Excerpt from Religious Thought in Old English Verse In the following pages I have endeavoured to illustrate the main current of religious thought in English poetry through the long period of 1100 years which elapsed between Caedmon and the end of the last century. I am careful to say the main current. It has been an interest and a pleasure to me to trace through each passing century the general stream of religious thought flowing steadily and calmly on, affected far less than might have been expected by the changing circumstances and questions of the time. Those deeper and more personal feelings which so often find a natural and appropriate vent in poetry have little in common with the spirit of controversy. In religious poetry, so far as it is the language of the heart, even the Reformation itself, great as the movement was, made itself felt not so much in the disputatious and argumentative form which it displayed in most prose writings of that period, but simply, for the most part, in the evident enlargement of the general field of graver thought. Not unfrequently, it would be difficult to determine from internal evidence on which side the writer of the poem had ranged himself. About the Publisher Forgotten Books publishes hundreds of thousands of rare and classic books. Find more at www.forgottenbooks.com This book is a reproduction of an important historical work. Forgotten Books uses state-of-the-art technology to digitally reconstruct the work, preserving the original format whilst repairing imperfections present in the aged copy. In rare cases, an imperfection in the original, such as a blemish or missing page, may be replicated in our edition. We do, however, repair the vast majority of imperfections successfully; any imperfections that remain are intentionally left to preserve the state of such historical works.