worship, I repeat, is not what we commonly imply either by paganism
or by pantheism. For in pagan countries, though the gods may have
originally represented natural forces, yet the conception of them
soon becomes anthropomorphic, and they are reverenced as
transcendent _men_; and, on the other hand, pantheism is generally
characterized by an indifference to things in the concrete, to
Nature in detail; so that the Whole, or Universe, with which the
Stoics (for instance) sought to be in harmony, was approached not by
contemplating external objects, but rather by ignoring them.

Yet here I would be understood to speak only in the most general
manner. So congruous in all ages are the aspirations and the hopes
of men that it would be rash indeed to attempt to assign the moment
when any spiritual truth rises for the first time on human
consciousness. But thus much, I think, may be fairly said, that the
maxims of Wordsworth's form of natural religion were uttered before
Wordsworth only in the sense in which the maxims of Christianity
were uttered before Christ. To compare small things with great--or
rather, to compare great things with things vastly greater--the
essential spirit of the _Lines near Tintern Abbey_ was for practical
purposes as new to mankind as the essential spirit of the _Sermon on
the Mount_. Not the isolated expression of moral ideas, but their
fusion into a whole in one memorable personality, is that which
connects them for ever with a single name. Therefore it is that
Wordsworth is venerated; because to so many men--indifferent, it may
be, to literary or poetical effects, as such--he has shown by the
subtle intensity of his own emotion how the contemplation of Nature
can be made a revealing agency, like Love or Prayer,--an opening, if
indeed there be any opening, into the transcendent world.