Excerpt from Prayers and Meditations

He knew the little books contained nothing contrary to religion, and he was therefore perfectly content to let what was in them go forth. We were all told in our childhood that 'I don't care' came to a bad end. Johnson, I must suppose, is the proverbial exception, for no man cared less than he what people said or might say.

Pious authors of the first rank are sufficiently rare to make us thankful for Prayers and Meditations, and Johnson's piety is as indisputable as it is interesting. It represents a type always prevalent among the laity, but exceedingly ill-represented in our literature. It is not the primitive piety of the Early Church, nor is it the Evangelicalism of a later day, still less the 'enthusiasm' of the Methodist Revival. There is something medi?val about its gloom something Jansenist about its mysticism, whilst there is not a little of the Eighteenth Century in that 'obstinate rationality' which, as the doctor himself half proudly, half ruefully admitted, made communion with the Roman Church an impossibility for him.

Religion to Johnson was an awful thing. He never learnt to take his case on Zion.

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