richer happiness than is here to be found—after a world of sunnier skies ., and less misery— -of fuller bliss and less alloy , than are even his

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    608 Lord Byron ' s theology .

• Citation
  • Monthly Repository (1806-1838) and Unitarian Chronicle (1832-1833), Sept. 2, 1830, page 608, in the Nineteenth-Century Serials Edition (2008; 2018) ncse.ac.uk/periodicals/mruc/issues/vm2-ncseproduct2588/page/24/