What is the difference?

In St. Clair’s article “The Reading Nation in the Romantic Period,” old-canon literature is referred to as “conduct literature” (133). Its purpose was to “refine the heart and elevate the soul” and the result of reading “good literature” was social contentment and morality. Furthermore, St. Clair points out that Poetry, in its capability to inspire awe and a sense of the sublime, is natural religious. Yet, an overt sense of religiosity is curiously absent from Knox’s Elegant Extracts. The Preface includes a quote on morality by Sir Philip Sydney and suggests that reading Poetry leads to virtue. Book I is even entitled The Sacred and Moral. However, his main selling point in the Preface is that Poetry, though fanciful and charming (for better or for worse), leads to the general advancement of learning (iii).

My question is: what is the difference between religious literature and conduct literature? In consideration of the table of contents, many poem titles include overtly religious themes or issues that are directly commented on in the Bible. What then is the advantage in distinguishing between actual Scripture and thinly veiled Bible stories? St. Clair suggests that literature entered the educational space that was previously occupied by the Bible (137). Yet, included in the poems suggested for “Entertainment of Younger Minds” are titles such as “Against Lying” and “Against Swearing and taking God’s name in vain.” The whole series of “Against” poems by Dr. Cotton seem no more than a simple (blasphemous?) re-working of the Ten Commandments. What are we to make of the turn towards poems whose teachings, though they presumably do not contain Scripture, can still be directly traced to the Bible? Is the answer merely accessibility, as Knox seems to suggest?