in the Excise: within two years he was made Under Secretary of State to Sir Charles Hedges, a Tory, who was soon replaced by the Earl of Sunderland, a Whig. This appointment he held for nearly three years, but lost it when the Earl of Sunderland was removed to make room for Lord Dartmouth; but, still a favourite of fortune, he was almost immediately offered the Secretaryship of Ireland by the Earl of Wharton, who had been recently made Lord-Lieutenant. In this capacity he was serving when Steele founded The Tatler, and soon recognising the hand of the disguised editor, he wrote to him offering his literary assistance, which was of course joyfully accepted.

Hitherto Addison's career, like Montague's, had mainly illustrated the power acquired by literature in determining the course of public affairs. His own poetical panegyrics. were adroitly contrived to catch the prevailing Whig breeze in politics; and even The Tatler was the offspring mainly of a desire to provide entertainment for the busy and bustling interests of the town, always in quest of some "new thing." It was an ingenious development of the old "Mercury," or, as Steele called it, a "Letter of Intelligence, consisting of such parts as might gratify the curiosity of persons of all conditions and of each sex." The Spectator, on the other hand, founded after the lapse of The Tatler, addressed a wider audience, and with a more definitely moral design. It sought to interest all open minds which were in search of ideas :—

Since (says Addison) I have raised to myself so great an audience, I shall spare no pains to make their instruction agreeable and their diversion useful. For which reason I shall endeavour to enliven morality with wit, and to temper wit with morality, that my readers may, if possible, both ways find their account in the speculation of the day. And to the end that their virtue and discretion may not be short, transient, intermitting starts of thought, I have resolved to refresh their memories from day to day, till I have recovered them out of that desperate state of vice and folly into which the age has fallen. The mind that lies fallow but a single day sprouts up in follies, that are only to be killed by a constant and assiduous culture.

It was said of Socrates that he brought philosophy down from heaven to inhabit among men; and I shall be ambitious to have it said of me that I have brought philosophy out of closets and libraries, schools and colleges, to dwell in clubs and assemblies, at tea-tables and in coffee-houses.1

To set up a social standard of philosophy some different kind of fiction was required from that which had sufficed for The Tatler, the design of which was rather critical than constructive. Hence, instead of the four leading Coffee-houses, with the rush of their clients coming and going, and the single figure of the Editor, discriminating between novelties false and true, the machinery of The Spectator turned on the idea of a single Club, containing in itself representatives of the constituent parts of society, the Church, the Bar, the Army, the Landed Interest, the Monied Interest, the Interest of the World of Fashion, together with the Spectator himself, who is interested in all sorts and conditions of men, and judges how far their several opinions are just and reasonable. It being recognised that the reaction in the previous age against the Puritan régime had plunged society as a whole into a desperate condition of vice and folly, the object of The Spectator was to recover it to a state of good morals and manners by means of debates in the Club, or by the reflections and example of its individual members. The method of reformation pursued by Addison may therefore be considered under the heads of Religion, Manners, and Taste.

As regards Religion, the actual progress of thought in England since the rejection by the nation of the Papal supremacy is very faithfully reflected in the parallel development of its philosophy and its poetry. The most philosophical definition of the Constitutional situation of the Christian Church in England is probably to be found in the words of Hooker I have already cited:

Our state is according to the pattern of God's own ancient elect people, which people was not part of them the Commonwealth, and part of them the Church of God, but the self-same

1 Spectator, No. 10.

people, whole and entire, were both under one Chief Governor, on whose supreme authority they all depend.1

The difficulties encountered in the attempt to convert the philosophical theory of the Royal Supremacy of the Church into practice had been a prime cause of the Civil War between King and Parliament; and after the Restoration four divergent views of the place of Religion in the State, remained confronting each other in the mind of society; namely (1) the Absolutist idea, founded on the philosophy of Hobbes; (2) the Puritan Creed, whether Presbyterian or Independent; (3) the doctrine of Papal Supremacy; (4) the Anglican System, fortified by the Test Act Act and other safeguards of Parliamentary legislation.

Of these the first was frankly materialist. By it Instinct was exalted at the expense of Reason, and Religion was regarded as part of the system of absolute government, held by Hobbes to be the most suitable for mankind after their emergence from the state of Nature. As its philosophical principles were very congenial to the tendencies of the Court of Charles II., it was readily embraced by fashionable poets and playwrights of the time, whose ideas of life may be seen reflected in Rochester's Satire on Man and Etherege's Man of Mode.2 The practical atheism of the entire school is satirised by Steele, with excellent irony, in the following imaginary letter, abusing the design of The Spectator:

I am now between fifty and sixty, and had the honour to be well with the first men of taste and gallantry in the joyous reign of Charles the Second. As for yourself, Mr. Spectator, you seem with the utmost arrogance to undermine the very fundamentals upon which we conducted ourselves. It is monstrous to set up for a man of wit, and yet deny that honour in a woman is anything but peevishness, that inclination is not the best rule of life, or virtue and vice anything else but health and disease. We had no more to do but to put a lady in a good humour, and all we could wish followed of course. Then again your Tully, and your discourses of another life, are the 1 Ecclesiastical Polity, cited in vol. iii. p. 5. 2 See vol. iii. pp. 456-458 and 465-467.

very bane of mirth and good-humour. Prythee don't value thyself on thy reason at that exorbitant rate, and the dignity of human nature; take my word for it a setting dog has as good reason as any man in England.1

1

Opposed at all points to the licentiousness of fashionable society, the Puritans, through their theology, exerted a powerful influence over numbers of individuals in every section of society, and more particularly among the commercial and professional classes. In these the sense of religion was so strong as to swallow up every other human instinct; not only was the most innocent kind of pleasure a sin in their eyes, but the feeling of their own responsibility was so great as to make them eager to impose their opinions upon all their neighbours. The victory of their party in the Civil War had placed in their hands power which they had so used that, after groaning for many years under their yoke, the people preferred to submit themselves to all the excesses of the Royalist reaction. Yet, though conscious of their unpopularity, the Puritans preserved with sullen tenacity all the rigidity of their principles, and after the Revolution of 1688, sought to take advantage of the turn of the tide to restore the rule of the Saints. Their character and creed are both sketched with some humour in No. 454 of The Spectator.

Between these two extremes the great body of the nation recognised the necessity of obeying some established form of the Christian religion, but were in doubt to what degree of authority they ought to submit. During the whole period between the Restoration and the Revolution their minds wavered between loyalty to the reigning Sovereigns, who were plainly trying to restore the Papal Supremacy, and their attachment to the national Church, of which, by the true theory of the Constitution, the King was the rightful head. On the one side were the arguments of the Roman Catholic disputants from Bellarmine to Bossuet; on the other the reasoning of the Anglican divines from Hooker to Stillingfleet. The Papists showed

1 Spectator, No. 158.

them the impossibility of preserving the Unity of the Faith from the heresies of the Sects, except by the authority of one Infallible Head of the Church: the English Churchman replied by denying that liberty of judgment ought to be sacrificed to the fallible authority of any single interpreter of Holy Writ. Thus many wavered between the mood of mind depicted, under Charles II., in Religio Laici, and the Roman Catholic conclusion advocated, under James II., in The Hind and the Panther. By the Revolution of 1688 the nation decided that the extent of authority, postulated in the former poem, was sufficient for its needs; but though it had rejected the infallibility of the Pope, peace was far from being secured to it, and the Anglican controversialists found that they had only freed themselves from their Roman antagonists to be engaged in a conflict with the Deists. The period of the half-century following the Revolution of 1688 is characterised by the "Socinian" reasoning of Tindal, Toland, Collins, and Woolston.

It was to reach the minds of the wavering portion of the nation that Addison addressed his arguments in The Spectator:

Those (he says, in Spectator No. 465) who delight in reading books of controversy, which are written on both sides of the question on points of faith, do very seldom arrive at a fixed and settled habit of it. They are one day entirely convinced of its important truths, and the next meet with something that shakes and disturbs them. The doubt which was laid revives again, and shows itself in new difficulties, and that generally for this reason, because the mind which is perpetually tost in controversies and disputes is apt to forget the reasons which had once set it at rest, and to be disquieted with any former perplexity when it appears in a new shape, or is started by a different hand. As nothing is more laudable than an enquiry after truth, so nothing is more irrational than to pass away our whole lives without determining ourselves one way or another in those points which are of the last importance to us. There are indeed many things from which we may withhold our assent; but in cases by which we are to regulate our lives, it is the greatest absurdity to be wavering and unsettled, without closing with that side which appears the most safe and the most probable.