LXII. The Temple and the Christian Year

Extract

Superficial resemblances between George Herbert's The Temple and John Keble's The Christian Year are too obvious to escape notice. Both emanated from little country parsonages, one at Bemerton, near Salisbury, the other at Hursley, five miles from Winchester, or possibly in part at Fairford in the Oxford region. Neither author intended his work for immediate publication. “Deliver this little book,” said Herbert, “to my dear brother Ferrar, and tell him he shall find in it a picture of the many spiritual conflicts that have passed betwixt God and my soul, before I could subject mine to the will of Jesus my Master.” With the same modest self-effacement Keble planned, as one of his friends testified, “to go on improving the series all his life, and leave it to come out, if judged useful, only when he should be fairly out of the way.” Each book, furthermore, was written when clouds had gathered thick about the Church, and possibly the rationalizing temper of the nineteenth century was a more insidious foe than the stiff-necked Puritanism of the seventeenth. Inevitably, these two collections of sacred poems, the finest poetical expression of the Anglican Church, have been linked together.