ABSTRACT
One day . . . I met him [Cargill] by chance and asked him by chance what he thought of Wordsworth’s Ecclesiastical Sketches. He had not read them. I expressed my surprise. ‘Do you no longer love Wordsworth?’ ‘It is as impossible’, he answered, ‘for one who has ever really loved Wordsworth to cease loving him, as it is for a Christian to cease being a Christian. But the religious poems of Wordsworth are those precisely which I do not love. In fact, I doubt whether Wordsworth is a Christian, if I am to judge of him from The Excursion. I think that no better than atheism. This he afterwards defined to consist in a faith in redemption by Christ and the means of redemption . . .
