Donald Davie speaks up for Old Dissent—for its religious life and the literature it generated—with what might be thought of as an aptly persistent dissentience. He naturally believes he must dissent from the bulk of Dissent's usual enemies. Even more, though, he feels led to dissent from some of the most insistent of Dissent's friends. Crustily, he stands between, on the one hand, the scornful majority who borrow the terminologies of Matthew Arnold for their dismissals of all Dissent as barbarously uncultured philistinism, and, on the other, that colonising minority who want to specialise Dissent into the ranks of the progressive and leftist.
It's an awkward, contentious corner to hold out in. Davie knowingly boxed himself into it in his Clark Lectures, A Gathered Church (1976), and these more recent lectures and articles [collected in Dissentient Voice: Enlightenment and Christian Dissent] show him still contentedly there, still jabbing foxily away with intent to outrage his chosen opponents. His beloved 18th-century Dissenters, so his argument goes, didn't just happen to hit off a clutch of memorable hymns. Watts and Charles Wesley, Newton and Doddridge wrote their great poems because their religion sited them comfortably within the Age of Reason. Nobody was more intellectually serious and reasonable than Watts and Co., with their abstractions and their theological paradoxes. The Enlightenment was—and enlightenment still is—as much Christian as it is anything. The members of an 18th-century Baptist or Congregationalist church were shaped by a toughly reasoning faith expressed in a strong-minded, plain-speaking poetry. They enjoyed Christ and culture. Which is, or so Davie intends, one in the eye for their snobbish, 'cultured' despisers….
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