Dean Stanley delivered an eloquent address at Dundee yester- day
week on " Religion, Science, and Literature," which he em- bodied in the study of three contemporaries, or almost contem- poraries,—Calvin, Galileo, and Shakespeare. He treated Calvin as the great theologian of predestination, which he regarded as a strained and extreme form of, but still a form of, the gospel of Providential guidance, and claimed for Calvin in this matter no less a disciple amongst modern men of genius than Carlyle. -Galileo he treated as the true scientific man, and Shakespeare as the poet whose faith was all the greater for not being confined to any definite creed. The Dean ridi- culed the notion that theology would soon perish from off the earth, and declared that its alliance with science and literature must be eternal ; and we agree with him. But we do not think with him that Shakespeare, with all his greatness, can ever be held to embody the highest religion. The one characteristic de- lineation wanting in Shakespeare's work is that of a mind specifically religious,—that is, devoted to the love of God. That his imagina- tion was far too great to be limited to worldly views of the uni- verse is true, but on the whole, Shakespeare's largeness of mind was surely rather of the worldly than of the religious or devotional type. The Dean, wise and eloquent as he is, always seems to us to sublimate too much the substance of religion in the form of a vague, though beautiful sentiment.
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