ABSTRACT
A religion of Reason that positively discouraged emotion or devotional piety was never likely to be popular or have much institutional hold on its members, and in fact throughout the Romantic period the Unitarians declined in numbers. In a peculiar kind of way, Romanticism is rooted in the felt tension between moribund religious institutions and the reaction of believers against them. It was a paradox the Romantics themselves were not blind to. The advent of Romanticism in the 1780s and 1790s was closely associated with sharp changes both in ways of understanding the human mind, and therefore knowledge itself, and in ways of understanding art. For Maurice, the connections between this religious and philosophic shift of climate and the poetry of the period were clear. Religious belief was central to the intellectual and emotional evolution of Romanticism; it is also true that Romanticism was to prove central to the evolution of religious belief.
