before them, and a vivid appreciation of the importance of the moral law,
are the staple of the best literature of the time."[11]

The God of the deists was, in truth, hardly more impersonal than the
abstraction worshiped by the orthodox--the "Great Being" of Addison's
essays, the "Great First Cause" of Pope's "Universal Prayer," invoked
indifferently as "Jehovah, Jove, or Lord." Dryden and Pope were
professed Catholics, but there is nothing to distinguish their so-called
sacred poetry from that of their Protestant contemporaries. Contrast the
mere polemics of "The Hind and the Panther" with really Catholic poems
like Southwell's "Burning Babe" and Crashaw's "Flaming Heart," or even
with Newman's "Dream of Gerontius." In his "Essay on Man," Pope
versified, without well understanding, the optimistic deism of Leibnitz,
as expounded by Shaftesbury and Bolingbroke. The Anglican Church itself
was in a strange condition, when Jonathan Swift, a dean and would-be
bishop, came to its defense with his "Tale of a Tub" and his ironical
"Argument against the Abolition of Christianity." Among the Queen Anne
wits Addison was the man of most genuine religious feeling. He is always
reverent, and "the feeling infinite" stirs faintly in one or two of his
hymns. But, in general, his religion is of the rationalizing type, a
religion of common sense, a belief resting upon logical deductions, a
system of ethics in which the supernatural is reduced to the lowest
terms, and from which the glooms and fervors of a deep spiritual
experience are almost entirely absent. This "parson in a tie-wig" is
constantly preaching against zeal, enthusiasm, superstition, mysticism,
and recommending a moderate, cheerful, and reason religion.[12] It is
instructive to contrast his amused contempt for popular beliefs in
ghosts, witches, dreams, prognostications, and the like, with the
reawakened interest in folk lore evidenced by such a book as Scott's
"Demonology and Witchcraft."