In 1810, the two brothers had established a quarterly, _The Reflector_, of much the same nature and creed as _The Examiner_. It was unsuccessful and was discontinued after the fourth number. It differed from its predecessor in combining literature with politics. Hunt's reason for this innovation displays a rare power to judge of contemporary movements: "Politics, in times like these, should naturally take the lead in periodical discussion, because they have an importance almost unexampled in history, and because _they are now, in their turn, exhibiting their reaction upon literature, as literature in the preceding age exhibited its action upon them_."[41]
Although Hunt continued to be editor of _The Examiner_ until he went to Italy in 1822, his aggressive political activity seemed to die out of him after his release from prison. He was never so prominently again before the public; in 1828, he ceased altogether to write on political questions. He retired more and more into the seclusion of his books, and from about 1849, denied himself to all but a small circle of congenial spirits.
Hunt, like the others of his group, was deeply influenced by the liberal movement in religion as well as in politics. He had seen his father's progress from the Anglican Church through the Unitarian[42] to the Universalist. At the age of twelve he repudiated the doctrine of eternal punishment and declared himself a believer in the "exclusive goodness of futurity." In his early manhood he decried the superstition of Catholicism, the intolerance of Calvinism, and the emotionality of Methodism. Yet he acknowledged a Great First Cause and a Divine Paternity. He refused, like Shelley, to recognize the existence of evil, and thought everything finally good and beautiful in nature.[43] He believed that universal happiness would come about through individual excellence, through performance of duty and avoidance of excess. Those who disagreed with him in this respect he considered blasphemers of nature. As Lord Houghton in his address in the cemetery of Kensal Green on the unveiling of a bust of Hunt remarked, he had an "absolute superstition for good." Similar testimony was borne by R. H. Horne when he said that Chaucer's "'Ah, benedicite' was falling forever from his lips."[44] His religion was one of charity and cheerfulness, of love and truth, which is but to affirm that the humanitarian moral of _Abou Ben Adhem_ was realized in his own life.[45] On the death of Shelley's child William, Hunt wrote to the bereaved father: "I do not know that a soul is born with us; but we seem, to me, to _attain_ to a soul, some later, some earlier; and when we have got that, there is a look in our eye, a sympathy in our cheerfulness, and a yearning and grave beauty in our thoughtfulness that seems to say, 'Our mortal dress may fall off when it will; our trunk and our leaves may go; we have shot up our blossom into an immortal air.'"[46]