ABSTRACT
This is a country of sects. An Englishman, being a free man, goes to Heaven by whatever path he chooses.
As a poetic mode manifestly concerned with the spiritual and religious health of the individual, there can be little doubt that graveyard poetry and its development during the early to mid-eighteenth century was profoundly influenced by the robust religious and theological debates of the period. As Young testifies, “FEW Ages have been deeper in dispute about Religion, than this” (“Preface” to NT 4). An ever growing number of divergent religious perspectives coupled with an array of theological issues concerned with the proper way to salvation meant that the pious no longer viewed one straight and narrow path, but a variety of roads that equally claimed salvation as their destination. The devout Englishman, as Voltaire quips, had choice; but with choice came the additional hazard of waywardness. While salvation remained at stake, the enquiry into the true and authentic journey towards deliverance would remain rigorous. But who, then, to believe? The question ultimately entails further questions of authority, of not only who is justified to claim legitimacy but also by what sources. To further complicate the equation, the liberty of choice in such enquiry also inevitably requires a certain degree of self-authority. John Trenchard summarily captures the overriding contemporary concern over competing authorities: in discussing the perfection of true knowledge in his Natural History of Superstition (1709), Trenchard asserts that “since the Divine Providence has for the most part hid the Causes of Things which chiefly concern us from our View, we must either entirely abandon the enquiry, or substitute such in their room, as our own Imaginations or Prejudices suggest to us, or take the Words of others whom we think Wiser than our selves …”2 To place Trenchard’s comments in their contemporary context: to trust to one’s own imagination in the pursuit of true knowledge and religion, is to succumb to that most pernicious vanity the orthodox establishment termed “enthusiasm”; to trust in the alternative, according to the Deists, leaves one susceptible to the systematic deception and manipulation by the clergy commonly
termed “priestcraft.”3 Whether framed as a religious battle between High Church Anglican orthodoxy and the natural religion of Deism, or more fundamentally between organised religion and moral autonomy, the competition for religious authority was essentially underwritten by the increasing tendency to claim the self as a legitimate source of religious knowledge, a claim with equal bearing upon the Augustan poet and reader, which manifested itself not only in a number of religious debates but also in the evolution of Augustan poetics.
