On this page

• Text (1)

  Note: This text has been automatically extracted via Optical Character Recognition (OCR) software. The text has not been manually corrected and should not be relied on to be an accurate representation of the item.

  • 

    Untitled Article

• Transcript

  • Note: This text has been automatically extracted via Optical Character Recognition (OCR) software. The text has not been manually corrected and should not be relied on to be an accurate representation of the item.

    Additionally, when viewing full transcripts, extracted text may not be in the same order as the original document.

    Untitled Article

    ' She is a woman who has tried the world And found it a deceit ; therefore she keeps Her gentle Raymond like a Corydon , Watching his silly sheep among the fields . Of course f her gentle Raymond * is prepared to be imposed upon by the deceit . She had kept the wax soft for the reception of the fiend ' s seal . This capital mistake should have been more strongly marked . ' Philip of Maine' is on ambition ; a long and bustling drama , but to our taste the least pleasing of the whole . A disappointed

    young aristocrat becomes a demagogue , and then a despot , and so goes to the devil . The tale is somewhat trite . The series concludes , very beautifully and impressively , with f Sorrow of Theresa / in which the demon endeavours to make maternal fondness a rack on which to torture a woman into the language of impiety . He is not only foiled of his intended victim , but loses one who was previously in his grasp ,

    the stern and reprobate husband , whose heart is touched and purified by her unconquerable goodness . In conclusion , the spirit of evil , though successful in dragging down to perdition four out of the seven on whom he had tried his temptations , is pronounced , by an angel of truth , to have failed , because the miserable example of those whom he seduced * had warned many more of danger , and become the means of their salvation .

    While we award strong and heartfelt praise to this poem , both in its conception and execution , there are some objections which , regarding it rather as a moral than as a literary production , il is incumbent on us to express . We think it is constructed on too narrow a basis , too limited a view of the struggles , perils , and glories of man ' s moral nature ; that the temptations are too remote from the actual trials of life * in the present state of society ; and that sometimes the temptation , in order to give it sufficient power , is so framed as to render doubtful the reality of the virtue to which it is opposed . No less than three of the dramas relate entirely to religious

    faith or trust , the trial of which is also specifically included in a fourth . This is out of proportion for a temptation which must chiefly address itself to weak and ignorant minds . The prevalent modes of teaching religion unhappily keep many minds in that condition , but the knowledge even of history and science throw so much light on the benignity of the providential plan ,

    as to drive the peril very much into that circle within which priestcraft domineers in darkness over feebleness . There might also have been much more touching delineations of the corrupting influences of cupidity , drawn from the existing state of society , than those which are afforded by the crimes of the Miser and the Pirate . The peculiar manifestation is so alien from , common life , that it keeps out of sight how thoroughly the vice itself is

    Untitled Article

    400 The Seven Temptations .

• Citation
  • Monthly Repository (1806-1838) and Unitarian Chronicle (1832-1833), June 2, 1834, page 400, in the Nineteenth-Century Serials Edition (2008; 2018) ncse.ac.uk/periodicals/mruc/issues/vm2-ncseproduct2634/page/18/