“Father of light and life! thou Good Supreme! Oh teach me what is good! teach me thyself! Save me from folly, vanity, and vice, From every low pursuit! and feed my soul With knowledge, conscious peace, and virtue pure, Sacred, substantial, never-fading bliss!” There is nothing in his amiable and placid life to throw doubt on the sincerity of that prayer. And yet Thomson’s piety seems to us now of that kind which is easily satisfied and thoughtlessly thankful! There are many at the present day, and those the most thoughtful, who “not only see through but (as has been said) feel a strong revulsion against the well-meant but superficial attempt to describe the world as happy, and to see in God, as the Governor of it, only a sort of easy and shallow goodness.” They cannot be satisfied with such a view. “They have a complaining within—a sense of imperfection in and around them which rebels against so easy-going a view and demands another solution. It is not merely a benevolent God that they long for, but a God who sympathizes with man, and who in some way, of which only revelation can fully inform us, makes out of man’s misery and imperfection the way to something better for him.” Thomson’s religion, no doubt, could hardly have escaped the infection of the Deism that was all around him in the literary and philosophic atmosphere of his time. In his beautiful “Hymn,” which may be regarded as the climax of the “Seasons,” and as summing up the devoutest thoughts which these suggested to him, there is nothing that goes beyond such a view:— “These, as they change, Almighty Father, these Are but the varied God. The rolling year Is full of thee”— unless perhaps in that more Christian strain where, hearing the bleating on the hills and the lowings in the vale, he breaks forth— “For the Great Shepherd reigns, And his unsuffering Kingdom yet will come.” The prevailing spirit of the Hymn, as of most of his other addresses to the Deity, is that of optimism and the reign of universal benevolence:— “I cannot go Where Universal Love smiles not around, Sustaining all yon orbs, and all their suns, From seeming evil still educing good.”