The Truth and Beauty: How the Lives and Works of England's Greatest Poets Point the Way to a Deeper Understanding of the Words of Jesus

by Andrew Klavan

For now, the name of Christ was silent. In this increasingly irreligious age, the poets had woven him invisibly into the interplay of nature and the imagination. For now, skeptics like Mill were not asked to believe in God or religion but only, in the words of the psalm, to “taste and see that the Lord is good.”50 It might be that in the end this strategy would undermine Romanticism as a fully reasoned approach to life. It might be there would come a time when, in order to experience the inward joy the Romantics offered, we would be compelled by force of logic to confront the infinite I AM and ask ourselves the old question, Can we believe? But for now, in this hinge of history, at the start of the crisis of unbelief, for men like Mill and all the men like Mill who followed, the poets had found a way to reconstruct the human soul.