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The Pamphlet Collection of Sir Robert Stout: Volume 42

Dean Stanley on the Religion of Shakespeare

Dean Stanley on the Religion of Shakespeare.

"There is much idle talk in the present day about secular and religious. Is there any one who will venture to shut out from any scheme of education the writings of Milton and Shakespeare? Is there any one who will be able to say that the writings of Milton or Shakespeare are not in the highest sense religious, if by religious we mean that which gives a higher and wider idea of the nature of God, and a deeper, clearer insight into the nature of man? No! We say that Shakespeare had a deep sense of the awfulness and greatness of God, of the tender and soothing influences of the Christian faith. We say that the words of the Bible were most familiar to him—that the words and rites of religious ordinances had a hold upon him, but page 70 more than this we do not know. We ask whether he was a Roman Catholic or a Protestant. Whether he was a Calvinist or an Armenian. We ask whether he was a Puritan or a high Churchman. We ask, but we ask in vain. Some expressions may lead to one side, some to the other, but the whole result is that of this greatest of merely human teachers, the wisest and greatest of merely human writers, is simply above and beyond and beside all those party distinctions. That he who of all men knew most of human nature cannot, without a manifest absurdity, be classed with any single religious division of any kind whatever. From the fact that he was married and buried in the parish church of Stratford-on-Avon we may infer that he belonged to the National Church. It is one of the excellences of the English Church that a spirit like Shakespeare can belong to it without being compelled to answer any question or to enrol himself under any flag. It was in Shakespeare's time that the Church embraced all Englishmen, and in this best and highest sense of the word, and in this sense only, he was an English Churchman. But I repeat that of his particular opinions his works tell us nothing. And the fact that this is so, and that we notwithstanding, bear with him and admire him, is a standing proof to us that their paltry distinctions are not so important as we usually endeavour to make them—that the highest idea of the Church of truth, of a National Church, is that which takes no heed of them. There will, we trust, be a time hereafter when they will vanish away altogether. But there are times, even now, when in the highest and greatest minds they have vanished altogether even here."