The Worlds Best Poetry, Volume 4 | Page 2

is related to poetry as life is related to art. Religion is life, the life of God in the soul of man--the response of man's spirit to the attractions of the divine Spirit. Poetry is an interpretation of life. Religious poetry endeavors to express, in beautiful forms, the facts of the religious life. There is poetry that is not religious; poetry which deals only with that which is purely sensuous, poetry which does not hint at spiritual facts, or divine relations; and there is religion which has but little to do with poetry: but the highest religious thoughts and feelings are greatly served by putting them into poetic forms; and the greatest poetry is always that which sets forth the facts of the religious life. "Without love to man and love to God," says Dr. Strong, "the greatest poetry is impossible. Mere human love to God is not enough to stir the deepest chords either in the poet or in his readers. It is the connection of human love with the divine love that gives it permanence and security."[A]
If, then, religion is the supreme experience of the human spirit, and that experience finds its most perfect literary expression in poetry, the present volume ought to contain a precious collection of the best literature. And any one who wished to give to a friend a volume which would convey to him the essential elements of religion would probably be safe to choose this volume rather than any prose treatise upon theology ever printed. He who reads this book through will get a clearer and truer idea of what the religious life is than any philosophical discussion could give him. For this poetry is an attempt to express life, not to explain it. It offers pictures or reports rather than analyses of religious experience. It gives utterance to the real life of religion in the individual soul, and is not a generalization of religious thoughts and feelings.
The sources from which this collection has been drawn are abundant and varied. The psalmody and hymnology of the church furnish a vast preserve, the exploration of which would be a large undertaking. It must be confessed that the pious people who had in their hands some of the ancient hymn-books were justified in feeling that religion and poetry were not closely related, for many of the hymns they were wont to sing were guiltless of any poetic character. It was too often evident that the hymn-writer had been more intent on giving metrical form to proper theological concepts than on giving utterance to his own religious life. But the feeling has been growing that in hymns, at any rate, life is more than dogma; and we have now some collections of hymns that come pretty near being books of poetry. The improvement in this department of literature within the past twenty-five years has been marked. There is still, indeed, in many hymnals, and especially in hymnals for Sunday schools and social meetings, much doggerel; but large recent contributions of hymns which are true poetry, many of the best of them from American sources, have made it possible to furnish our congregations with admirable manuals of praise.
The indebtedness of religion to poetry which is thus expressed in the hymnology of the church is very large. Probably many of us are indebted for definite and permanent religious conceptions and impressions quite as much to felicitous phrases of hymns as to any words of sermon or catechism. Our most positive convictions of religious truth are apt to come to us in some line or stanza that tells the whole story. The rhythm and the rhyme have helped to fix it and hold it in the memory.
This is true not only of the hymns of the church but of many poems that are not suitable for singing. English poetry is especially rich in meditative and devotional elements, and of no period has this been more true than of the nineteenth century. Cowper, Wordsworth, Coleridge, the Brownings, Tennyson and Matthew Arnold, on the other side of the sea, with Bryant, Longfellow, Emerson, Whittier, Lowell, Holmes, Lanier, Sill and Gilder on this side--these and many others--have made most precious additions to our store of religious poetry. The century has been one of great perturbations in religious thought; the advent of the evolutionary philosophy threatened all the theological foundations, and there was need of a thorough revision of the dogmas which were based on a mechanical theology, and of a reinterpretation of the life of the Spirit. In all this the poets have given us the strongest help. The great poet cannot be oblivious of these deepest themes. He need not be a dogmatician, indeed he cannot be, for his business is insight, not ratiocination; but the problems which theology is trying