this estimate of clerical responsibilities Crabbe seems to have remained
stationary. But meantime the laity had been aroused to expect better
things. The ferment of the Wesley and Whitefield Revival was spreading
slowly but surely even among the remote villages of England. What Crabbe
and the bulk of the parochial clergy called "a sober and rational
conversion" seemed to those who had fallen under the fervid influence of
the great Methodist a savourless and ineffectual formality. The
extravagances of the Movement had indeed travelled everywhere in company
with its worthier fruits. Enthusiasm,--"an excellent good word until it
was ill-sorted,"--found vent in various shapes that were justly feared
and suspected by many of the clergy, even by those to whom "a reasonable
religion" was far from being "so very reasonable as to have nothing to
do with the heart and affections." It was not only the Moderates who saw
its danger. Wesley himself had found it necessary to caution his more
impetuous followers against its eccentricities. And Joseph Butler
preaching at the Rolls Chapel on "the Love of God" thought it well to
explain that in his use of the phrase there was nothing
"enthusiastical." But as one mischievous extreme generates another, the
influence of the prejudice against enthusiasm became disastrous, and the
word came too often to be confounded with any and every form of
religious fervency and earnestness. To the end of his days Crabbe, like
many another, regarded sobriety and moderation in the expression of
religious feeling as not only its chief safeguard but its chief
ornament. It may seem strange that the poetic temperament which Crabbe
certainly possessed never seemed to affect his views of life and human
nature outside the fields of poetic composition. He was notably
indifferent, his son tells us, "to almost all the proper objects of
taste. He had no real love for painting, or music, or architecture, or
for what a painter's eye considers as the beauties of landscape. But he
had a passion for science--the science of the human mind, first; then,