which he set himself to realize the highest ideals of the calling he had chosen, and the candour with which he accepted the contrast between his present position and his earlier life, leaving to whosoever wished to judge while he followed the path of duty and penitence. But such a spirit will not easily produce great devotional poetry. There are qualities in the religious poetry of simpler and purer souls to which Donne seldom or never attains. The natural love of God which overflows the pages of the great mystics, which dilates the heart and the verses of a poet like the Dutchman Vondel, the ardour and tenderness of Crashaw, the chaste, pure piety and penitence of Herbert, the love from which devotion and ascetic self-denial come unbidden--to these Donne never attained. The high and passionate joy of _The Anniversary_ is not heard in his sonnets or hymns. Effort is the note which predominates--the effort to realize the majesty of God, the heinousness of sin, the terrors of Hell, the mercy of Christ. Some of the very worst traits in Donne's mind are brought out in his religious writing. _The Essays on Divinity_ are an extraordinary revelation of his accumulations of useless Scholastic erudition, and his capacity to perform feats of ingenious deduction from traditional and accepted premises. To compare these freakish deductions from the theory of verbal inspiration with the luminous sense of the _Tractatus Theologico-Politicus_ is to realize how much rationalism was doing in the course of the century for the emancipation and healing of the human intellect. Some of the poems, and those the earliest written, before Donne had actually taken Orders, are not much more than exercises in these theological subtleties, poems such as that _On the Annunciation and Passion falling in the same year_ (1608), _The Litany_ (1610), _Good-Friday_ (1613), and _The Cross_ (_c._ 1615) are characteristic examples of Donne's intense and imaginative wit employed on traditional topics of Catholic devotion to which no change of Church ever made him indifferent. Donne never ignored in his sermons the gulf that separated the Anglican from the Roman Church, or the link that bound her to the Protestant Churches of the Continent. 'Our great protestant divines' are one of his courts of appeal, and included Luther and Calvin of whom he never speaks but with the deepest respect. But he was unwilling to sacrifice to a fanatical puritanism any element of Catholic devotion which was capable of an innocent interpretation. His language is guarded and perhaps not always consistent, but it would not be difficult to show from his sermons and prose-writings that many of the most distinctively Catholic tenets were treated by him with the utmost tenderness.