There are many obvious pitfalls in considering Clare’s self-declared religious opinions, not least that those for whom they often effectively were written tended on the whole to have very definite and intransigent opinions of their own. In attempting to discern the nature of Clare’s faith, then, we must bear the conditions of its construction (including the spectre of his readership) in mind. Certain ideas, however, emerge with such persistence and through such a variety of sources that they suggest something of Clare’s ‘creed’ and conception of God. I have suggested that Clare interprets the rapture inspired in him by the natural world as intimation of God’s presence, and that the mystery which is an essential part of sublimity leads to a very particular stance in most of Clare’s explicit statements about religion. Clare is strongly within a Christian tradition which holds that the scope and immensity of God’s creation, and especially God’s self, cannot be comprehended by the human mind, which is all too fond of making God ‘after

man’s image.’ Just as, despite Clare’s intense fascination with the scholastic side of nature study, he can watch without needing to understand the mechanisms functioning behind what he sees, Clare’s God is ‘known unknown’ (MP.IV.150). But this chapter seeks to identify those aspects of God which are ‘known’, and hence to understand how this knowledge is translated into something which Clare understands to be a personal creed.