his dramas with the gods of its own creation. The Poet's works are a mirror of humanity and his pictures of heathenism are true to the subject. But God was in his thoughts. He reverently acknowledges the God of the Bible in all His various attributes. He holds up to view the divine side of man. All his best men and women do homage to the Divine and his worst characters are shown to be in dread of the law of God and the ends of justice. God, as distinct from pagan gods, is mentioned in at least thirty of his thirty-seven plays and nearly seven hundred times. As many as forty different terms or exclamations are employed in his references to the Divine Being, most of which are taken from the Bible. These are given together with the Shakspearean text in the chapter on "God in Shakspeare." Frequent references are made to Jesus Christ as "Saviour," "Redeemer," "Lord" as may be seen in the chapter on "Scripture Themes." That these were in harmony with his own faith and not merely expressions accommodated to his characters is a necessary conclusion on reading the following paragraph taken from the opening paragraph of the "last will and testament of William Shakspeare": "I commend my soul into the hands of God my Creator, hoping, and assuredly believing through the merits of Jesus Christ, my Saviour, to be made partaker of life everlasting." To this may be added the following from the Life of Shakspeare published in Knight's edition of his works:-"Whatever was the immediate cause of his last illness we may believe that the closing scene was full of tranquillity and hope; and that he who had sought, perhaps more than any man, to look beyond the material and finite things of the world, should rest in the 'peace which passeth all understanding' in that assured belief which the opening of his will has expressed with far more than formal solemnity.' In face of such testimony, he must be wilfully blind who will deny that this man spoke the language of his own heart and soul, when he, at various times and through various characters exclaims: "The precious image of our dear Redeemer." "The world's ransom, blessed Mary's son." "By the death of him who died for all." "I charge you as you hope to have redemption." "By Christ's dear blood shed for our grievous sins." "In those holy fields, Over whose acres walked those blessed feet Thus it is seen that Shakspeare drank so deeply from the wells of Scripture that one may say, without any straining of the evidence, without the Bible Shakspeare could not be. And if it were possible to suppress every copy of the sacred volume and obliterate its very existence as a book, the Bible in its essence and spirit, its great doctrines of infinite justice, mercy, love and redemption, as well as a vast store of its most precious sayings, would yet live in Shakspeare. Whoever looks intelligently at this Shakspeare may recognize that he was a prophet in his own way, of an insight analogous to the prophetic, though he took up another strain. Nature seemed to this man also divine; unspeakable, deep as Tophet, high as Heaven. "We are such stuff as dreams are made of!" That Scroll in Westminster Abbey, which few read with understanding, is of the depth of the sea. We may say without offense, that there rises a kind of universal psalm out of this Shakspeare, too; not unfit to make itself heard among the still more sacred Psalms. Not in disharmony with these, if we understood them, but in harmony. I cannot call this Shakspeare a sceptic as some do; his indifference to creeds and theological quarrels of his time misleading them. No; neither unpatriotic, though he says little about his patriotism; nor sceptic, though he says little about his faith. |