Look how the world's poor people are amazed

At apparitions, signs, and prodigies,

Whereon with fearful eyes they long have gaz'd

Infusing them with dreadful prophecies. *

Having just told us that "It is difficult to say whether Shakespeare had any religious faith or no," Green intimates that Shakespeare was an agnostic, and probably a disciple of Montaigne. If he was an agnostic, it is not true that we do not know "whether he had any religious faith or no." We can be sure that he was without religious faith of any kind, using the word "religious" in the sense of the supernatural—if he preferred agnosticism to the creeds. He was an agnostic, it is to be supposed, because he could not conscientiously profess any of the "religious faiths" of his day.

But to be an agnostic does not mean to be without a religion; it only means to be without a revealed religion. This very agnosticism, as the expression of a courageous, honest and rational protest against revealed religions, is a religion—more manly, certainly, than the popular religions, because while the latter are imitative to a large extent, the former is unconstrained and personal.

Those who say unqualifiedly that Shakespeare had no religion, as Prof. Santayana of Harvard University, does, must mean by religion a recognition of the supernatural, which we submit is to make a partisan use only of the word religion. Wishing to prove the absence of religion in Shakespeare, Prof. Santayana writes: "If we were asked to select one monument of human civilization that should survive