I8RARY 
 
 h 
 
 SAN 
 
 .
 
 THE CHRIST OF ENGLISH 
 POETRY
 
 " Angelus Faciei Ejus salvavil eos." 
 
 ISAIAH Ixiii. 9 
 
 " Jliat one Face far from vanish rather grows, 
 Or decomposes but to recompose, 
 Becomes my universe that feels and knows." 
 
 BROWNING
 
 THE CHRIST 
 OF ENGLISH POETRY 
 
 BEING THE HULSEAN LECTURES DELIVERED 
 
 BEFORE THE UNIVERSITY OF CAMBRIDGE 
 
 MCMIV-MCMV. BY CHARLES WILLIAM STUBBS, D.D. 
 
 DEAN OF ELY AND HON. FELLOW OF 
 
 SIDNEY SUSSEX COLLEGE 
 
 LONDON: J. M. DENT & CO. 
 BEDFORD STREET, W.C. MDCCCCVI
 
 All Rights Reserved 
 
 Printed by BALLANTYNE, HANSON 6* Co. 
 At the Ballantyne Press
 
 TO 
 
 SIR OLIVER LODGE, D.Sc., LL.D., F.R.S., &c. 
 
 PRINCIPAL OF THE UNIVERSITY OF BIRMINGHAM. 
 
 My dear Lodge, / want, if you will let me, to dedicate 
 this book to you, not only for the sake of " Auld Lang Syne " 
 in Liverpool, but also because among the forces of the time 
 which are most deeply influencing the religious thought of 
 young Englishmen to-day, I count your writings. You may 
 -perhaps remember that at the close of a lecture, delivered 
 a year or so ago at the Midland Institute under your chair- 
 manship, in which I had suggested an analogy in regard to 
 Shakespeare's Prospero, which you will find repeated in the 
 third lecture of this course, you playfully said to me, " So 
 then, you think Prospero was the poet himself: I had thought 
 he had been a man of science" If you do me the honour 
 to glance through these pages you will see that my chief object 
 has been to impress upon my undergraduate congregation the 
 doctrine that Personality is the mightiest force which God can 
 bring to bear upon man, that the Supreme Personality in all 
 history, the most potent factor in all civilised change and 
 progress, is that of Jesus Christ, and how and why, there- 
 fore, this claim of Christ to supremacy in all human thought 
 and action ought to affect and influence the moral character
 
 vi DEDICATION 
 
 no less than the intellectual attitude of every baptized disciple 
 of Jesus. In these lectures 1 have endeavoured to show how 
 this conception of Christ 's Personality has been brought home 
 to the English people, at four representative periods of our 
 national life, by making my appeal, not to the witness of the 
 Theologians, but to the witness of the Poets of England ; and 
 I have done so, because it seems to me that the Poets rather 
 than the Theologians, or even the men of science, are the 
 most representative, the most prophetic, the most clear-sighted, 
 the most deep-hearted men of their time. You perhaps may 
 think, others perhaps may think, that I should have been wiser 
 as a Christian apologist if I had tried to read the lesson of 
 Prosperous ideal allegory of human life from the scientific 
 rather than the poetic point of view. It may be so. But 
 you at least, among the foremost of our men of science to-day, 
 are Poet enough to see (I quote your own words] " that God 
 is One : that the Universe is an aspect and a revelation of 
 God ; that the Universe is struggling upward to a perfection 
 not yet attained ; that in the mighty process of evolution there 
 is an eternal struggle towards more and more self-perception 
 and fuller and more all-embracing existence of the Deity." 
 There are theologians, no doubt, who will think that your 
 further statement that " The Christian idea of God is not 
 that of a being outside the universe, above its struggles and 
 advances, looking on and taking no part in the process, solely 
 exalted, beneficent, self-determined and complete; no, it is 
 also that of a God which loves, which yearns, which suffers, 
 which keenly laments the rebellious and misguided activity
 
 DEDICATION vii 
 
 of the free agents whom He has brought into being as part 
 of Himself, which enters into the storm and conflict ; and is 
 subject to conditions as a part of it all ; conditions not artificial 
 and transitory, but inherent in the process of producing free 
 and conscious beings, and essential to the full self -development 
 even of Deity " -falls somewhat short of a complete present- 
 ment of the Christian doctrine of the Incarnation. That is 
 probable. But of this, I, at least, who am no theologian, 
 am quite sure that if our men of science will only approach 
 these great issues in your spirit of reverence and candour, and 
 love of truth, there is a future of great hope for Theology : 
 for Science will then have much to teach to Theology as to the 
 true bearings both of the facts of revelation and of the pheno- 
 mena of spiritual experience. Anyhow, for your attitude 
 towards questions of Christian apology, I should like to thank 
 you, not only for myself, but also on behalf of those young 
 hearts for whom I have chiefly written these pages, in the 
 hope that through a quickened interest in the witness of the 
 English Poets to the Personality of Christ and to the Spirit of 
 His Religion, they may be helped to gain some consciousness, 
 if only by glimpse of His garment's hem, of the Mighty Figure 
 in the Way before them, very man and very God. Believe 
 
 me, ever sincerely yours, 
 
 CHARLES W. STUBBS. 
 
 DEANERY, ELY, 
 
 December 6, 1905.
 
 CONTENTS 
 
 PAGE 
 
 DEDICATORY LETTER v 
 
 LECTURE I 
 
 CYNEWULF 3 
 
 NOTES AND ILLUSTRATIONS .... 33 
 
 LECTURE II 
 
 WILLIAM LANGLAND 65 
 
 NOTES AND ILLUSTRATIONS . ... 97 
 
 LECTURE III 
 
 SHAKESPEARE 123 
 
 NOTES AND ILLUSTRATIONS . . . .149 
 
 LECTURE IV 
 
 ROBERT BROWNING 169 
 
 NOTES AND ILLUSTRATIONS . . . .196
 
 LECTURE I 
 CYNEWULF
 
 " As Cynewulf's life fell within the reigns of two notable Eng- 
 lish kings, OfFa and Egbert ; as he was the contemporary of Charle- 
 magne, and probably outlived him, and as we cannot suppose that 
 he was wholly blind to the course of events in his own day, he 
 may have had some premonition of the influence which his poetry 
 would exert, and therefore have taken precautions that his name 
 should not perish, by interweaving it into the substance of his 
 verse. That he, like Alfred, loved the poetry of his native tongue, 
 is beyond question. Caedmon, who knew no Latin, could only 
 sing in English, if at all ; Aldhem, who knew Latin, wrote only 
 in that language ; Bede has left us but one brief English poem, 
 though the vigour which that displays is evidence that he was 
 under no necessity of writing in Latin ; so that Cynewulf is the 
 first Christian poet who, being thoroughly conversant with Latin, 
 deliberately adopted the vernacular as the vehicle for a considerable 
 body of poetry, and in this showed himself at once a good scholar, 
 a good Christian, and a good patriot." 
 
 A. S. COOK.
 
 THE 
 
 CHRIST OF ENGLISH POETRY 
 
 LECTURE I 
 CYNEWULF 
 
 " Worship God : for the testimony of Jesus is the Spirit of prophecy " 
 
 REVELATION xix. 10. 
 
 IN the belief that " prophecy is an attribute of poetry 
 rather than poetry an attribute of prophecy," L I am 
 proposing in the four lectures which it is my duty to 
 deliver in this place, to ask you to consider with me the 
 varied witness which has been borne by four represen- 
 tative poets of England, to the Person and the Spirit 
 of Jesus Christ. 
 
 Let me begin with a preliminary question. 
 
 What is the secret of that immortal story which now 
 for more than sixty generations of Gospel readers has 
 wrought its unfailing spell upon the heart of humanity ? 
 What is the source and origin of that compelling motive 
 which alone in the experience of Christendom has been 
 found potent to make bad men good, and to bring to 
 good men the abiding vision of eternal life, the abiding 
 vision of the best that is hidden in temporal things ?
 
 4 THE CHRIST OF ENGLISH POETRY 
 
 Is it not the central Presence of a unique and a 
 compelling Personality felt through every page of those 
 informal memoirs, which we know by the name of the 
 Four Gospels ? Personality is the mightiest force which 
 God can bring to bear upon man, and the supreme 
 Personality in all history, the most potent factor in all 
 civilised change and progress is that of Jesus Christ. It 
 is of this Personality that the evangelists speak to us. 
 In the Gospels Jesus Christ Himself is the Gospel. And 
 from first to last the spell of His story on our hearts and 
 consciences never lessens. 
 
 We feel it as we begin to read the records of the 
 infancy, where in the Prologue of St. Luke's Gospel, the 
 Spirit of Hebrew poetry, in sacred canticles, in bursts 
 of lyric joy, in the still sweeter stranger music falling 
 from the magic sky, is vocal above the manger- cradle 
 of Bethlehem. We feel it more strongly as we read on 
 through the historic narrative of later years, where, as 
 in St. Matthew's Gospel, a Royal Figure moves, claiming 
 homage from all good men, by signs of power, by deeds 
 of mercy, by words of love ; a Prophet, whose message 
 is always Life means mission^ Love means service ; a 
 Teacher whose sayings because of their moral insight 
 and spiritual beauty are always vibrant down the cen- 
 turies ; a Legislator whose gift to His people is not 
 a model code of laws, but a law-making power inherent 
 in the disciplined human character. We feel it again 
 when with an added touch of dramatic realism St. Mark 
 takes up the tale to tell us of the " strong Son of 
 God," the Lord of Patience and of Pity, who wins His 
 throne of spiritual royalty, and through suffering,
 
 CYNEWULF 5 
 
 through self-discipline, through self-subordination, ex- 
 hibits the majesty of a self-possessed manhood and the 
 divine strength of a perfected will. We feel it most 
 of all perhaps, as we approach the last tragic issue, where, 
 as in St. John's Gospel, the divine glory of the Passion 
 is revealed and the eternal motive of Christ is made 
 plain, as the " law of the spirit of life " is seen acting 
 upon the secret principles of the human will, setting 
 humanity free from " the law of sin and of death," 
 creating in the world a new order of spiritual evolution, 
 which shall gradually bring the way of life of the disciple 
 into perfect harmony with the duty-ideal of the Master. 
 
 But it is not only in the Gospel story, it is not only 
 even in the writings of the immediately succeeding 
 generation of believers, attempting to interpret the 
 Gospel facts, that we feel that behind the wonderful 
 teaching of Jesus there stands always the presence of 
 His Creative Personality. It is also the witness of 
 history. All through the ages of the Christian Church, 
 side by side with the attempt to interpret the facts upon 
 which the Gospel of man's redemption rests the facts 
 which underlie the doctrines of the Trinity and of the 
 Incarnation, of the Forgiveness of Sins, of the Resurrec- 
 tion of the Body, and of the certainty of Eternal Life, of 
 the consciousness of man's filial relationship with the 
 Heavenly Father, of the Mission of the Comforter, and 
 of the Apostolic Church all in fact which by St. Paul 
 is epitomised as " the preaching of Christ crucified " 
 there has been the endeavour to keep the picture of Christ's 
 living Personality close before the eyes of the believer, 
 for so only was it felt to be possible it is the verdict of
 
 6 THE CHRIST OF ENGLISH POETRY 
 
 experience to reach the springs of the human heart, to 
 kindle the personal devotion of the disciple of Jesus, to 
 stir his imagination, to quicken his conscience, to compel 
 his love. All indeed would have been lost for Christianity 
 as an ethical force in the world, if men, busied too much 
 with the task of perfecting a theological system, had 
 suffered themselves permanently to lose or to undervalue 
 the Personality of Christ Himself as the source of all holy 
 inspiration. The presence of Christ in fact was a power 
 which saved men from their sins by imbuing them with 
 His Personality. The story of man's search after God, it 
 is true, is a fine and a noble story, but it has always 
 become an unspeakably pathetic story when the searcher 
 whether theologian or philosopher, whether monk or 
 mystic fogged, it may be, in the mist of scholasticism, 
 or blinded by the dust of controversy, has lost sight of 
 the Figure in the Way before him and has become deaf 
 to the voice, saying, " Follow ME ! I am the Way, the 
 Truth, and the Life." The ethical instinct, at any rate, 
 of humanity turns inevitably from a system to a Person, 
 from theories about Christ to Christ Himself. It is the 
 Person of Christ which is the essential factor in the 
 Christian religion. It is the spirit of Christ which makes 
 us Christian, the spirit, which is not the letter of His 
 Gospel, but the emanation of His Person. In a word, it 
 is upon Christology rather than upon Theology, that the 
 ultimate sanction for Christian conduct rests. 
 
 But is it not true, you will ask, that the picture of 
 Jesus Christ, the conception of His Personality, has 
 varied greatly from age to age ? Yes, it is true. Jesus 
 Christ is indeed the Light of the World, but the light, as
 
 CYNEWULF 7 
 
 it were, has been broken up as by a prism, and to some 
 eyes each colour of the spectrum in its turn has seemed 
 to be the light's complete effulgence. You will see that 
 that has been so nowhere more vividly than in the history 
 of Christian art. 
 
 As you gaze upon the earliest Christian pictures, in 
 the Roman catacombs, you cannot fail, I think, to re- 
 cognise that the conception of Christ which was conveyed 
 to the simple minds of the men of the second and third 
 century by the gay and winsome figure of the Good 
 Shepherd, 2 " with the happy sheep nestling upon His 
 shoulder, with the pastoral pipes in His hand, blooming 
 in immortal youth," must be very different from that of 
 the men of a later age, for whom the gracious and gentle 
 Pastor has given place to the crucified Sufferer, depicted 
 in countless aspects of misery and woe, from the gaunt 
 and ghastly crucifixes and Pietas and entombments of the 
 early Florentines, to the sublime dignities of Michael 
 Angelo, and of Tintoretto and of Correggio. 
 
 Nor, again, can you help feeling that the conception 
 of Christ's Personality conveyed to the Italian Church- 
 men of the Middle Ages by the numberless pictures of 
 the Madonna and Child, unfailing in their sweet and 
 gentle lessons of the divinity of childhood and of 
 mother's love, must be far different to that conveyed to 
 the Flemish Christians of the fourteenth century by such 
 a picture as the Van Eycks' " Worship of the Immacu- 
 late Lamb," with its sublime figure of the omnipotent 
 Christ, the King in glory, enthroned and crowned, with 
 hands outstretched, in royal priestly benediction of the 
 world.
 
 8 THE CHRIST OF ENGLISH POETRY 
 
 But a still more potent witness to the varying pictures 
 of the Christ might, I think, be found in the pages of the 
 poets of Christendom ; indeed, I can conceive of few 
 nobler, few more useful subjects of Christian apology, 
 than an adequate exposition of the witness which has been 
 borne by the Christian poets of every age to Christ and 
 Christianity. The poets, perhaps, even more than the 
 theologians, are the representative men of their own age ; 
 for each poet is, in a sense, the epitome of the imagina- 
 tive life of his age and nation, sharing with his country- 
 men the raw materials of his art, though illuminating 
 those materials with the light of his own genius. The 
 poets therefore are the most prophetic, the most clear- 
 sighted, the most deep-hearted men of their time. It 
 is to their writings we may most wisely go if we would 
 know what real spiritual insight is there is in such 
 things, remember, but one source of inspiration, for, as 
 Christians, we believe there is but one Holy Spirit if 
 we would feel the true warm religious emotion of men's 
 hearts rather than the cold intellectual thoughts of their 
 minds ; nay, if we would distinguish often between the 
 religion of Christ and the religion of Christians ; in a 
 word, if we would find the very Christ Himself as He 
 has been known and worshipped in every age. 
 
 I cannot, of course, in the time allotted to me as 
 Hulsean Lecturer, undertake any such task. Obviously 
 for a complete presentation of such a subject covering 
 the whole field of Church history, a much wider canvas 
 than mine would be necessary. 
 
 But I think it may be useful to delimit a small por- 
 tion of that field, and to endeavour, from the history of
 
 CYNEWULF 9 
 
 the English Church and nation at four representative 
 periods of the national life, to sketch the teaching of four 
 representative English poets in regard to the Personality 
 of Christ and the spirit of His teaching. 
 
 That at any rate is the subject which I am proposing 
 to discuss with you in the four lectures which it is my 
 duty to deliver in this place. I shall hope that such an 
 investigation will prove, not, as Matthew Arnold once 
 said, that " Poetry is the strongest part of our religion 
 to-day," but that the English poets have been among the 
 strongest witnesses to the faith of Christ in this land, and 
 to that " truth and excellency of Christianity " which 
 Mr, Hulse in his will stated to be the object which his 
 lecturer should endeavour to demonstrate. 
 
 In the growth of English literature it is, of course, 
 possible to trace a definite law of progress, and indeed 
 to group its phenomena of intellectual ebb and flow into 
 certain well-marked periods of special activity. The 
 national sowing of great deeds is, as of necessity, fol- 
 lowed by a national harvest of great thoughts. Each 
 act, as it were, of the drama of England's life and story 
 seems always to end in an epilogue of lyric song and 
 praise, as the mental exaltation of the nation aroused by 
 some great movement demands its adequate expression. 
 
 There are, it seems to me, four such representative 
 periods in the national life, which we may conveniently 
 take as the field of our present inquiry. 
 
 I. First, then, there is the period, consequent upon 
 the settlement, in the eighth and ninth centuries of the 
 old English kingdoms, of that national seething time,
 
 when the many and various elements, which were after- 
 wards to make the mighty England of the generations 
 yet to be, were still struggling under the inspiration of 
 the working unity of the one English Church into the 
 unity of the one English nation ; and the monastic 
 school of York, gathering in, on the one hand, the 
 harvest of Irish learning, and, on the other, of the bar- 
 barised Latin culture of the Franco-Gallican monasteries, 
 was gradually becoming the literary centre of Western 
 Europe. Of this period I propose to take Cynewulf as 
 the representative poet. 
 
 II. Again, there is the period, at the close of the 
 fourteenth century, when the two great principles upon 
 which English society in the Middle Ages, Monasticism 
 and Chivalry, had rested reached their grand climacteric, 
 and sank into decay when the scene of all those feelings 
 which, since the time of King John, had been working 
 in the conscience of the English people, found its most 
 vivid poetic reflection in the " Vision of Piers Plowman," 
 by William Langland. 
 
 III. Thirdly, there is the period, following upon 
 the disruption in England of the great social fabric of 
 Catholicism and of Feudalism, when in the sixteenth 
 century, under the influence, on the one hand, of the 
 New Learning, and, on the other, of the spiritual 
 principle of equal freedom and individual liberty, the 
 old traditional order gave place to that emancipation of 
 faith and morals, which in the realm of letters we know 
 by the magic name of the Renaissance, and in the realm 
 of religion of the Reformation.
 
 CYNEWULF ii 
 
 And of this period I dare hardly take as the repre- 
 sentative poet of his age any other than he who is " not 
 for an age, but for all time." 
 
 IV. Lastly, there is our own period, which in the 
 early part of the last century witnessed the revival of 
 Romanticism, both in letters and religion, and at a later 
 date has endeavoured to co-ordinate in both spheres the 
 latest revelations of philosophy and faith by the re- 
 focussing, on the one hand, of the old doctrine of the 
 early Greek Christian Fathers, concerning the Imman- 
 ence of the Divine in Man, which is the essential truth 
 of the Incarnation ; and, on the other, by the applica- 
 tion of the modern scientific theory of evolution to all 
 the great problems of human destiny and origin a theory 
 which alone appears to make possible to our modern age 
 the thought of the Church of Christ as a sovereign 
 society embracing in one comprehensive unity all realms 
 of human thought or action. 
 
 And for this period the most representative poet the 
 poet of keenest spiritual insight, who shall best interpret 
 for us in the light of modern knowledge the Person and the 
 Spirit of Jesus Christ I believe to be Robert Browning. 
 
 I begin, then, to-day with an early English monastic 
 ideal, as set forth in "The Christ" of Cynewulf. 
 
 In the library of Exeter Cathedral there is an old 
 book, or rather a roll of manuscript, known by the 
 name of "The Exeter Book" {Codex Exonensis}, 3 con- 
 taining probably the noblest product of early English 
 genius. The book has lain in the cathedral library ever
 
 12 THE CHRIST OF ENGLISH POETRY 
 
 since the day when it was placed there, in the year 1071, 
 by Leofric, the first Bishop of Exeter and tenth of 
 Crediton, Chancellor of England, the friend and coun- 
 sellor of Edward the Confessor. In Leofric's catalogue 
 (prefixed to this MS.) of the books he placed in the 
 library, the entry of this book, written in a contem- 
 porary Anglo-Saxon hand, runs thus : "A mickle Eng- 
 lish book on all sorts of things wrought in verse." 
 The first place in the Codex is held by the remarkable 
 poem the oldest Christiad of modern Europe Cyne- 
 wulf's " Christ." 
 
 Of Cynewulf himself we know very little.* He 
 is like the greatest of all our poets at least in this, 
 that we know less of his life than of his character. 
 From the fact that the scenery of his poems closely 
 resembles the coast scenery of Northumbria the 
 storm-lashed cliffs, the wintry tempestuous seas, often 
 weltering with ice it has been conjectured that he 
 belonged to one or other of the towns of that region 
 Whitby, Jarrow, Lindisfarne, Tynemouth all centres 
 of learning in touch with the great monastery school 
 at York, and all places with which a poet would 
 breathe that atmosphere of the sea which is so charac- 
 teristic of all his poems. Other scholars, however, 
 have conjectured, and the conjecture is not without 
 some show of probability, that the poet may be identified 
 with a certain Cynewulf, priest of Dunwich, 5 whose 
 signature follows that of Bishop Tidfrith in the Canons 
 of the Synod of Cloveshoo held in 803. Dunwich, 
 as you remember, was that chief seaport on the East 
 Anglian coast now swallowed up by the ocean which
 
 CYNEWULF 13 
 
 in the middle of the seventh century had become the 
 seat of Felix, the first East Anglian bishop. There, 
 under the influence of Felix, a school of learning had 
 sprung up, whose traditions, at any rate, were considered 
 in the Middle Ages to be of sufficient importance to 
 lend authority to the legendary stories of the ancient 
 origin of this University, traditions which are still re- 
 cognised, I believe, by the recital, in our Commemora- 
 tion Service of Benefactors, of the name of Sigebert, 
 King of the East Angles, and uncle of S. Etheldreda 
 of Ely, as our first University founder. 
 
 But however that may be, whether the poet 
 Cynewulf belonged to the Northern School of York, or 
 to the East Anglian School of Dunwich, one thing is 
 quite certain, that he must have had a scholastic training, 
 for on no other hypothesis can we account for his 
 familiarity with liturgical lore or for the ripeness of 
 his scholarship, facts which are so prominent in his 
 poetry. Obviously he was a zealous student of the 
 Bible, and quite as obviously a student of the poetry or 
 poetical prose of Augustine, of Prudentius, of Gregory 
 the Great, of Bede, of Alcuin ; and also of the Latin 
 Creeds, Antiphons, and Hymns of the Church. So 
 familiar indeed is he with the scholar's vernacular that 
 Latin words slip, as it were, unobserved into his own 
 English lines. That in mature life he became a priest 
 seems fairly probable. That he was a monk also, and 
 had therefore been trained as such, does not seem quite 
 so likely. For he speaks of himself in early life as 
 having received guerdon gold in the mead-hall, and a
 
 i 4 THE CHRIST OF ENGLISH POETRY 
 
 richly caparisoned charger as the reward of prowess. 
 This points at least to a youth of some adventure, and 
 would explain also the exactitude of his knowledge 
 concerning war and all its pomp and circumstance. But 
 Cynewulf has not only the soldier's enthusiasm for war- 
 like deeds. He speaks, too, with all a sailor's zest of 
 the sea. No inland man could have written his poetry, 
 or could so have sung as he did of the ocean, of its 
 storm and calm, of its power and rage, of its waves 
 dancing in the sunlight, of its multitudinous billows 
 rolling into space under the moonbeams. In a word, 
 he was a poet, with all a poet's imagination and close 
 observation of what he saw and heard on sea and 
 land ; with all a poet's love of beauty the beauty of 
 the world, the splendour of art, the loveliness of 
 woman, the glory of manhood ; with ail a poet's eye, 
 too, for colour and with all a poet's passion for light. 
 To him the earth is all dressed in green. " In guard of 
 God stands the green plain decked with many streams 
 and bright flowers." It is the white hands of Christ 
 that are pierced with nails. The iron nails shine like 
 stars or glitter like jewels. Christ Himself is " the sun 
 burst" out of the East, flooding the world with day. 
 His presence is always attested by glory of light. 
 In his later poems, brooding, tender, poignant, vivid, 
 in which he strives to disclose to us the kingdoms of 
 life and death, to pierce the darkness of heathenism 
 with the Christian's lyric joy, and to invest the lives 
 of his hearers with the heaven which lies habitually 
 about his own soul, there is still an echo of the care- 
 less heroic days of youth. But the higher moods of
 
 CYNEWULF 15 
 
 his later life were not won without a period of storm 
 and stress in which his early song-craft passes from 
 him. There came a time he tells us himself when 
 the careless happiness of youth found an abrupt end, 
 like " the hasting waves, like the storm which ends in 
 silence." He is in bitterest sorrow, convinced of sin, 
 fearful of the wrath of God, so full of remorse for the 
 careless past that his song-craft leaves him. He is no 
 more a poet. Then he wins hope again with a vision 
 of the redeeming power of the cross of Christ and the 
 craft of song returns. "God Himself," he says, "un- 
 locked the power of poetry in my breast." And all 
 the old subjects live again in his pages battle and 
 voyage, mead-hall and race-course, jewels and fair 
 women but subordinated to his higher purpose, 
 heightened and transfigured by the vision of the eternal 
 behind the temporal. And so he sings of the " Dream 
 of the Holy Rood," "Juliana," " Elene," "Andreas," 
 "Guthlac," the "Fates of the Apostles," and "The 
 Christ." 
 
 It is of this last poem especially that I wish to 
 speak to you. 
 
 I confess that when I read it for the first time some 
 years ago, in the full text published by Mr. Gollancz, 
 I was astonished at the lofty sublimity and power of 
 this great Christian epic of the Northern Church in 
 the eighth century ; this noble story of our salvation 
 with its trumpet-tongued passages of joy and piety ; its 
 pathetic wailing lyrics of passionate prayer and suppli- 
 cation ; its vivid dramatic pictures ; its rushing choric 
 outbursts of praise and victory.
 
 16 THE CHRIST OF ENGLISH POETRY 
 
 The story is divided into three main pieces, dealing 
 respectively with the Nativity of Christ, His Ascension, 
 and the Doomsday. 
 
 I. 
 
 I have said that Cynewulf exhibits in his poetry 
 very considerable familiarity with liturgical literature. 
 This knowledge is very plainly shown in the first section 
 of his " Christ." Its historic basis, indeed, is to be found 
 in the public offices of the Church, as arranged for the 
 Advent season, with their proper psalms, lessons, re- 
 sponds, hymns, and prayers, and especially upon the 
 textual structure of the pre-Christmas antiphons 
 4< the seven greater O's" as they have been called 
 those solemn invocations to the Advent Christ, addressed 
 under one or other of His scriptural titles : (i.) O 
 Sapientia ! (ii.) O Adona! ! (iii.) O Radix Jesse ! (iv.) O 
 Clavis David ! (v.) O Oriens ! (vi.) O Rex Gentium ! 
 (vii.) O Emmanuel ! which were sung in the churches 
 day by day at vespers in the week preceding Christmas. 6 
 There can be little doubt indeed to any careful student 
 of this first passus of Cynewulf's poem, that its writer, 
 thrilled by the solemn chanting of these Latin anti- 
 phons and inspired by the devout spirit of their 
 contents, desires to reproduce them in English. He 
 abridges, expands, suppresses, transposes, interpolates, 
 just as his genius may dictate, but the liturgical basis 
 is never forgotten. The great Advent message of the 
 Church is clearly told. The story alternates between joy 
 and exultation over the fulness of Christ's manifestation, 
 and intense longing that, as the great Redeemer, He
 
 CYNEWULF 17 
 
 will liberate the sinner from the thraldom of his sin, 
 and as the Prince of Glory He will build up His 
 Church in the most Holy Faith. 
 
 The poem opens with an invocation to Christ 
 a variation of the Antiphon " O Rex Gentium " " O 
 King and desire of all nations, Thou chief corner-stone 
 who makest two to be one ; come Thou and save man 
 whom Thou formedst from the clay ! " 7 It is thus 
 Englished by Cynewulf : 
 
 " O King ! Thou art the wall-stone, 
 which of old the workman 
 from their work rejected ! 
 Well it Thee beseemeth 
 that Thou hold the headship 
 of this Hall of glory, 
 and should' st join together 
 With a fastening firm 
 the broad-spaced walls 
 of the flint unbreakable 
 all fitly framed together ; 
 that among earth's dwellers 
 all with sight of eyes 
 may for ever wonder ; 
 O Prince of glory ! 
 now through skill and wisdom 
 manifest Thy handiwork, 
 true-fast, and firm-set 
 In sovran splendour." 
 
 Then follows a paraphrase of the Antiphon " O 
 clavis David ! " a prayer to the Christ as the Maker and 
 Craftsman of the world, who holds the keys of Life 
 and Death, to have pity upon His people and to save
 
 1 8 THE CHRIST OF ENGLISH POETRY 
 
 them from the Baleful one, the slayer of the mind, 
 the Scather of Men. "We speak these words in very 
 need " cries the poet in his own person " we who in 
 prison yearn for the sunlight, who in abject plight 
 must needs depart to this narrow shore bereft of 
 Fatherland." 
 
 Then there follows what we may well call a 
 dramatic dialogue 8 the first dawning so to say in our 
 literature of the Mystery Play and the sequent English 
 drama in which the characters Mary the Virgin, and 
 Joseph with the children of Jerusalem as chorus, placed 
 in a scenic environment prepared for their entrance, 
 sing to one another of the Incarnation of Christ and 
 its meaning. 
 
 " Hail ! from the sovran splendour glory Thou of women, 
 Loveliest of maidens in all the realms of earth, 
 That the ocean Rovers ever hearkened speech of 
 Tell to us the mystery that came to thee from heaven." 
 
 And the Virgin answers 
 
 " What is now the wonder at the which ye gaze 
 Making here your moan mournfully awailing 
 Children ye of Salem daughters too of Solima 
 Verily to men-ward the mystery is not known 
 But gone is the guilt of Eve passed the curse of Adam 
 Praise to lowliest woman hope is won for man 
 And joy for the host of angels and for the Father of Truth 
 for ever." 
 
 Then the chorus seems to break into the dialogue with 
 a variant of the antiphon, O oriens splendor lucis, a little 
 lyric which is probably one of the earliest of English 
 Christmas carols
 
 CYNEWULF 19 
 
 " Hail Earendel soothfast and sunbright 
 Sunbeam enlightening all the tides of time 
 Come Thyself illumine souls long lost in darkness 
 Come Thou Lord of Triumph Thou Giver of Thyself! "* 
 
 Then once more the dialogue of Mary and Joseph 
 proceeds, celebrating the Virgin's praise as " the glorious 
 Lady of the middle earth, and the ring-adorned Bride of 
 Heaven," ending with a final chorus in which are pic- 
 tured the circle of the praising Seraphim, " with winged 
 plumes flashing in the play of their flight," around the 
 throne of the Eternal. 
 
 I think perhaps one ought to notice here in passing 
 how in this canto the somewhat sombre and grim aspect 
 of the Gospel, as Cynewulf conceives it, is brightened 
 with the idyllic beauty of the Virgin Mother of the 
 Christ, and through her of that conception of woman- 
 hood an ideal, it should be remembered, worthy of an 
 English poet picturing a woman of the true northern 
 type, generous and gentle and winning, but firm of 
 character, resolute of will, royal of bearing a concep- 
 tion which, whatever may be the mistakes and heresies 
 of a later Mariolatry, did so much to soften and refine 
 the heroic ideals of our early forbears 
 
 " For in reverence of the Heavenes Queen 
 They came to worship alle women that been." 
 
 Indeed, I think, it is not too much to say that the sweet 
 and tender grace, the humility and loving-kindness of 
 the Virgin, her maidenhood, her motherhood, as pictured 
 in this poem of Cynewulfs, and in the pages of many 
 another English poet down to Chaucer, became for the
 
 20 THE CHRIST OF ENGLTSH POETRY 
 
 men of mediaeval England ths most vivid and beautiful 
 Christian ideal that filled the minds of men after the 
 image of Christ. 10 
 
 II. 
 
 The second portion of Cynewulf's poem is taken up 
 with the subject of Christ's Ascension, and of the events 
 which followed and preceded it. I have said that the 
 source of the first part was found by Cynewulf in the 
 great pre-Christmas antiphons. So also we shall find 
 that the historic basis of this second part is more or less 
 liturgical ; for it is founded on the close of a homily 
 written by Gregory the Great n on one of the special 
 lessons of Ascension-tide (that which was read on the 
 third Nocturne of the Octave), and upon a Latin Antiphon 
 (Hymnum Cantamus Gloria) written by the Venerable 
 Bede, and still in part familiar to the Church of to-day 
 as the hymn "Sing triumphant hymns of praise." The 
 substance therefore of Cynewulf's poem is thus associated 
 with two of the glories of the early English Church. 
 For as the heroic age of that Church may fitly be said 
 to close with the death of Bede, it is surely interesting 
 to find that the Ascension Hymn, which, according to 
 the touching story of Cuthbert, was among the last words 
 on the lips of his dying master, was also enshrined at the 
 very heart of Cynewulf's great epic. And when we 
 remember too how great was the debt of the English 
 Church to Pope Gregory, it is hardly, I think, less 
 interesting to note that the most important part 
 of Cynewulf's " Christ " should consist of a poetic
 
 CYNEWULF 21 
 
 amplification of one of the most eloquent homilies of 
 that great Doctor of the Church. 
 
 But the fact that the Ascended Christ, the King of 
 Glory, victorious over sin and death, rather than the 
 Crucified Sufferer shines forth as the chief Figure of this 
 eighth-century poem whether suggested to Cynewulf 
 primarily by Gregory's homily or not I cannot say 
 has, I think, a far wider interest than its mere historic 
 association with the Ascension-tide offices. For although 
 it cannot be doubted, I suppose, that the harmony of 
 the Christian Creed depends upon the fact of the 
 Ascension of Jesus even as much as upon the fact of 
 the Resurrection itself for it should not be forgotten 
 that the circumstances of the Ascension, in their bright- 
 ness, in their promise, in their miraculousness, in their 
 moving appeal to human aspiration seems especially to 
 attract the contemplation of all who receive the Christian 
 Faith still it cannot, I think, be denied it is a mourn- 
 ful fact of history that the morbid temper of the 
 Church of the Middle Ages could not rest satisfied 
 without perpetual representation of the tortures of the 
 Crucified Christ, and did but very rarely dwell upon 
 the glories of His triumph. 
 
 It is, therefore, all the more remarkable to find, on 
 the evidence of this representative poet, that in regard 
 to the due proportion of faith, and especially in relation 
 to this great doctrine of the triumphant Christ, our 
 English forbears in the Church of the eighth century 
 had the root of the matter in them a thousand years 
 ago. For it is this faith in a Christ, who by His in- 
 carnation consecrated and ennobled human nature, and
 
 22 THE CHRIST OF ENGLISH POETRY 
 
 who by His Ascension with that spiritualised human 
 nature into heaven, glorified, may I not say, deified it 
 " He was made man that we might be made God " l2 are 
 the bold words of Athanasius and who by His Holy 
 Spirit " gave gifts unto men " for the strengthening and 
 emboldening of His Church, it is this faith which has 
 been the effective antecedent of those historic changes 
 which have modified, if they have not created, our 
 modern civilisation. 
 
 It is, I say, therefore, specially interesting to find 
 that the Personality of Christ, in Cynewulf's poem, is 
 undoubtedly pictured as a Divine and Imperial Figure, 
 supreme over heaven and earth, the Lord of Glory and 
 the everlasting Son of the Father, the Judge of quick 
 and dead, even though we are also obliged to allow that 
 the old Saxon poet has conceived Him, in somewhat 
 saga fashion, as a victorious King, whose apostles and 
 saints are thegns and asthelings, dispensing gifts of 
 service among His thralls, waging a world-wide war 
 in which earth and heaven and hell are mingled, and 
 who, when the victory over the dark-burg of hell shall 
 be won, will sit down to feast with His warriors in the 
 great Hall of the light-burg of heaven, amid the singing 
 of the angels, who are the bards of the battle. 13 
 
 " When the great Leader, the Prince majestic, 
 Called to Bethany his band of thanes 
 His dear comrades " 
 
 are the words with which Cynewulf prefaces the 
 scriptural account of the farewell words of the ascend- 
 ing Christ to His disciples. So too the great commission
 
 CYNEWULF 23 
 
 to His Church, " Go ye into all nations, teach, preach, 
 baptize," becomes such an exhortation as would no doubt 
 be natural to a poet whose people were still half-pagan 
 and idolatrous : " Break, break the idols, cast them 
 down, spurn them ; quench strife and hatred ; sow peace 
 on earth. I will abide with you for ever." 
 
 " Lo ! the Holy Hero ! " he exclaims, as in his 
 vision he sees the mighty host of the angels coming to 
 meet in mid-space the ascending Christ, and the warrior 
 spirit once more awakens in him, and he bursts into a 
 war-shout, like a chieftain welcoming his over-lord : 
 
 " Lo, the Holy Hero warrior King of glory, 
 He the Helm of Heaven, hath arrayed the war 
 Right against his ancient foes, with his only might. 
 
 Now will he seek the spirit's throne of grace, 
 
 He, the Saviour of souls, the proper bairn of God, 
 
 After his war-play ! Forward now, ye comrades, 
 
 Frankly march along ! Open, O ye gates ! 
 
 He will into you. He, of all the wielder, 
 
 He, the City's King He Creation's Lord, 
 
 Now his folk will lead, reft from the devils, 
 
 To the joy of joys, by His own victory. 
 
 'Twixt God and man he places a ghostly pledge 
 
 Of love Life's solace, and of all Light joy." [563-584.] 15 
 
 III. 
 
 The third and final portion of Cynewulf's poem is 
 taken up with a description, in swirling verses, full of 
 imaginative splendour, of the Day of Judgment. Like 
 a thief in the blackness of night it surprises men. 
 
 " Lo, the fire-blast, flaming far, fierce and hungry as a sword, 
 Whelms the world withal. Then on every wight
 
 24 THE CHRIST OF ENGLISH POETRY 
 
 Fastens the death-flame ! on all fowls and beasts, 
 Fire-swart or raging warrior, rushes conflagration 
 All the earth along." 16 
 
 For the general organism of this part of his 
 poem, Cynewulf is indebted to various sources to 
 Bede, to Gregory, to Augustine, to Prudentius, to 
 Ephraem Syrus, to the Apocrypha but the whole is 
 moulded or rather fused by his imaginative power into 
 a poem of the greatest moral fervour, intensity, and 
 vividness. The scenes described are realised with start- 
 ling clearness. The speeches are majestic and yet 
 tender, pathetic and yet awful. 
 
 The final address of Christ to the good and evil, 
 to the just and the unjust, repeating the whole story of 
 the Fall, the Incarnation, the Crucifixion, the Resurrec- 
 tion, is full of quick personal appeals, as if Jesus were 
 speaking to one only out of the vast host gathered to 
 judgment. 
 
 There is one specially effective passage on the 
 theme of the Holy Rood. It is a variant on the 
 story of the vision of Constantine, as told by Eusebius, 
 a story which we know to have been familiar to 
 Cynewulf by his direct allusion to it in the " Elene." " 
 
 A mighty blood-red cross is pictured with its foot 
 standing on the Hill of Zion, rising till its top reaches 
 the sky. All the hosts of heaven, angels and men, 
 gaze upon it. By its ruddy light all things are seen. 
 The sun is gone. It shines instead of the sun. It 
 is the brightest of all beacons. All the shadows 
 are scattered by its brilliancy. From head to foot 
 it is red, wet with the blood of the King of Heaven.
 
 CYNEWULF 25 
 
 The good see it and it brings brightness to their 
 souls. The evil see it for their torment and 
 their doom. And in the ruddy light, Christ, like 
 a Roman preacher to the crucifix, turns to the mighty 
 Rood, points to Himself hanging there, and, " speaking 
 as if He spake to one and yet did mean all sinful 
 folk," exclaims : 
 
 " Lo, man, with my own hands I fashioned thee 
 In the beginning, and wisdom granted thee ; 
 I formed thy Jimbs of clay ; I gave thee living soul ; 
 I honoured thee o'er all created things ; I wrought 
 Thine aspect like to mine ; I gave thee might, 
 And wealth o'er each wide land ; of woe thou knewest nought, 
 Nought of the woe to come ; yet thankless thou . . . 
 Thou wouldst not fulfil the Word of Life 
 But, at the word of thy Bane, didst break my bidding, 
 A treacherous foe, a mischievous destroyer, 
 Didst thou obey rather than thy Creator. . . . 
 
 See now the deadly wounds they made of yore 
 Upon my hands and e'en upon my feet . . . 
 The gory wound, the gash upon my side . . . 
 
 how uneven between us two the reckoning ! 
 
 Wherefore didst thou forsake the beauteous life 
 Which graciously I bought for thee through love. 
 
 Give me back my life for which in martyrdom 
 
 1 gave thee my own. For that sore death of mine 
 I claim the life thou hast so sinfully destroyed. 
 
 Why hast thou crucified me afresh on thy hand's cross 
 Worse than when of old I hung upon the tree ?
 
 26 THE CHRIST OF ENGLISH POETRY 
 
 . . . Methinks this is harder, 
 
 Thy sin's cross is heavier for me bound fast unwillingly, 
 
 Than was that other rood which once willingly 
 
 I for thee ascended." 18 
 
 And so Cynewulf's poem ends with the final locking 
 of hell and the opening of heaven to the just, and with 
 this description of the Perfect Land : 
 
 " There is angels' song bliss of the blessed, 
 There is the dear face of the Lord Eternal 
 To the blessed brighter than all the sun's beaming. 
 There is love of the loved ones, life without death's end ; 
 Merry man's multitude, youth without age, 
 Glory of God's chivalry, health without pain, 
 Rest for right doers, rest without toil, 
 Day without darkness, bliss without bale, 
 Peace between friends, peace without jealousy, 
 Love that envieth not, in the union of the saints, 
 For the blessed in Heaven, nor hunger nor thirst, 
 Nor sleep, nor sickness, nor sun's heat, 
 Nor cold, nor care, but the happy company. 
 Fairest of all hosts shall ever enjoy 
 Their sovran's grace and glory with their King." 
 
 Such, then, in briefest analysis is the outline of 
 Cynewulf's poem. What, then, shall we say of it? 
 How especially does it seem to us for in conclusion 
 I must return to the question with which I set out 
 that the Personality of the Christ is conceived by this 
 singer and poet of our Northern Church in the 
 England of a thousand years ago ? 
 
 Of the poem as a whole I think we may say this, 
 that although in its structure we cannot deny that the 
 old is still somewhat interwoven with the new, the old
 
 CYNEWULF 27 
 
 romantic and mythical elements of Celtic or Teutonic 
 origin tending somewhat to paganise the purity of 
 Christian faith, still Cynewulf's song is a trumpet voice 
 of the heart which belongs essentially to our English 
 nature. In grasp, in variety, in narrative skill, 
 Cynewulf, it is true, is hopelessly inferior to Dante 
 or Milton ; yet, in vividness, in poignancy, in hope, in 
 love, in tenderness, he belongs to the same order as 
 they, and in his sense of the sublime, as in that 
 picture of the cross towering to the heavens like a 
 mythic Yggdrasil, he needs not shrink from a com- 
 parison with even the prophets of the sublime. In- 
 deed, I think it is not too much to say, in the words 
 of one of his latest commentators, that " the lofty 
 music of Milton's ' mighty mouthed harmonies,' and 
 not less perhaps Milton's sombre Puritan faith and its 
 somewhat lurid conceptions of the future of the un- 
 saved, come down to him in legitimate descent from 
 this earliest exaltation of English Psalm." 
 
 In the theology of his poem Cynewulf is quite 
 evidently an orthodox believer after the standard of the 
 Western Church of his time, in substantial agreement 
 with Pope Gregory, the father of Latin Christianity in 
 England. " Not only does he frequently extol the 
 Trinity, but he specifies the Three Persons, even ex- 
 plicitly identifying the Father with the Son and with 
 the Spirit. The Father is thought of especially as the 
 Creator, though this function is sometimes attributed to 
 the Son, and sometimes exercised by Him in conjunction 
 with the Father. Christ, though God's Son, and con-
 
 28 THE CHRIST OF ENGLISH POETRY 
 
 ceived by the Holy Ghost, is God of God, without be- 
 ginning, co-eternal and co-abiding with the Father, and 
 eternally generated by Him. He is called Emmanuel, 
 and designated a priest after the order of Melchizedec. 
 Of His life on earth, we have mention of His birth, 
 His miracles, His trial and crucifixion, the harrowing of 
 hell, the Resurrection and Ascension. He sitteth at the 
 right hand of the Father, throned among the angels, 
 and thence shall come in glory to judge the world." 
 
 And it is this last clause of the Christian Creed 
 this faith in the ascended Christ victorious over sin and 
 death and hell which gives, I think, the distinctive 
 note to Cynewulf's poem, as indeed it probably does 
 also to Anglo-Saxon Christianity. Personal sorrow for 
 sin, the rapture wrought by the conviction of redemp- 
 tion through Christ's cross, this of course finds lyric 
 expression in Anglo-Saxon poetry. For the personal cry 
 after all is the human basis of poetry as it is of prayer. 
 But the final overthrow of evil, the final victory of good, 
 this also finds triumphant, exultant expression. For an 
 optimistic faith in the highest forces which govern 
 human destiny as beneficent and progressive, is the truest 
 inspiration of poetry as it is of worship. And although 
 it is true that the glory of Christ's conquest is, as I said, 
 conceived by Cynewulf in somewhat Saga fashion, and 
 the story of the harrowing of hell and the victor's return 
 in triumph to His heavenly home is depicted in images 
 largely borrowed from the war legends of our heathen 
 forefathers, yet it is this conception of Christ as a victor 
 crowned and triumphant, with the signs of the Passion 
 accomplished and fulfilled kept in the background, which
 
 CYNEWULF 29 
 
 touched the imagination of our forefathers as nothing 
 else perhaps could, and gave indeed a distinctively 
 national note of joy to their Christianity and to the 
 development of English worship. It was this concep- 
 tion also of the ascended Christ, co-equal with the 
 Father, the glorified Son of Man sitting at the right 
 hand of God, the eternal sanction, be it remembered, of 
 the dignity of human nature, and of the principle of 
 human freedom in every form, natural as well as indi- 
 vidual, which gave to the great monastic leaders, and 
 indeed to all the best Church teachers of the Middle 
 Age, their power to make the Church of Christ the 
 school and nurse of patriots, the guide, the educator, 
 the protector of the woman, the child, the slave against 
 the tyranny of their lords, the guardian of ancient liberties, 
 the inspirer of those newer democratic virtues of loyalty 
 and brotherhood, which have formed the basis of all that 
 is most stable in the social order of the present. 19 
 
 And to-day do we not need to emphasise the same 
 conception ? 
 
 Is it not true that the conquering spirit of life, an 
 optimistic faith in human nature as it exists in the 
 thought of God ; faith in man as he ought to be and 
 will be ; faith in God as the Father of man ; faith in 
 man as the Son of God ; faith that the outcome of the 
 evolution of all things will be found to be good ; faith 
 that good will ultimately prevail over evil ; faith that sin 
 itself will ultimately be seen to have been subordinated 
 to the purpose of a higher righteousness than could have 
 been attained if man had never sinned ; that faith in all
 
 30 THE CHRIST OF ENGLISH POETRY 
 
 this is it not true ? is indissolubly bound up with our 
 belief that Christ has ascended up on high, and has sat 
 down at the right hand of God ? 
 
 " The right hand of God ! " But where is that ? 
 
 " Dextra Dei est ubique ! " 
 
 The old Christian Father spoke true. The right 
 hand of God is everywhere. The kingdom of Christ is 
 an eternal kingdom. 
 
 I have read somewhere in a book of Eastern travels 
 that among the Mussulmans of Damascus there is a 
 tradition that as the Ascension of Jesus into heaven took 
 place on the Mount of Olives at Jerusalem, so His 
 Descent at the last day to judge the world will be on 
 the Mountain of Figs at Damascus. In honour of the 
 legend one of the minarets of the Great Mosque there is 
 called the Minaret of Isa the Tower of Jesus. And 
 as every prayer offered within those walls is thought by 
 the Mohammedans to be sure of answer, for many a 
 long year they have rigidly excluded every Christian 
 believer from the mosque. But the mosque was once 
 a Christian church one of the earliest of Christian 
 churches. And above the great entrance gate the 
 followers of Christ who to-day may not cross its thres- 
 hold may still read the words inscribed there in imperish- 
 able mosaic by its Christian builders in the fourth 
 century. They are the words of the H5th Psalm, with 
 the addition of but one word, that of the Holy Name : 
 
 "*H (3a.cri.Xf la crov, ^picrre, /3acriAeta TTUVTWV TWV aiwvwv." 
 " Thy kingdom, O Christ, is an everlasting kingdom."
 
 CYNEWULF 31 
 
 And that is still the song of praise and triumph 
 which the Church of the imperial Christ demands 
 from each one of us to-day. " Thy kingdom, O 
 Jesus, is a kingdom for all the ages." We stand, 
 you and I, not outside the gate only, I trust, offering 
 a mere nominal reverence, a mere conventional wor- 
 ship to the Holy Name : we are privileged to enter 
 within the courts of prayer and praise, to join in 
 adoration of the incarnate and ascended Lord, whose 
 kingdom is a kingdom for all the ages ! " Regnum 
 tuum, Domine, regnum omnium seculorum ; et dominatio 
 tua in omni generatione et generationem." Through 
 all the ages and through all the realms Christ claims 
 to be supreme. " All things that the Father hath are 
 His." All things there is no limitation : all history, all 
 science, all poetry, all art, all music, all politics, all 
 philosophy, all truth, in whatever realm of human 
 thought or action it may be. The Christ of Christ's 
 own teaching is a wider Christ than the Christ of 
 our imagining. He still " giveth gifts unto men " 
 apostles, prophets, saints, evangelists, teachers, poets. 
 " The testimony of Jesus is the spirit of prophecy." 
 He spake by the prophets of old : He speaks by the 
 prophets now : David and Isaiah and Job, Pythagoras 
 and Plato, Virgil and Augustine, Gregory and Hilde- 
 brand and Bernard, Bede and Caedmon and Cyne- 
 wulf, Langland and Chaucer and Shakespeare, Dante 
 and Raphael and Michael Angelo, Wycliff and Erasmus 
 and Luther, Descartes and Newton and Darwin, 
 Wordsworth and Emerson and Browning, Newman 
 and Pusey and Maurice all heaven and earth are
 
 32 THE CHRIST OF ENGLISH POETRY 
 
 vocal with this imperious song of praise : " Give 
 unto the Christ, O ye sons of the mighty, Give unto 
 the Christ glory and strength. Worship the Christ 
 in the beauty of holiness ! Worship God, for the 
 testimony of Jesus is the spirit of prophecy."
 
 NOTES AND ILLUSTRATIONS TO 
 LECTURE I 
 
 NOTE i, p. 3. 
 
 " POETS, according to the circumstances of the age and nation in 
 which they appeared, were called, in the earlier epochs of the 
 world, legislators or prophets : a poet essentially comprises and 
 unites both these characters. For he not only beholds intensely 
 the present as it is, and discovers those laws according to which 
 present things ought to be ordered, but he beholds the future in 
 the present, and his thoughts are the germs of the flower and fruit 
 of latest time. Not that I assert poets to be prophets in the 
 gross sense of the word, or that they can foretell the form as 
 surely as they foreknow the spirit of events : such is the pre- 
 tence of superstition, which would make poetry an attribute of 
 prophecy, rather than prophecy an attribute of poetry " (Shelley's 
 A Defence of Poetry "). 
 
 NOTE 2, p. 7. 
 
 "A figure not unlike the Good Shepherd had from time to 
 time appeared in the Grecian worship. This was the Hermes 
 Kriophorus Mercury with the Ram as described by Pausanius. 
 There were also the figures of dancing shepherds in the tombs 
 of the Nasones near Rome. In one instance in the Christian 
 Catacombs the Good Shepherd appears surrounded by the Three 
 Graces. In the tomb of Galla Placidia, He might well be the 
 youthful Apollo playing with his pipes to the flock of Admetus. 
 There had not yet sprung up the fear of taking as the chief 
 symbol of Christianity an idea or a figure which would be 
 
 33 c
 
 34 THE CHRIST OF ENGLISH POETRY 
 
 equally acknowledged by Pagans. It represents to us the joyful, 
 cheerful side of Christianity. Look at that beautiful, graceful 
 figure, bounding down as if from his native hills, with the happy 
 sheep nestling on his shoulder, with the pastoral pipes in his hand, 
 blooming in immortal youth. It is the exact representation of 
 the Italian shepherd as we constantly encounter him on the 
 Sabine hills at this day, holding the stray lamb on his shoulders, 
 with a strong hand grasping the twisted legs as they hang on his 
 breast. Just such a one appears on a fresco in the so-called house 
 of Liviaon the Palatine. That is the primitive conception of the 
 Founder of Christianity. . . . The popular conception of Him 
 in the early Church was of the strong, the joyous youth, of 
 eternal growth, of immortal grace." (From the chapter on " The 
 Roman Catacombs," in Dean Stanley's " Christian Institutions," 
 p. 256.) 
 
 In some of the early frescoes of the Good Shepherd this 
 joyous conception of the Christ is emphasised by representing 
 the foundling on His shoulder not as a lamb of the sheep, but as 
 a kid of the goats. It was this representation which provoked 
 that indignant un-Christian protest of Tertullian, which Matthew 
 Arnold has enshrined in one of his most touching sonnets. 
 
 " ' He saves the sheep, the goats He doth not save' 
 So rang Tertullian's sentence, on the side 
 Of that unpitying Phrygian sect which cried : 
 * Him can no fount of fresh forgiveness lave, 
 Who sins, once wash'd by the baptismal wave.' 
 So spake the fierce Tertullian. But she sigh'd 
 The infant Church ! of love she felt the tide 
 Stream on her from her Lord's yet recent grave. 
 And then she smiled : and in the Catacombs, 
 With eye suffused, but heart inspired true, 
 On those walls subterranean, where she hid 
 Her head, 'mid ignominy, death, and tombs, 
 She her Good Shepherd's hasty image drew 
 And on His shoulder, not a lamb, a kid."
 
 NOTES TO LECTURE I 35 
 
 Cf. also on this aspect of the Christ, Keim, " Geschichte 
 Jesu von Nazara," i. 458, and Zangwill's " Dreamers of the 
 Ghetto," p. 480 : "I give the Jews a Christ they can now 
 accept, the Christians a Christ they have forgotten. Christ, not 
 the tortured God, but the joyous comrade, the friend of all 
 simple souls. . . . Not the theologian spinning barren subtleties, 
 but the man of genius protesting against all forms and dogmas 
 that would replace the divine vision and the living ecstasy . . . 
 the lover of warm life and warm sunlight, and all that is fresh 
 and simple, and pure and beautiful." But this Hellenic quality, 
 so to say, in the character of Jesus must not of course be 
 emphasised out of due proportion. Even Harnack ("What is 
 Christianity?" edn. Saunders, 1901, p. 33) warns us that "the 
 picture of Jesus' life and His discourses stand in no relation with 
 the Greek spirit ; . . . that He was even in touch with the 
 thoughts of Plato or the Porch ... it is absolutely impossible 
 to maintain." The balance, however, between the Hellenic 
 quality of joy in life and the Hebrew quality of asceticism, as 
 exhibited in the character of Jesus, is well kept in a remarkable 
 article by Professor Peabody of Harvard in the Hibbert Journal, 
 July 1903. "The asceticism of Jesus, however un-Hellenic it 
 may be, and His delight in life, however un-Messianic it may be, 
 are obviously not ends in His teaching, but incidents along the 
 way. They are by-products thrown off in the development of 
 His career. . . . The ethics of Jesus are not those of a mediaeval 
 saint or of a Galilean peasant, but of a teacher whose pains and 
 pleasures are but the scenery and environment of the soul. . . . 
 His ministry was first of all dynamic, commanding, authoritative. 
 When He announced the principles of His teaching, the impres- 
 sion first made upon its hearers was, we are told, not so much of 
 the message itself as of the messenger. . . . The preacher did 
 not demonstrate, or plead, or threaten like the scribes : He 
 swayed the multitude by personal power. It was the same 
 throughout His ministry. He called men from their boats, their 
 tax-booths, their homes, and they looked up into His face and
 
 36 THE CHRIST OF ENGLISH POETRY 
 
 obeyed. He commands the instinct of the soldier who gives 
 orders to those below him because he has received orders from 
 above. What is the note of character which is touched in such 
 incidents as these ? It is the note of strength. This is no 
 ascetic, abandoning the world ; no dreamer ; no joyous comrade, 
 delighting in the world : here is the quiet consciousness of 
 mastery, the authority of the leader : a confidence which makes 
 Him able to declare that a life built on His sayings is built on 
 a rock. Jesus is no gentle visionary, no Lamb of God except in 
 the experience of suffering : He is a Person whose dominating 
 trait is force : the scourger of the traders, the defier of the 
 Pharisees, the commanding Personality whose words are with 
 the authority of power." 
 
 NOTE 3, p. ii. 
 
 The manuscript of the "Exeter Codex" is 5^ inches in 
 height and 7^ inches in breadth. It is written on vellum, 
 apparently by a single hand of the early eleventh century. 
 Scholars were first indebted for their knowledge of the existence 
 of the MS. to Wanley, who gave an imperfect account of it in 
 his Catalogue of Anglo-Saxon MSS. It was not, however, until the 
 year 1826 that the fact of its existence became gradually known, 
 through the analysis given of it by the Rev. W. D. Conybeare, 
 in the "Illustrations of Anglo-Saxon Poetry" compiled in 1826 
 by his brother, Rev. J. J. Conybeare. A copy of the MS. made 
 by Robert Chambers in 1831 now constitutes Additional MS. 
 9067 of the British Museum. A complete edition of the MS. 
 with a translation was published in 1842 by Benjamin Thorpe. 
 A new edition of Thorpe's work is announced as shortly to 
 appear (in the Early English Text Society publications) by Mr. 
 I. Gollancz, who had already in 1892 published an excellent 
 translation with notes. The most complete edition known of 
 "The Christ" is that by .Professor Cook of Yale, published by 
 the Boston Athenaeum Press in 1900. In that work we have
 
 NOTES TO LECTURE I 37 
 
 an old English classic edited with all the care and ability which 
 is given by the best scholars to an edition of a Greek or Roman 
 masterpiece. Professor Cook, in speaking of the date ascribed 
 to the MS., considers that " it is not unlikely that it may have 
 been executed and carefully revised under Leofric's own direc- 
 tions, in which case we are tempted to assume that the selection 
 and compilation of the poems was also due to the good bishop. 
 It is clear that he was a man of taste as well as of judgment, 
 a lover of art as well as an excellent administrator. At present 
 ' The Christ ' is the longest and most important poem in the 
 collection, being at least one-fifth longer than the 'Guthlac,' 
 and nearly two and a half times as long as the * Phcenix ' or 
 the 'Juliana.' If the book were put together by a man as 
 judicious, learned, and artistic as Leofric, it would seem fitting 
 that he should begin it with a poem of such great beauty and sig- 
 nificance." Of the dialect in which the "Exeter Codex" is 
 written, Mr. Gollancz says (p. xxi., " The Christ ") : " It is 
 West Saxon, but one is able to detect in a number of poems the 
 fossil remains of another and an older dialect. Minute philo- 
 logical criteria lead to the conclusion, supported strongly by 
 other evidence, that the first of the poems preserved in the 
 Codex, and many more besides, are Saxon (i.e. Southern) trans- 
 criptions of Anglian (i.e. Northern) originals. Wessex merely 
 preserves the poems, Northumbria produces them. Indeed, at 
 no time in its history has Wessex been productive of poetical 
 work : from the days of Alfred onwards its special strength lay 
 in prose literature. Did not Chaucer recognise the fact when 
 he made his parson exclaim 
 
 " * Trusteth wel, I am a Sotherne man, 
 I cannot geste, rom, ram, ruf, by my letter, 
 And God wote, rime holde I but litel better, 
 And therefore if you list I wol not glose, 
 I wol you tell a litel tale in prose.' 
 
 It seems almost certain, then, that * The Christ ' is an Anglian 
 poem written before Northumbria ceased to be the great centre
 
 38 THE CHRIST OF ENGLISH POETRY 
 
 of poetical activity, i.e. before the beginning or the ninth 
 century." 
 
 NOTE 4, p. 12. 
 
 In 1840 J. M. Kemble in England (Archaologia, xxviii. 
 360-62) and Jacob Grimm in Germany (Andreas und E!ene y 
 ed. Grimm, Cassel) independently discovered that the runic 
 letters interwoven with the text of "Christ" and "Juliana," 
 two of the Exeter pieces, and "Elene," one of the Vercelli, 
 formed in each case the name of the author CYNEWULF. 
 For a full discussion of this runic device cf. Professor Cook's ed. 
 of "The Christ," pp. 151-63, and Gollancz, "Christ," excursus 
 on the Cynewulf runes, pp. 173-84. The following is the 
 runic passage from " The Christ," lines 796-806 in the original, 
 with the runes printed in Roman capitals, with the English 
 translation : 
 
 " ]x>nne C cwacad gehyred cyning mxdlan 
 rodera ryhtend s)>recan re]?e word 
 J>am J)e him cer in worulde wace hyrdon 
 ]>end;in Y and N ypast meahtan 
 frofre fmdan )?oer sceal forht monig 
 on ]?am wong-steda werig bidan 
 hwaet him sefter doedum deman wille 
 wra}?ra wita. Bi]? se W scaecen 
 eor]?an fraetwa U was longe 
 
 L flodum bilocen lif-wynna dael 
 
 F on foldan J>onne fraetwe sculon 
 byrnan on baele." 
 
 Translation. 
 
 C Then the keen shall quake : he shall hear the Lord, 
 
 The Heaven's ruler, utter words of wrath 
 
 To those who in the world obeyed Him ill, 
 
 While they might solace find more easily 
 Y N ' for their Teaming and their Need ; Many afeard
 
 NOTES TO LECTURE I 39 
 
 shall wearily await upon that plain 
 
 what penalty he will adjudge to them 
 
 W for their deeds. The Winsomencss of earthly gauds 
 U Shall then be changed. In days of yore Unknown 
 L Laie-Jloods embraced the region of life's joy 
 F and all earth's Fortune. 
 
 It must be remembered, of course, that in the original MS. 
 the letters C'Y-N'E'W'U'L'F were printed in the runic 
 character to attract the eye to the device. But as each runic 
 character also represents a word as well as a letter, in reading 
 the poem the equivalent word was substituted to give the sense 
 much as in the above English translation. 
 
 NOTE 5, p. 12. 
 
 There has been much discussion among scholars as to whether 
 Cynewulf was a native of Wessex or of Northumbria. The 
 " Exeter Codex," as we have said, is the dialect of Wessex (the 
 literary dialect), but to claim a Wessex origin of Cynewulf on 
 this ground would be to prove too much, for it would prove that 
 all Anglo-Saxon poems are also West Saxon, for they are all in 
 that dialect. Professor Cook (" Christ," p. Ixxi.) has thus 
 tabulated the authorities on either side of the debate : " Upon 
 this point we are restricted to inference. Grimm seems to 
 intimate that he considers Cynewulf to have been a West Saxon. 
 He was at first followed by Dietrich, and the same opinion was 
 also held by Th. Miiller. Leo was the first to assume that he 
 was a Northumbrian, though on grounds that were largely 
 untenable. Not till 1875 did Dietrich change his opinion, and 
 concede that Cynewulf was a Northumbrian. Rieger assented to 
 this, as did Grein and Ten Brink. Mtiller, who at first regarded 
 Cynewulf as a West Saxon, in 1895 endeavoured to prove that 
 he was a Mercian. Sievers, in his articles on rhyme and metre, 
 brought forward new arguments to show that the poet was a 
 Northumbrian. Ramhorst and Leiding were of the same opinion."
 
 40 THE CHRIST OF ENGLISH POETRY 
 
 In confirmation of the Northumbrian origin of Cynewulf, 
 Mr. Stopford Brooke has the following interesting suggestions to 
 make : " If Cynewulf wrote the * Riddles * (in the Exeter book) 
 and far the greater number of critics think that he did he 
 was well acquainted with a storm-lashed coast bordered with 
 cliffs j with the life and business of sailors in their ships, and 
 that the seas which he knew were not only tempestuous, but 
 frequently weltering with ice. . . . 'The Christ' also- is full 
 of sea allusions ; the cliff" barriers between sea and land is once, 
 at least, vigorously seen, and the famous passage (line 848) 
 is written by one who had been a sailor, who knew the pains and 
 longings of a seaman's life, and who spoke to men who, being 
 themselves seamen, would understand him. It is not a passage 
 which a poet writing in Mercia or Wessex was likely to have 
 written. . . . No inland man, no Mercian, is likely to have 
 written the voyage of * Andreas.' Moreover, I do not know of 
 any place on the coast of Wessex where a sea-poet was likely to 
 write. Many such places did exist on the coast of Northumbria 
 Whitby, Hartlepool, J arrow, Tynemouth, Lindisfarne, Cold- 
 ingham all centres of learning and all in constant sea com- 
 munication. . . . An * atmosphere' is perhaps poor evidence, 
 but it is of value when it goes with other probabilities. More- 
 over, it is not such weak evidence as it seems. One might say, 
 for example, that Tennyson could never have lived on the 
 northern coast. His atmosphere is of the gentler lands and 
 coasts below the Humber ; and I can no more conceive the 
 'Elene' and the 'Riddles,' < Guthlac,' and the 'Andreas' 
 being written on the southern coast or inland, than I can con- 
 ceive ' Maud ' being written at Bamborough or Whitby " 
 (Brooke, "Early English Literature," vol. ii. pp. 193-4). To his 
 "sea atmosphere" argument Mr. Brooke adds two other suggestions 
 in support of the Northumbrian origin of Cynewulf. First, there 
 was no school of native poetry in either Mercia or Wessex, as for 
 a century there had been in the North ; and second, the historical 
 conditions of Northumbria were in exactly that state which
 
 NOTES TO LECTURE I 41 
 
 would be likely to produce the half-sad, half-despairing note of 
 Cynewulf, who finds all his joy, not on the earth, but in the 
 world to come. 
 
 Professor Cook, on the other hand, although he would reject 
 a Wessex origin for Cynewulf as emphatically as Mr. Brooke, 
 makes the suggestion, which I have given in the text of my 
 lecture, namely, that Cynewulf was an East Anglian rather 
 than a Northumbrian, identifying the poet with a certain 
 Cynulf, who was present at the Synod of Clovesho in 803, a 
 priest of the diocese of Dunwich, in the train of Bishop 
 Tidfrith. Briefly stated, Professor Cook's arguments for this 
 contention are these : 
 
 1. The date agrees with what we should expect. 
 
 2. The form of the name is such as the poet was using 
 at this time. 
 
 3. Cynewulf was almost certainly an ecclesiastic : if not 
 a monk, then a priest, or perhaps both. 
 
 4. Dunwich was the seat of a school established by its 
 first bishop, Felix, from which school, in later times, the 
 University of Cambridge was asserted to have sprung : so that 
 the traditions of learning may well have persisted there. 
 
 5. Through ^Ethelheard, the Archbishop of Canterbury, 
 and Tidfrith, his own bishop, Cynewulf could have kept in 
 touch with Alcuin, from whom he derived his notions of the 
 fire of Doomsday. About the time of the Council of Clovesho, 
 Tidfrith received a letter of advice from Alcuin. Possibly 
 Tidfrith, ^Ethelheard, or more likely Alcuin, may have been 
 " the eminent man " whom Cynewulf apostrophises at the 
 beginning of Part II. of " The Christ." 
 
 6. At Dunwich, in early days, the chief seaport on the 
 East Anglian coast, Cynewulf would have ample opportunities 
 to become acquainted with the sea, and even with the storm- 
 lashed cliffs of Whitby and the North. 
 
 "Objections," concludes Professor Cook, "may no doubt be 
 brought against this theory, but to me there seems nothing
 
 42 THE CHRIST OF ENGLISH POETRY 
 
 intrinsically improbable in it. If it be urged that we know 
 nothing about the dialect of East Anglia, one might reply that 
 at all events it was Anglian : if that the Dunwich School may 
 by this time have become extinct, it is yet possible, nay, very 
 likely, that Cynewulf may have attended the still more famous 
 one at York, and by no means certain that he was not a 
 Northumbrian or Mercian by birth. If the influence of Offa 
 was sufficient to raise the Mercian ^Ethelheard to the See of 
 Canterbury, it was sufficient to induct a priest from another 
 province into his East Anglian office. It is thus possible that 
 the Court which Cynewulf knew was the Court of Offa, and 
 that it was there that he received the " appled gold " men- 
 tioned in the Elene. 
 
 "The poem is truly original and originally conceived. It 
 is the history, I might say the epic, of salvation. ... It is 
 a series of hymns, at least at the beginning, closed by choice 
 outbursts of praise. I fancy, however for the third part is 
 much more continuously wrought than the first or second 
 that when the poet had written a number of these short pieces, 
 a larger aim dawned on him, and then fully rose in his mind : 
 and that then he determined to work his three subjects into 
 a connected whole. If he went back for this purpose to his 
 earlier labours he did not fulfil his purpose well. The bring- 
 ing together of the first part is not successful. The different 
 pieces remain separate lays. In the second part the two sub- 
 jects the Ascension itself, and the ascension with Christ of 
 the souls delivered from Hades into Heaven might easily have 
 been made into a continuous narrative if Cynewulf had thought 
 of weaving them into one piece when he began. . . . Never- 
 theless, of all CynewulPs poems, 4 The Christ ' is the 
 weightiest, because in it he has made his greatest struggle 
 towards an artistic unity, and has best shown in a sustained 
 effort his constructive power. It is, moreover, essentially the 
 work of a poet, though of a poet untrained in composition. 
 The rushing outbursts of praise the lyrics of the work are
 
 NOTES TO LECTURE I 43 
 
 poetry of a higher fervour than anything in the Caedmonic 
 verse. In these he reaches his nearest approach to a fine 
 style ; and, as always with a poet, his style is a revelation of 
 his character. We seem to feel the man himself when in the 
 contrast so natural to an artist this trumpet-tongued piety and 
 joy is succeeded by personal passages full of pathetic regret, 
 repentance, and humility. In praise and prayer, in mournful- 
 ness and exaltation, he was equally passionate." (Stopford 
 Brooke, "Early English Literature," vol. ii. p. 218-19.) 
 
 NOTE 6, p. 1 6. 
 
 "The Church enters to-day (Dec. 17) on the seven days 
 which precede the vigil of Christmas, and which are known 
 in the Liturgy under the name of the Greater Ferias. The 
 ordinary of the advent office becomes more solemn ; the anti- 
 phons of the Psalms, both for Lauds and the Hours of the day, 
 are proper and allude expressly to the Great Coming. Every 
 day at vespers is sung a solemn antiphon, which consists of 
 a fervent Prayer to the Messiah, whom it addresses by one of 
 the titles given Him by the sacred Scriptures. . . . The canoni- 
 cal Hour of Vespers has been selected as the most appropriate 
 time for this solemn supplication to our Saviour, because, as the 
 Church sings in one of her hymns, it was in the evening of the 
 world (vergente mundi vespere) that the Messiah came among us. 
 Then antiphons are sung at the Magnificat to show us that the 
 Saviour whom we expect is to come to us by Mary. They are 
 sung twice once before and once after the Canticle " (Guer- 
 anger, " The Liturgical Year, 1 ' Advent, pp. 508-9). 
 
 The following interesting reason for the use of the Magnificat 
 at Vespers is thus given by Bede ("Works," 5, 306) : "It comes 
 to pass, by the bounty of the Lord, that if we at all times medi- 
 tate upon the acts and sayings of the Blessed Mary, the observ- 
 ance of chastity and the works of virtue will always continue in 
 us. For the excellent and salutary custom has grown up in Holy 
 Church that all shall sing her hymn (the Magnificat} every day
 
 44 THE CHRIST OF ENGLISH POETRY 
 
 with the Vesper Psalms, in order that the recalling of the Lord's 
 Incarnation by this means may the oftener incite the souls of 
 the faithful to devotion, and that the consideration of the 
 example set by His Mother may confirm them in the stability 
 of virtue. And it is meet that this should be done at Vespers, 
 so that the mind, wearied in the course of the day, and distracted 
 by various opinions, may, at the approach of the season of quiet, 
 collect itself in the oneness of meditation, and through this 
 wholesome reminder may hasten to cleanse itself by the prayers 
 and tears of the night from everything useless or harmful which 
 it had contracted by the business of the day." 
 
 NOTE 7, p. 17. 
 
 The following key to the position in the text of "The 
 Christ" of CynewulPs paraphrase of the antiphons may be 
 found useful : 
 
 The Greater O's in the order sung at Vespers from December Ijth 
 to December 2yd inclusive, according to Sarum use. 
 
 1. O Sapientia: cf. lines 239-240 (?) of "The Christ." 
 
 2. O Adonai : (possibly in the lost beginning of the poem). 
 
 3. O Radix Jesse: cf. lines 348-377 (?) 
 
 4. O Claris David : 1 8-49 
 
 5. O Oriens : 104-129 
 
 6. O Rex Gentium : ,,1-17 
 
 7. O Emmanuel: 130-163 
 
 Four Advent antiphons associated with the great O's by certain 
 medieval churches. 
 
 8. O Virgo Virginum: cf. lines 71-103 of the poem. 
 
 9. O Rex Pacifica: 214-274 
 
 10. O Mundi Domina : 275^". 
 
 11. O Hierusalem: 50-70 
 
 Two combined antiphons for Lauds on Trinity Sunday. 
 
 12. O Beata Trinitas: cf. lines 378 ff. of the poem.
 
 NOTES TO LECTURE I 45 
 
 By way of illustration of CynewulPs method of interpreta- 
 tion I add translations of his reading of two of the antiphons 
 O Orient and O Emmanuel. 
 
 I. LATIN TEXT. 
 
 O Oriens splendor lucis aeternje, et sol justitiae : veni et illumina 
 sedentes in tenebris et umbra mortis ! 
 
 Cardinal Newman's translation (Tracts for the Times, No. 75). 
 
 O Rising Brightness of the everlasting Light and Sun of Righteous- 
 ness : come Thou and enlighten those who sit in darkness and in the 
 shadow of death. 
 
 Cynewulf, 104-129 
 
 Eala tarendel Hail Earendel, 
 
 Engla beorhtast Brightest of angels, 
 
 oter middangeard Over this mid-earth 
 
 monnum sended Sent unto men : 
 
 ond soth faesta Thou art the Light-beam, 
 
 sunnan leoama Soothfast and sunbright 
 
 torht ofer tunglas Over the Heavens, 
 
 Ju tida gehwane And day-tides of Time, 
 
 of sylfum ]>e From Thee Thyself 
 
 symle inlihtes. Ever enlightening. 
 
 Swa J>u God of gode Son of the just Father 
 
 gearo a cenned, Only begotten 
 
 sunu so]?an F seder In Heaven's glory 
 
 swegles in wuldre Thou livest ever 
 
 butan anginne From the beginning 
 
 JtLfre waere, Now and for always: 
 
 swa pec nu for Jjearfum So now Thy handiwork 
 
 bin agen geweorc In its sore need stress 
 
 bideth >urh byldo, Prayeth Thee boldly 
 
 Jaet ]TU J>a beorhtan us That Thou do send to us 
 
 sunnan onsende, Sunbeam of radiance, 
 
 on J?e sylf cyme And Thyself comest 
 
 )>ast thu inledhte Thou to illumine
 
 46 THE CHRIST OF ENGLISH POETRY 
 
 ]?a )?e longe &r Those who from long ago 
 
 prosme be)?eahte Wrapt round with darkness 
 
 ond in peostrum her Sit in the night glooms 
 
 ssetonsinneahtessynrumbifealdre Shrouded with sin, and cast 
 
 deorc heathes sceadu dreogan Deep in Death's shadow, 
 sceoldan 
 
 II. LATIN TEXT. 
 
 O Emmanuel, Rex et legifer noster, expectatio gentium, et Salvator 
 earum : veni ad salvandum nos, Domine Deus noster ! 
 
 Newman's translation. 
 
 O Emmanuel, our King and Lawgiver, the gatherer of the People and 
 their Saviour : come Thou to save us, O Lord our God ! 
 
 Cynewulf, 130-152. 
 
 Eala gxsta God O of all spirits Lord 
 
 hu Jm gleawlice God the Almighty 
 
 mid noman ryhte Wisely by right wast Thou 
 
 nemned wsere Emmanuhel Namd Emmanuel 
 
 Swa hit engel gecwseth Named by the angel 
 
 aerest on Ebresc First in the Hebrew tongue 
 
 J?aet is eft gereht Yea, by the mystic ruse 
 
 rume bi gerynum : Witness of grace. 
 
 " Nu is rodera weard " Guardian of angels, 
 
 God sylfa mid us." God self now with us ! " 
 
 Swa fact gomele gefyrn E'en as of old time 
 
 Ealra cyninga cyning When young were the years, yet 
 
 ond pone clrrnan eac Old men said truly 
 
 sacerd sothlica Lo, the great King of kings 
 
 saegdon toweard. Priest of the sacred place 
 
 cometh of surety. 
 
 Swa se masre iu Yea, as of yore the great 
 
 Melchisedech, King-priest Melchisedec 
 
 gleaw in gaeste, Wisest of human souls 
 
 god]?rym omwrah Showed forth God's majesty 
 
 Eces alwaldan. God the world ruler.
 
 NOTES TO LECTURE I 
 
 47 
 
 Se waes ae bringerd 
 lara Isedend 
 pam longe his 
 hytan hidercyme. 
 Swa hym gehaten waes 
 paethe Sunu Meotudes 
 sylfa wolde 
 gefaelsian 
 folcian maegthe 
 swylce grundes eac 
 Gaestes maegne 
 sipe gesecan. 
 Nu hie softe pass 
 bidon in bendum 
 hwonne Beam Codes 
 cwome to cearigum. 
 Forpon cwaedon swa 
 suslum geslashte : 
 Nu J>u sylfa cum, 
 heofones Heahcyning. 
 Bring us haelolif 
 wergum witepeowum 
 wope forcymenum, 
 bitrum bynetearum. 
 
 God the law-bringer 
 He gave them precepts 
 Who had awaited long 
 His advent hither. 
 For it was promised them 
 That the one Son of God 
 He the all Ruler 
 Should Himself purify 
 Nations of earth. 
 And in his course should seek 
 Deep Hele's abode 
 Lord of the Spirits there 
 Waiting so patiently 
 bound in their fetters 
 Waiting the Child of God 
 in their affliction 
 Speaking with doleful cry 
 those cast in torments 
 " Come Thou, come Thyself 
 High King of Heaven 
 Bring us True Health of Life 
 Now to Thy Weary Thanes 
 Worn out with weeping 
 And brine-bitter tears." 
 
 NOTE 8, p. 1 8. 
 
 The dramatic character of this section of Cynewulf's poem 
 was first noted by Professor Conybeare in his Anglo-Saxon 
 lectures at Oxford. " It is in fact a dialogue between the 
 Virgin Mary and Joseph, initiated probably from some of those 
 apocryphal writings current in the Middle Ages under the titles 
 of the Life, or the Gospel, of the Virgin. The dialogue com- 
 mences with an address by the Virgin to Joseph, expressing her 
 fears lest she should be subjected to the rigour of the Jewish 
 law in the punishment of an adulteress ; and the answer of 
 Joseph is occupied, partly by the assurance of his steady belief in
 
 48 THE CHRIST OF ENGLISH POETRY 
 
 her purity, and other expressions calculated to remove her dis- 
 tress ; and partly of prayers and thanksgiving to the Power 
 which had so signally favoured himself and his lineage. It 
 will be readily agreed that this subject, from its grave and 
 mysterious nature, is ill-adapted to the purposes of poetry. 
 The general absence of taste and refinement which charac- 
 terised the age in which the poem was originally written, 
 may fairly be pleaded in defence of its author ; but in the 
 present day no such excuse could well be discovered for a 
 translator. Indeed, I should have felt disposed to pass over 
 the poem without notice, had not the form in which it is 
 written rendered it an object of some curiosity. Dialogues 
 of this kind were probably, in our own country, as in Greece, 
 the earliest and rudest species of the drama ; and that here pre- 
 served is unquestionably by many years the most ancient speci- 
 men of this kind of poetry existing in our native language." 
 
 Mr. Gollancz in his introduction to " The Christ," p. xxi., 
 has a somewhat similar comment. He speaks of this dialogue 
 as " the earliest dramatic scene in English literature." " What 
 a contrast," he continues, "an Anglo-Saxon religious drama 
 would have presented to the homely miracles and mysteries of 
 later ages. The original of the greater part of Passus I. must, 
 I think, have been a later hymn-cycle, the * Joseph and Mary ' 
 section being derived from an undiscovered hymn arranged for 
 recital by half-choirs." Mr. Stopford Brooke, "Early English 
 Literature," vol. ii. p. 221, thus speaks of the scene : "It seems 
 to be the first dawning in our literature of the mystery play." 
 But in a later written note to the passage he gives up the idea 
 that it was actually written to be recited " in the market-place 
 on a stage," and is content with Mr. Gollancz to follow Wiilker 
 (Grundriss, p. 385) in regarding the scene as derived from some 
 later festival hymn dramatically constructed to be sung in 
 parts.
 
 NOTES TO LECTURE I 49 
 
 NOTE 9, p. 19. 
 
 Earendel. Gollancz's note on this word is as follows : " It 
 is difficult to translate the word adequately ; some bright star 
 is evidently meant, probably the same as Orvandels-ta, ' Orwen- 
 del's toe,' mentioned in the 'Edda.' . . . 'Earendel' does not 
 occur elsewhere in A. S. poetry as a poetical designation of 
 Christ ; the word is interpreted in the Epinal Glossary by 
 'jubar.'" Professor Cook ("Christ," p. 89, note 104) says: 
 " The first impulse is to translate the word by ' dawn,' partly 
 because in the form * Earendel," 1 it glosses aurora in the two hymns, 
 * Splendor paternae gloriae ' and ' Aurora jam spargit polum.' 
 . . . Finally one might argue in favour of * dawn "" from * the 
 Dayspring' of Luke i. 78, a word which, first used in this 
 place by Tyndale, has been retained even in the R.V." I 
 think, however, it is plain from Cynewulf's epithet, "Thou of 
 thy very self dost constantly enlighten every season," that 
 " Earendel " in his idea connotes " the sun " as a poetical 
 designation of Christ. I have somewhere seen the conjecture 
 that "Earendel" was the traditional mythical name of "the 
 Star of Bethlehem." 
 
 NOTE 10, p. 20. 
 
 It is not possible, of course, to mark out with absolute pre- 
 cision the chronology of a moral ideal. But there can be little 
 question, I think, that in the history of European civilisation 
 the change of sentiment with regard to the position of woman, 
 and consequently of the ideal of womanhood, synchronises with 
 the change from Pagan to Christian influences, although perhaps 
 it might be difficult to say whether Christianity instituted the 
 change of ideal, or constituted itself the representative of the 
 change. Certainly in the women of Cynewulf's poems typi- 
 cally in his "Juliana" the special quality of race cannot be 
 forgotten. Just as the Teutonic racial element is responsible, 
 no doubt, for much of the sombre Puritan aspect of the Anglo- 
 
 D
 
 50 
 
 Saxon Christian's faith, and especially his lurid conception of the 
 future of the unfaithful, so the same element affected the Early 
 English conception of womanhood. The women of Cynewulf are 
 noble women, sweet and winsome, clothed in a tender light he 
 always, indeed, speaks of women preferably in terms of light : 
 " My sweetest sunshine ! " " Light of mine eyes," " What 
 radiant beauty hast thou ! " and yet almost always represented 
 also as of a character strenuous and firm, with a resoluteness, 
 purpose, and will carried almost to grimness. It is an ideal, one 
 is glad to think, that has persisted long in the hearts of Cyne- 
 wulfs countrymen. Witness Wordsworth's lines : 
 
 " The reason firm, the temperate will, 
 Endurance, foresight, strength, and skill : 
 A perfect woman, nobly planned 
 To warn, to comfort, and command." 
 
 In this connection the following passage from Mr. Stopford 
 Brooked " Early English Literature," vol. i. pp. 274-5, may be 
 quoted : "The saintly women, who in the days of martyrdom 
 kept their chastity against the tyranny of men and the threats 
 of the Demon, like Juliana whom Cynewulf sang, passed, like 
 the ancient goddesses who brought peace and protection to the 
 faithful wife of the good spinner, from land to land, and 
 became dear to every household. When the shepherd Eoves, 
 in Bishop Ecgwine's legend, told that he saw in a forest glade 
 fair women singing a magic song, and thought them perhaps 
 heathen haunters of the forest land, the Bishop saw in them a 
 vision of the Virgin Mother and angels, and in the spot where 
 they had sung rose the abbey of Evesham. It was no longer 
 Choosers of the Slaughter or Elf-women that rode in the air 
 or shot deadly spears, but figures of excelling beauty, clothed 
 in light, singing softly, took their place the Angels of God 
 whom Caedmon exalts, and Cynewulf is unwearied in praising, 
 who brighten the pages of Baeda from legend to legend, whose 
 songs are not of war but of spiritual peace, and who receive the
 
 NOTES |TO LECTURE I 51 
 
 warriors of Christ into the heavenly Hall and to the heavenly 
 Banquet. The relations of women to men, which we have 
 seen honoured in " Beowulf," and which played so large a part 
 in English policy and war while England was yet heathen, 
 received a fresh dignity in Christianity ; and this new source 
 of emotion produced many a poetic story. It increased the 
 material of literature. The double monasteries, which after- 
 wards became the cause of scandal, were, while they kept 
 their first purity, the cause of tender and beautiful friendships 
 between grave men and holy women. The relations of Hild 
 and Aidan, of Cuthbert and ^Elflaeda, of Cuthbert and Verca, 
 of Ealdhelm and the virgins whose praise he wrote and to 
 whom his letters are so gay, of Boniface and the nuns who 
 wrote to him so lovingly, were charming, full of grace and 
 poetry, though, when the men were not Cuthbert and Aidan, 
 similar relationships soon degenerated. The great abbesses 
 were great folk in Northumbria. Heiu, who founded Hartle- 
 pool, was noble ; so was Verca of Tynemouth. Hild, whom 
 we know, and Ebba, whose monastery of Coldingham, seated 
 on its lofty cape, rivalled its sister of Whitby ; ^Etheldreda 
 who, amidst the rushy fens, founded Ely on its emerald isle ; 
 ^Elflaeda, as patriotic as religious, who finally brought peace to 
 Wilfrid were all princesses, powers in the state, with whom 
 kings and bishops had to count, whose advice was taken in 
 great movements, and whose lives, and all the legends which 
 the emotion of the people for noble womanhood collected 
 round them, became for centuries the material for ballad and 
 song ; but more especially for that silent literature which is, as 
 it were, the background of the literature which is written the 
 popular emotion, the feelings of the mother and father and 
 child in hamlet and town, the memories and prayers in times 
 of distress and joy, which come together, like doves to their 
 dwelling, to the names of the women who have consoled or 
 exalted the world."
 
 52 THE CHRIST OF ENGLISH POETRY 
 
 NOTE ii, p. 20. 
 
 " As the source of Part I. is found in the Breviary, so also is 
 the principal source of Part II. the Ascension Sermon of Pope 
 Gregory the Great. The fact that Gregory was the Father 
 of English Christianity, or at least of Roman Christianity in 
 England, together with the circumstance that to him was 
 attributed the constitution of the liturgy, the compilation of 
 the musical service books employed by the Church, and the 
 instruction of the school for chanters from which England had 
 received its training in sacred song, imparts a singular interest 
 to this poetic amplification of one of his most eloquent homilies " 
 (Cook's "Christ," p. xliii.). Ozanam is tempted to call him 
 the last of the Romans. If this be true, he in whom ancient 
 Rome died was he in whom the civilisation of England began 
 to live. 
 
 Gregory's Homily on the Ascension is 29 of his Homilies 
 on the Gospels (Migne 76, 1218-9), extracts from which in 
 the Breviary formed the Lessons at Nocturns in the Octave of 
 the Ascension. 
 
 Another important source of this Part II. of Cynewulf is 
 the spirited Ascension Hymn ascribed to the Venerable Bede, 
 Hymnum canamus gloria. This hymn, which consists of 128 
 lines, is printed in full by Giles in his "Miscellaneous Works 
 of Venerable Bede," i. 83-86 ; and in part by the Surtees 
 Society in their " Latin Hymns of the Anglo-Saxon Church," 
 from an eleventh century MS. at Durham. 
 
 NOTE 12, p. 22. 
 
 Athanasius, de Incarnatione, 54, " AVTO<S evtjvdpoyrrrjffev^ Iva 
 J7/ietr 6eoTrotr)6a>ttv" Compare also Gregory, Orat. xlii. 17, 
 " How should He not be God, to insert in passing a bold deduc- 
 tion, by whom thou also dost become God." But although it 
 should be noticed that this deification, as understood by the
 
 NOTES TO LECTURE I 53 
 
 Greek Church, did not by any means merely signify " becoming 
 like God " it is the ineffable, the transcendent, which is 
 described as Oeia ^tm?, because it is enjoyed for ever yet 
 the interval between Christ, who was born and did not become 
 Son of God, and the sons of adoption, is always very strongly 
 emphasised by the Greek Fathers. 
 
 NOTE 13, p. 22. 
 
 Commenting on the lines 558-585, which describe an epi- 
 sode called the " Harrowing of Hell," an event which strictly 
 should follow a record of the Resurrection, not of the Ascen- 
 sion, Professor Cook rightly, I think, points out that Bede's 
 Hymn, mentioned above, is a sufficient illustration of the fact 
 that strict chronological order need not be expected in lyrico- 
 dramatic writing. Nevertheless, Mr. Stopford Brooke's inter- 
 pretation of the passage, though I think mistaken, is interesting. 
 He considers the whole passage a fragment of another poem by 
 Cynewulf, clumsily interpolated at this point when he was 
 refitting the several parts of " The Christ " written separately 
 as a whole, and taking no particular pains to fit it properly into 
 its place. " The episode," he says, " is really a choric hymn, 
 supposed to be sung by the host of angels who come forth from 
 the gates of Heaven on the day of the Resurrection to meet 
 and welcome the Old Testament saints, as, rising from Hades, 
 they mount the sky with Christ. The scene is laid in mid 
 space. The angels from Heaven have met the ascending bands, 
 and when Cynewulf sees this mighty meeting in his vision, the 
 warrior awakens in him, and the speech the angelic leader makes 
 to his followers is such as a heathen chief might have made to his 
 Lord returning from war with the spoils of victory." (E. E. L. y 
 ii. 227.) 
 
 NOTE 14, p. 23. 
 
 It is interesting to compare Cynewulf's rendering of Psalm 
 xxiv. 7, which was sung as an antiphon at the Second Nocturne
 
 54 THE CHRIST OF ENGLISH POETRY 
 
 of Easter Eve, with this stanza from Giles Fletcher, " Christ's 
 Victory and Triumph " : 
 
 " ' Toss up your heads, ye everlasting gates, 
 And let the Prince of Glory enter in ! 
 At whose brave volley of sidereal states 
 The sun to blush, and stars grow pale, were seen, 
 When leaping first from earth He did begin 
 To climb His angels' wings ; then open hang 
 Your crystal doors,' so all the chorus sang 
 Of heavenly birds, as to the stars they nimbly sprang." 
 
 NOTE 15, p. 23. 
 
 Following upon these lines, there intervenes a passage, 
 658-684, upon "The Gifts of Men," a theme which is a 
 common motive of early poetry we shall see it repeated in 
 Langlands' " Piers Plowman " but, as interpreted by Cyne- 
 wulf, of finer poetic quality than is shown elsewhere. It may 
 have come to him from the similar thought in the Thirteenth 
 Book of Homer's " Iliad," 726-734, or more likely from Pope 
 Gregory's Homily on the " Gifts of the Spirit," in I Corinthians 
 xii. 8. The passage I may render as follows : 
 
 " Lo ! the world shaper, 
 God's spirit-son, 
 There to ennoble us, 
 Gave to us grace, 
 Home- seats eternal 
 Far above angels : 
 And also manifold 
 Wisdom of soul. 
 Sowed there and set there 
 Lore for men's minds : 
 One He gave eloquence, 
 Wisely he sendeth it 
 Through the mind's memory 
 As a sweet mouth-guest,
 
 NOTES TO LECTURE I 55 
 
 Wisdom right noble ; 
 Yea, he can say and sing 
 Full many hidden things, 
 Who in his heart holds 
 Masterful wisdom : 
 One can with fingers deft 
 Loud before heroes 
 Wake the shrill harp-strings, 
 Greeting the ' glee- beam ' : 
 One can interpret well 
 God given Law : 
 One can the star's wide course 
 Trace through the heavens : 
 One can the spoktn-word 
 Write with a cunning pen : 
 To one in stress of fight 
 War-luck he giveth, 
 When the sharp spear shower, 
 Wing'd work of arrows, 
 O'er leaps the shield-fence : 
 One can right boldly 
 O'er the salt sea streams 
 Drive the black war ships 
 Swift through the surges : 
 One can the lofty trees 
 Climb to their topmost steep : 
 One can with smith-craft 
 Fashion war-weapons : 
 One can the spacious ways 
 Of the wide field-plain 
 Mete the out-going : 
 Thus doth the mighty One, 
 He the true Bairn of God, 
 Grant men His gifts on earth, 
 Grant to them equally ; 
 Not to one man of all 
 Granteth all wisdom,
 
 56 THE CHRIST OF ENGLISH POETRY 
 
 Lest pride should injure him ; 
 By his own skill-craft 
 Raised beyond others." 
 
 NOTE 1 6, p. 24. 
 
 In "Modern Language Notes" for June 1889, Professor 
 Cook of Yale proved that one important source of Cynewulf's 
 Part III. is the following alphabetic Hymn, quoted by Bede 
 in his De Arte Metrica : 
 
 Hymnus de Die Judicit. 
 
 Apparebit repentina dies magna Domini, 
 
 fur obscura velut nocte improvises occupans. 
 
 Brevis totus turn parebit prisci luxus saeculi, 
 totum simul cum clarebit praeterisse sasculum. 
 
 Clangor tubas per quaternas terrae plagas concinens, 
 vivos una mortuosque Christo ciet obviam. 
 
 De caslesti Judex arce, majestate fulgidus, 
 Claris angelorura choris comitatus aderit. 
 
 Erubescet orbis lunae, sol et obscurabitur, 
 
 Stellae cadent pallescentes, mundi tremit ambitus. 
 
 Flamma ignis anteibit justi vultum Judicis, 
 
 caalos, terras, et profundi fluctus ponti devorans. 
 
 Gloriosus in sublimi Rex sedebit solio ; 
 
 angelorum tremebunda circumstabunt agmina. 
 
 Hujus omnes ad electi colligentur dexteram ; 
 pravi pavent a sinistris, haedi velut fastidi. 
 
 " Ite," dixit Rex ad dextros, " regnum caeli sumite 
 Pater vobis quod paravit ante omne sseculum. 
 
 Karitate qui fraterna me juvistis pauperem, 
 Karitatis nunc mercedem repostate divites."
 
 NOTES TO LECTURE I 57 
 
 Laeti dicent : " Quando, Christe, pauperem te vidimus, 
 te, Rex magne, vel egentem miserati juvimus." 
 
 Magnus illus dicet Judex : " Cum juvistis pauperes, 
 panem, domum, vestem dantes, me juvistis humiles.'' 
 
 Nee tardabit et sinistris loqui Justus Arbiter : 
 in gehennae maledicti flammas hinc discedite ; 
 
 Ousecrantem me audire despexistis mendicum, 
 nudo vestem non dedistis, neglexistis languidum. 
 
 Peccatores dicent : " Christe, quando te vel pauperem 
 te, Rex magne, vel infirmum contemnentes sprevimus. 
 
 Quibus contra Judex altus : " Mendicanti quamdiu 
 opem ferre despexistis, me sprevistis improbi." 
 
 Retro ruent turn injusti ignes in perpetuos, 
 
 Vermis quorum non morietur, flamma nee restringuitur 
 
 Satan atro cum ministris quo tenetur carcere, 
 fletus ubi mugitusque, strident omnes dentibus. 
 
 Tune fideles ad caelestem sustollentur patriam 
 choros inter angelorum, regni petent gaudia. 
 
 Uibis summae Hierusalem introibunt gloriam 
 Vera lucis atque pads in qua fulget visio. 
 
 X PM. Regem jam paterna claritate splendidum 
 ubi celsa beatorum contemplantur agmina 
 
 Ydri fraudes ergo cave, infirmentes subleva 
 aurum temne, fuge luxus si vis astra petere 
 
 Zona clara castitatis lumbos nunc prsecingere 
 In occursum magni regis fer ardentes lampades. 
 
 NOTE 17, p. 24. 
 
 Cynewulf was the first old English writer of whom we have 
 any knowledge to lay emphasis upon the story of the Invention 
 of the Cross and Constantine's premonitory dream, related in
 
 58 THE CHRIST OF ENGLISH POETRY 
 
 Eusebius, " Life of Constantine," Bk. I., chap, xxviii.-xxxi. He 
 seems to have treated of the subject three times, in this passage 
 of "The Christ," lines 1084 and onwards, in the "Elene," lines 
 69-104, and in the separate poem "The Dream of the Rood," 
 if, as seems most likely, he was the author of it. Professor Sweet 
 in "Old English Texts," p. 125, commenting on the Runic 
 inscriptions of the celebrated Ruthwell Cross in Dumfries, which 
 are apparently quotations from this Latin poem, says : " As regards 
 the authorship of the poem, I hold fast to the opinion that it is a 
 portion of the epilogue to the * Elene,' preserved entire in the 
 Vercelli MS., and consequently is the work of Cynewulf. Also 
 that the complete original text of the Cross poem is that from 
 which the Vercelli recension was copied. The sculptor or de- 
 signer (* Caedmon ' or * Cadmon Made Me ') of the Ruthwell 
 Stone, having only a limited space at his command, selected from 
 the poem such verses as he thought most appropriate, and engraved 
 them wherever he had room for them." The following verse 
 translation of the Poem is by Mr. Moorsom (1901): 
 
 " Ho, Brethren, list the dream I tell, 
 The best that e'er to man befell, 
 How, when the world was hushed to rest, 
 And men lay still by sleep oppressed, 
 Amid the visions of the night 
 Before me rose a wondrous sight ; 
 I dreamt a tree of golden light 
 With radiant splendour glistening bright 
 
 Was borne upon the air ; 
 Methought the four arms glimmered bare, 
 Save that on each a jewel rare 
 Flamed on the night a ruddy glare ; 
 And five gems clustered, whence they sprung, 
 
 All ruby- red 
 
 Above my head : 
 'Twas thus the Beacon-Ensign hung.
 
 NOTES TO LECTURE I 59 
 
 I saw the fair ones in the sky, 
 With Spirits of the Holy dead, 
 
 Intent upon the Mystery : 
 And all that saintly were 'tis said 
 All who by nobleness were led 
 
 All on our earth 
 
 Of heavenly birth 
 Cast longing looks on high." 
 
 NOTE 1 8, p. 26. 
 
 Miss Havergal's rendering of this same idea in the hymn 
 " I gave my life for thee, what hast thou done for me ? " is well 
 known, but two other modern parallels, much more beautiful, 
 one the pathetic poem by Miss Christina Rossetti, and one the 
 remarkable, because perhaps so unexpected, rendering of the idea, 
 in the opening verses of Verlaine's " Sagesse," may be quoted 
 here. This is Miss Rossetti's poem : 
 
 " I bore with thee long weary days and nights, 
 
 Through many pangs of heart, through many tears, 
 I bore with thee, thy hardness, coldness, slights, 
 For three and thirty years. 
 
 Who else had dared for thee what I have dared ? 
 
 I plunged the depth most deep from bliss above ; 
 I not My flesh, I not My spirit spared ; 
 
 Give thou Me love for love. 
 
 For thee I thirsted in the daily drouth ; 
 
 For thee I trembled in the nightly frost ; 
 Much sweeter thou than honey to My mouth, 
 
 Why wilt thou still be lost ? 
 
 I bore thee on My shoulders and rejoiced : 
 
 Men only marked upon My shoulders borne 
 The branding cross ; and shouted, hungry voiced, 
 
 Or wagged their heads in scorn.
 
 60 THE CHRIST OF ENGLISH POETRY 
 
 Thee did nails grave upon Mine hands ; thy name 
 Did thorns for frontlets stamp between Mine eyes : 
 
 I, Holy One, put on thy guilt and shame : 
 I, God, Priest, Sacrifice. 
 
 A thief upon My right hand and My left ; 
 
 Six hours alone, athirst in misery ; 
 At length in death one smote My heart, and cleft 
 
 A hiding-place for thee. 
 
 Nailed to the racking cross, than bed of down 
 
 More dear, whereon to stretch Myself and sleep ; 
 
 So did I win a kingdom share My crown ; 
 A harvest come and reap." 
 
 And here are the lines of Verlaine : 
 
 " Mon Dieu ! m'a dit : mon fils, il faut m' aimer. Tu vois 
 Mon flanc perce, mon coeur qui rayonne et qui saigne, 
 Et mes pieds offense's que Madeleine baigne 
 De larmes, et mes bras douloureux sous la poids. 
 
 De tes peches, et mes mains ! et tu bois la croix, 
 Tu vois les clous, le fiel, 1'e'ponge et tout t'enseigne 
 A n* aimer, en ce monde od la chair regne, 
 Que ma Chair et mon Sang, ma parole et ma voix. 
 
 Ne t'ai-je pas aime jusqu'a la mort moi meme, 
 O mon frere en mon Pere, O mon fils en 1'Esprit, 
 Et nai-je pas souffert, comme c'etait ecrit ? 
 
 N'ai-je pas sanglote too angoisse supreme, 
 Et n'ai-je pas su6 la sueur de tes nuits, 
 Lamentable ami qui ma cherches ou je suis." 
 
 NOTE 19, p. 29. 
 
 Stopford Brooke in " Early English Literature." From the 
 same book (vol. i. p. 266) I may, perhaps, most fitly close these 
 notes and illustrations of Cynewulf's poetry with this passage on
 
 NOTES TO LECTURE I 61 
 
 the interpenetration of Christian and heathen legend in the be- 
 ginnings of early English literature : 
 
 " It would have been a pity in the interests of literature if 
 the romantic elements of the old heathendom, especially those 
 which arose out of the personification of the savage or gentle 
 forms of the life of nature, had been blotted out by Christianity. 
 . . . The poetry of the past drew its elements only from war, 
 nature-myths, and ancestral heroism. The new poetry or the 
 new poetic feeling drew its elements from the whole of human 
 life, entered into all the outgoings of the human heart, found its 
 subjects in the common doings of daily life. Christianity made 
 all the life of every man and woman interesting and impassioned 
 from the cradle to the grave. No one can read * The Ecclesias- 
 tical History,' by Baeda, without seeing the truth of this state- 
 ment. The book, in all its stories, is steeped in poetic feeling. 
 Religion, with its ideals, laid its hands of awe and of love on men, 
 from the king to the slave, and on all their relations one to another. 
 It made a country of which all were citizens by right : it made 
 a society which knit together all classes into a union in which 
 the various kingdoms of England dissolved their differences and 
 their wars. It brought together all men in one relation ; it filled 
 those doings of life which were common to all with one spirit. 
 In this fashion it expanded the whole world of feeling, and 
 though I cannot say that all these new elements were actually 
 worked out in Anglo-Saxon literature, yet the new acre of 
 poetic work was ploughed and sown, and the seed was afterwards 
 to grow into a great harvest."
 
 LECTURE II 
 WILLIAM LANGLAND
 
 " Langland's work was that of a reformer ; and the 
 English reformers of the sixteenth century were right when 
 they saw in him a forerunner. The Puritan element, which 
 was destined to impress itself so powerfully upon English 
 life and literature in the seventeenth century, broke forth 
 for the first time in Langland. One of the greatest in 
 the majestic line of English poets, whose muse was inspired 
 by the highest interests of man, those of religion, he was 
 the worthy predecessor of Milton. . . . Out of somewhat 
 ruder materials he created a style whose dignity, vigour, and 
 national spirit endure beside the more perfect art of Latin 
 and greater poets" (TEN BRINK, "English Literature," 
 vol. i. p. 367).
 
 LECTURE II 
 WILLIAM LANGLAND 
 
 " He shall stand at the right hand of the poor." PSALM cix. 31. 
 
 THE Divine Founder of our religion, the great Head 
 of our Church, is known in the sacred records, and 
 has been designated from time to time in the long 
 history of the Christian Society, by many names and 
 many titles. 
 
 Is there any true sense in which it is right for you 
 and me, without irreverence, to speak of Jesus Christ 
 as the greatest of Social Emancipators, the most potent 
 of Social Reformers ? Is there in the personality of 
 Jesus any element of character which, if we were 
 speaking of a modern leader of thought or action, 
 we should feel obliged to designate as democratic or 
 socialistic ? Is there in the religion of Jesus Christ 
 any specific quality which of itself seems to create a 
 social Message such as our modern world especially 
 needs to hear? 
 
 I think that there is. At any rate with this thought 
 in your minds let me ask you, by way of introduction 
 to my lecture to-day, to go back for a moment or two, 
 and try to feel once more if you will the social signi- 
 ficance of that life manifested in Galilee all those 
 years ago.
 
 66 THE CHRIST OF ENGLISH POETRY 
 
 Now there is no fact more removed from con- 
 troversy than this, that the supreme concern of Jesus 
 Christ, as exhibited in the sacred record of His ministry 
 on earth, was the disclosure to each individual human 
 soul of its right relation to God. One of His earliest 
 disciples, S. Philip, quite accurately interpreted that 
 central desire of His Master when he said : " Lord, 
 show us the Father, and it sufficeth us." And to that 
 revelation of the Father all else in the Gospel of Jesus 
 Christ was subordinate. All the rest of His teaching, 
 in fact, may be regarded as by-products thrown off 
 or precipitated in the process of reaching the special 
 result desired. And such a by-product most valuable 
 no doubt, but still a by-product was, in my opinion, 
 the teaching of Jesus Christ in regard to social 
 questions. Jesus was not, therefore, in the first place, 
 a social reformer. He was a revealer of the spiritual 
 basis of all true life. He was not primarily a social 
 agitator with a plan. He was a poetic idealist with 
 a vision. He looked at the social world from above 
 and always approached its problems from within. In 
 a word, revelation not revolution was His method. 
 He offered to humanity, therefore, not social reform 
 by organisation but social reform by inspiration. " I 
 am come," He said, " that ye might have life and have 
 it more abundantly." The communication of vitality, 
 the contagion of personality, this is the secret of Jesus 
 for the individual first and then for society for 
 what is born in the bone of the individual must 
 eventually show itself in the blood of society.
 
 LANGLAND 67 
 
 But having said this and I shall have further to 
 emphasise this thought of the essential individualism 
 of Christ's teaching before I close it must not be for- 
 gotten that there was much in the attitude of Jesus 
 Christ towards the social environment of His own time 
 which explains, if it does not entirely justify, the 
 position of those who from time to time, in the course 
 of the Church's history, have emphasised the profoundly 
 socialistic import of the Gospel. 1 
 
 The Church has never been able, thank God, to 
 forget that when Christ came He came as a poor man 
 in the outward rank of an artisan. He was a true 
 child of the people. In the very song of praise which 
 burst from His mother's lips, when she knew that of 
 her was the Christ to be born, the democratic note is 
 first sounded which has echoed on through the history 
 of the Church. 1 
 
 You and I are so familiar with the words of the 
 Magnificat, as we sing them day by day at Evensong 
 in our churches, that, in all probability, we miss the 
 significance of that note. But when the Church, 
 evening after evening all through the parishes of 
 Christendom, is singing this hymn, she is uncon- 
 sciously foretelling the most ignorant and prejudiced 
 of her priests are foretelling that greatest of all 
 revolutions which the mother of Jesus saw to be in- 
 volved in the birth and work of Christ. To Mary at 
 that moment of inspiration in which her lips poured 
 forth this birth-song of democracy, was revealed the 
 stupendous reversal, political and social, which the 
 birth of the Son of God, as the Son of Man, as the
 
 68 
 
 son of the poor carpenter's wife, was bound, sooner or 
 later, to produce in all the world. 
 
 You will find that same democratic note, the note 
 of social passion, struck by Jesus Himself, when, in the 
 full bloom of manhood, He stood for the first time 
 face to face with his brother men in the synagogue of 
 Nazareth : 
 
 " The Spirit of the Lord is upon Me, 
 
 Because He hath anointed Me to preach the Gospel to the poor ; 
 He hath sent Me to proclaim release to the captives 
 And recovery of sight to the blind ; 
 To set at liberty them that are bruised, 
 To proclaim the acceptable year of the Lord." 
 
 No wonder that the common people heard Him 
 gladly, and listened with delight to the gracious words 
 that proceeded out of His mouth. 
 
 It would have been strange had they not done so, 
 when we remember how completely such doctrine 
 seemed to satisfy the popular ideal. Of all histories 
 the history of the Jewish people is the one, notwith- 
 standing the outward form of their national constitution, 
 in which the democratic spirit most constantly pre- 
 dominates. No tribunes of the people have ever been 
 so bold as the prophets of Israel. They were, in fact, 
 the champions of popular liberty and popular justice 
 at a time when those virtues met with little regard 
 from either priests or kings. The Old Testament, 
 the Bible of the Israelites, was pre-eminently a Poor 
 Man's Book. The thought that God was the pro- 
 tector of the poor, and the avenger of the oppressed, 
 was to be found on almost every page of it. 2
 
 LANGLAND 69 
 
 When, therefore, Jesus Christ stood up for the first 
 time to speak to the people, He could not well find 
 words more clearly expressing the popular hope and 
 longing than those which He quoted from the great 
 statesman-prophet of His country. And moreover, do 
 not let us forget it, Christ and His disciples were, in fact, 
 surrounded by everything which could tempt human 
 reformers to enter on revolutionary courses ; the nation 
 of His day was grievously oppressed and shamefully de- 
 graded. The rulers and princes of Judsea were sensual 
 and cruel tyrants, and their tyranny was supported by 
 a central tyranny equally cruel and sensual. Injustice in 
 the form of Pilate sat on the judgment-seat. A foreign 
 soldiery filled the land, u doing violence," "accusing men 
 falsely," " not content with their wages." So oppressive 
 was the fiscal system that the name of the collector of 
 taxes was a byword of loathing and shame : the distress 
 of the people was such that multitudes were ready to 
 follow a teacher into the wilderness, not for the sake of 
 his words, but for the sake of a little bread. And for 
 this oppression there was no appeal to remorse in the 
 breast of the oppressor, or to the tribunal of a civilised 
 world. There seemed no hope but in patriotic arms. 
 Nor was the nation incapable of wielding them. The 
 spirit of Gideon and Judas Maccabasus glowed in it still. 
 It cherished the constant hope of a Deliverer. 
 
 And the Deliverer came, a radical revolution did 
 take place, an immense transformation of society was 
 brought about. The popular ideal was realised, though 
 not according to the popular idea. The Sermon on 
 the Mount, although it must have seemed little short
 
 yo THE CHRIST OF ENGLISH POETRY 
 
 of mockery to those whose passionate enthusiasm for 
 the redemption of Israel centred in the expectation of 
 a militant Messiah, did in reality contain the popular 
 charter of the world's liberties, did inaugurate as vast 
 a revolution as the world has ever known. To ascribe 
 the heroic character to those citizens of the new king- 
 dom who were not proud and rich, valiant and strong, 
 but to those who were meek-hearted, poor in spirit, 
 peacemakers, childlike, innocent, simple, may have 
 come as a chilling disappointment to the popular hopes 
 of His day ; yet beneath those beatitudes of the new 
 kingdom Christ had placed a principle which, in giving 
 a new valuation to the human soul as such, and 
 ennobling it with the patent of His own nobility, has 
 proved itself not only the most powerful solvent of 
 ancient civilisation, but also the great motive force in 
 the progressive social order of the present. 3 
 
 Obviously it would not be possible, within the limits 
 of our present opportunity, to trace out historically the 
 development of that principle, for it would be to tell 
 the history, not only of Christianity, but of modern 
 civilisation. The very briefest recollection, however, 
 of the prominent facts of social development in the 
 West the Abolition of Slavery, the Enfranchisement of 
 Woman, Representative Democracy, the Protestant Re- 
 formation, Free-trade, Free-thought will be sufficient 
 to remind you how potent has been this principle of the 
 intrinsic value of the human soul as such, revealed by 
 Christ, as a systematic organ of emancipation, not only
 
 LANGLAND 71 
 
 in the religious and ecclesiastical sphere, but also in the 
 civil and industrial order of modern Europe. 4 
 
 My purpose, however, to-day is a much humbler 
 one. I want, if I can, to show you how, in regard to 
 our own country at any rate, the spirit of social liberty 
 learnt in the school of Christ was preached to the Eng- 
 lishmen of the fourteenth century by one of our great 
 representative poets. I want you to read with me if 
 you will, in the pages of the " Piers Plowman " of 
 William Langland, a short but important chapter in 
 the history of the genesis of the social conscience in 
 England, and of that conception of the Personality of 
 Jesus Christ as the Master of Conscience, which has still, 
 it seems to me, its lessons for men of our own day. 
 I trust you will not think I am wanting in reverence for 
 the genius of this University if I express my belief that 
 the mass of men are moved to noble issues much more 
 by the presentation of splendid ideals than of clear 
 arguments ; that the poetic imagination, in fact, has 
 done far more for the average human will than the 
 philosophic reason. 
 
 Anyhow, I am proposing to ask you to consider 
 with me the influence exerted upon the social and 
 spiritual conscience of the England of five centuries 
 ago by that peasant poet, who was also a Christian 
 prophet, a seer of the vision of the present, a prophet 
 of the future kingdom of social righteousness, a rebuker 
 of wickedness in high places, a champion of the poor, a 
 preacher, a teacher at once simple and mystical simple, 
 because his one endeavour was to translate the text of the
 
 72 THE CHRIST OF ENGLISH POETRY 
 
 Gospel of Jesus Christ as literally as possible into life ; 
 and mystic, because he would allow no merit to any 
 action which is not the direct result of the action 
 of the individual conscience. 
 
 Born in the third decade of the fourteenth century, 
 William Langland was the product of an age of great 
 men and of great events. For Europe it was the age 
 of Dante and Petrarch, of Cimabue and Giotto, of 
 Thomas Aquinas and Thomas a Kempis. But for 
 England it was one of the saddest periods of all her 
 history. The brilliant reign of the third Edward was 
 drawing to its close. The collapse of the French War 
 after Crecy ; the ruinous taxation of the country, which 
 was consequent upon that event ; the terrible plague of 
 the Black Death, sweeping away half the population of 
 England ; the iniquitous Labour Laws, which, in face 
 of that depopulation, strove to keep down the rate of 
 wages in the interests of the landlords, had brought the 
 country to the verge of social revolution. Mediaeval 
 society in England was, in fact, breaking up mediaeval 
 society and mediaeval institutions. Even the Church in 
 its Augustinian conception modified though that had 
 been by the Franciscan ideal of the apostolic life, and 
 interpreted by the " Summa " of S. Thomas and the 
 writings of the Schoolmen was yet boldly challenged 
 by that spirit of reform, which in England is associated 
 with the great name of John Wycliff, "the morning 
 star of the Reformation.'* It is not, however, in the 
 philosophic arguments of John Wycliff whose " De 
 Dominio Divino " is the work of the greatest Oxford
 
 LANGLAND 73 
 
 schoolman of his age but in the virile, homely English 
 tracts, terse and vehement, which John Wycliff the 
 Reformer wrote for the guidance of his " poore priestes " 
 (and in which incidentally he made once more the Eng- 
 lish tongue a weapon of literature), that we find the 
 new forces of thought and feeling which were destined 
 to tell upon every page of our later history. 5 
 
 These " poore priestes " of Wycliff, as we know, car- 
 ried to the people of England much beside the religious 
 doctrines of the Reformer. They imbued, in fact, the 
 mind of the English people with ideas which in these 
 days we should call religious socialism, and which in 
 those led to that great popular uprising which we call 
 the Peasant Revolt. 
 
 With that chapter in the social history of England 
 we are all familiar. But the lesson of it and that 
 lesson was the burden, as I read it, of the Vision of 
 William of Langland I take to be this : 
 
 The only true revolution is that which is the result 
 of revelation. The force of new thought is always 
 stronger than the force of arms. There can be no safe 
 and lasting change of national condition which is not 
 founded on a previous change of national character. 
 No change of condition, no bettering of environment, 
 is sufficient in itself to make good men. No rearrange- 
 ment of society, no social transformation, is possible, 
 has ever been possible, or ever will be, except as the 
 application of a religious principle, of a moral develop- 
 ment, of a strong and active common faith. And for 
 this reason. Men may easily remake institutions, but they 
 do not so easily remake themselves. As Mr. John Morley
 
 74 THE CHRIST OF ENGLISH POETRY 
 
 said the other day at Pittsburg, " No politics will suffice 
 of themselves to make a nation's soul." It is indeed a 
 law of social forms, of national institutions, that they 
 are always expressive of national character. They come 
 into existence bearing its impress, and they live only so 
 long as it supplies them with vitality. To change in- 
 stitutions for the better we need to change men for the 
 better. And to do this we must, and shall ever, need 
 religious motive. " Let all men know the truth, and 
 the truth shall make them free." 
 
 Now this was the spirit, partly unconscious perhaps, 
 but none the less real, of the teaching which the " poore 
 priestes " of Wycliff had given to the peasantry of Eng- 
 land in the fourteenth century, and which bore its fruit 
 both in the social emancipation of that age, and in the 
 great acts of religious freedom of the next. This is 
 also the essential spirit of William Langland's poems. 
 He, like the greatest poet of his age, Dante, saw 
 that the world was out of joint. He too looked with 
 longing for the deliverer who should set it right ; he 
 too, with all the powers of his soul, wrestled for the 
 knowledge of social salvation, for himself as for others ; 
 he too lifted up his voice in warning and menace before 
 the great and mighty of the earth, before princes and 
 priests ; he too held up a mirror to the world, in which 
 it saw both its own image and the ideal to which it had 
 grown faithless. 
 
 But, unlike Dante, Langland did not reach a full 
 and clear ideal of life ; and hence he failed perfectly to 
 interpret, much less to transfigure, what he had lived
 
 LANGLAND 75 
 
 and seen, into a symmetrical, distinctly drawn picture, 
 with the personality of the poet in its centre. The 
 poem of " Piers the Plowman," therefore, is rather 
 perhaps a series of paintings, than a well-conceived 
 artistic whole, whose mutual connection lies more in 
 the intention than in the execution, and each of such 
 paintings has, beside clearly illuminated groups, others 
 which seem enveloped in mist, whose outlines we feel 
 rather than perceive, and still others whose dim figures 
 first receive colour and fancy from our own imagination. 
 And yet the mind and temper of the poet is all- 
 pervading. Somehow at least so it affects me 
 Langland takes hold of the heart of his reader, and 
 compels him to enter into the secret purpose of his 
 prophetic burden. It is not certainly, as in the case of 
 Chaucer, by the music of his language, or by the charm 
 of his imagery, that he is able to do this, but, as I 
 think, by the simple directness of his speech, flashing 
 out suddenly into some salient line which, as Mr. 
 Lowell has said, " gets inside our guard with the 
 home-thrust of a downright word." Langland was 
 not a cheerful and companionable man like Chaucer, 
 but rather, like the satirist of our own age, the peasant 
 philosopher Thomas Carlyle, a sincere, outspoken 
 preacher of righteousness. And in Langland's verse, 
 just as in the prose of Carlyle, the grim earnestness of 
 reforming zeal is tempered by thoughts and maxims in 
 which rude, rustic common sense and broad Hogarthian 
 humour are combined ; and never is there missing in his 
 message to his countrymen the note of social passion, 
 of hearty contempt for hypocrisy, of strong, almost
 
 76 THE CHRIST OF ENGLISH POETRY 
 
 vindictive moral fervour. And it is, I think, largely 
 because of this quality in his verse that we find in 
 "Piers the Plowman " rather than in the "Canterbury 
 Tales " most true as is that picture of fourteenth- 
 century English life the distinctive " note " of Eng- 
 lish religion ; that godliness, grim, earnest, and puritan, 
 which was from henceforth to exercise so deep an 
 influence on the national character. 8 
 
 I have only time to give you the merest sketch of 
 the poem. 
 
 In the prologue the poet describes himself as 
 wandering on the Malvern hills 
 
 " I was very for wandered and went me to rest 
 Under a broad bank, by a burnside, 
 And as I lay and leaned and looked in the water 
 I slumbered in a sleeping, it sweyved so merry." 
 
 And in his sleep he dreamed, and this was the opening 
 of his dream : 
 
 " A fair field full of folk I there between 
 Of all manner of man the mean and the rich, 
 Working and wandering as the world asketh. 
 Some put them to the plough played full seldom 
 In setting and in sowing swonken full hard 
 And won what masters with gluttony waste. 
 And some put them to pride, apparelled them thereafter 
 In countenance of clothing come disguised in prayer and penance. 
 
 And some chose chaffer, they thrive the better 
 As it seemeth to our sight as such men thrive 
 And some mirth to make as minstrels conneth 
 Getting gold with their glee, yet guiltless, I trust."
 
 LANGLAND 77 
 
 And some, he says, were 
 
 " Japers and jugglers, 
 
 Judas's children, and some beggars with bags 
 Crammed full of bread, and drunken and lazy." 
 
 Some were pilgrims and palmers, journeying to Rome, 
 and having " leave to tell lies all their life after." Some 
 weavers and craftsmen, burghers and bondmen, bishops 
 and friars, pardoners and parish priests. Of these, alas ! 
 he has little good to say. 
 
 "jParsons and priests plained them to the bishop 
 That their parishes were poor since the pestilence time. 
 To have licence and leave at London to dwell 
 And sing there for simony, for silver is sweet." 
 
 But whoever the people were of which our dreamer 
 dreamt, it is plain that they were all of the everyday 
 English working world. They are the same folk, in 
 fact, or almost the same, that Chaucer pictures for us 
 assembling at the Tabard Inn, preparing to make their 
 pilgrimage to Canterbury. Langland's crowd also has 
 a pilgrimage to make, but not along the sunny high- 
 roads of Kent. These pilgrims travel in a mystic land. 
 Three hundred years before Bunyan's Christian they 
 progress along the way of life in quest of truth and the 
 supreme good, and in this Pilgrim's Progress of Langland 
 realities and shadows intermingle, tangible realities, 
 changing shadows. The scheme of the poem defies ana- 
 lysis. There is indeed no skill of artistry about it. All 
 the effects are gained, as it would seem, at haphazard, 
 and without being sought. Langland does not select, 
 or contrive, or arrange. There is no art of change any-
 
 78 THE CHRIST OF ENGLISH POETRY 
 
 where. It is the scene-shifting of a dream. " With 
 that," says the poet ; and we are hundred miles away, 
 and among an entirely different set of characters. 
 " And then," he cries ; and once more the scene shifts. 
 The Court of Heaven has faded away, and we find our- 
 selves in a Cornhill ale tavern. On the Malvern Hills the 
 mists lie low, and are at times so fine that we cannot say 
 " it begins here," " it ends there." It is the same with 
 Langland's visions. 
 
 And so once in his dream he sees a lovely lady, the 
 Holy Church, and from her he asks the meaning of 
 the High Tower and the Darksome Dungeon which he 
 sees set over against the Fair Field of the world. She 
 tells him that the High Tower is the abode of Truth, 
 the daughter of God the Creator who gives gifts to 
 men ; and the Darksome Dungeon is the Castle of Care, 
 where lives the Father of Falseness. And she teaches 
 how great a treasure Truth is, and how the road to 
 the Tower is the way of Love. 
 
 " When all treasures are tried, quoth she, Truth is the best. 
 * God is Love,' saith the text, and it teaches you all 
 That Truth can be trusted, like dear God Himself. 
 Who is true of his tongue and telleth no other, 
 Doeth works that go with it and willeth no man an ill, 
 Is a god, by the Gospel, aground and aloft, 
 Yea, like to our Lord, by S. Luke's own words. 
 And clerks who know this should teach it about, 
 For Christian and unchristian lay claim to the Truth. 
 
 So then is Love leader of the Lord's folk in Heaven 
 
 And a mean as the Mayor is between the King and the Commons, 
 
 Right so is Love a leader and the Law shapeth, 
 
 Upon man for his misdeeds he taxeth the merchment.
 
 LANGLAND 79 
 
 In the heart is its head and its holy well, 
 In conscience of heart its might beginneth, 
 As found in the Father, who formed us all, 
 Looked on us with love, and let His Son die 
 Meekly for our misdeeds to amend us all. 
 
 Love is Leech of Life and next our Lord's own self, 
 
 And also the right gate that goeth to heaven. 
 
 So I say of the texts as I said before 
 
 When all treasures be tried, Truth is the best : 
 
 I have told thee what truth is, no treasure is better, 
 
 I may linger no longer, the Lord be thy guide." 
 
 Yet he begs that of her grace she will tell him 
 before she goes how he may know the false one. 
 She bids him turn himself about and see both False- 
 ness and Fauvel falsehood and flattery. He turns 
 and beholds a woman decked out in glorious apparel. 
 
 " Her robe was full rich, of red scarlet engrained 
 With ribbons of red gold, and of rich stones. 
 Her array me ravished, such richness saw I never. 
 I had wonder what she was, and whose wife she was : 
 
 * What is this woman/ said I, ' so worthily attired ? ' 
 
 * That is Meed the maid,' quoth she, 'hath noyed me full oft ... 
 False was her father, that hath a fickle tongue 
 
 And never Truth saith, sithen he come to earth. 
 
 And Meed is mannered after him, right as kind asketh, 
 
 Qualis pater, talius filius ; bona arbor bonum fructum facit.' " 
 
 And my Lady Church tells him that on the morrow 
 Lady Meed is to be married to Sir False-fickle-tongue, 
 and " then you may see the whole crew that belongeth 
 to that Lordship," for Fauvel, through his fair speech, 
 hath brought them together. And so she leaves the 
 dreamer to watch the preparations for the wedding.
 
 8o THE CHRIST OF ENGLISH POETRY 
 
 In the next three sections of the poem we have the 
 forbiddal of the marriage by Theology, who disputes 
 its legality, the adjournment to the King's Court at 
 Westminster, the arraignment there of Lady Meed by 
 Conscience, her attempted refutation of the charges 
 against her which he brings, the judgment of the high 
 chief justice Reason, the final decision of the King that 
 until Reformation is accomplished in the land there 
 shall be no pity, and no wrong shall go unpunished or 
 be atoned for by gifts. 
 
 " No Meed shall buy bail, by Saint Mary in Heaven ! 
 And wrong by the righteous shall be rightly condemned." 
 
 It is a wonderful Hogarthian picture, full of minutest 
 detail and vivid characterisation, crowds, groups, classes, 
 individuals, the King, the Lords, the Commons, the 
 clergy, the lawyers, the people, the whole organisation 
 of the state in Edward III.'s time, telling under alle- 
 gorical form of the actual evils which were threatening 
 the ruin of society, of the only possible means of 
 reformation, and of the true theory of life. 
 
 And then once more the scene shifts, and we come 
 to the vision of the seven deadly sins, and the appearance 
 for the first time of Piers the Plowman, followed by the 
 Pilgrimage of the Penitents to the Tower of Truth. 
 
 " A thousand of men there thronged together 
 Cried upward to Christ and to His clean Mother 
 To have grace to go with them Truth to seek." 
 
 On failure, however, of any to guide them on the 
 road, Peterkin the Plowman himself offers to be their 
 leader
 
 LANGLAND 81 
 
 " By S. Peter of Rome, he cries, 
 I have an half-acre to ear by the highway. 
 Had I eared this half- acre and sowed it after 
 I would wend with you and the way teach." 
 
 But Truth himself appears to the Plowman and tells 
 him that the work of ploughing and sowing his half- 
 acre is so important that he is not to leave it, even to 
 lead a pilgrimage. The business of the Plowman is 
 to work, and to help the world to work with him. 
 Laborare est orare. If all good men go on pilgrimage 
 who is to do the world's work ? 
 
 So Peterkin stays at home and preaches the Gospel 
 of Work and Brotherhood for Christ's sake. And this 
 is how he preaches it. " Christ," he says 
 
 " Gave each man a grace to guide himself with, 
 That idleness encumber him not, envy nor pride. 
 Some he gave wit with words to show 
 Wit to win their livelihood as the world asketh, 
 As preachers and priests and prentices of law 
 They loyally to live by labour of tongue, 
 And by wit to make wise others as grace them would teach ; 
 And some he learned craft and cunning of sight 
 With selling and buying their livelihood to gain ; 
 And some he learned to labour a loyal life and true, 
 And some he taught to till, to ditch and to thatch, 
 Aoid some to divine and divide, numbers to know, 
 And some to compass craftily and colours to make. 
 
 And some to ride and recover what unrightfully was won, 
 Ajid all he learned to be loyall, and each craft love other. 
 Though some be cleaner than some, See ye well, quoth He, 
 That he that followeth the fairest craft to the foulest I could 
 have put him. 
 
 F
 
 82 THE CHRIST OF ENGLISH POETRY 
 
 Look that none blame other, but love all as brethren ; 
 And who that most mastery can be mildest of bearing, 
 And crown conscience King and make work your steward." 7 
 
 In another vision Thought instead of Truth appears 
 to the dreamer, and tells him how 
 
 " Do wel : Do bet : and do Best 
 Are three fair virtues and be not far to find, 
 Whoso is true of his tongue and of his two hands, 
 And through his labour or through his land his livelihood winneth, 
 And taketh but his own Do well him followeth. 
 Do Bet doth right thus but he doth much more. 
 He is as low as a lamb and lovely of speech, 
 And helpeth all men after that them needeth. 
 Do Best is above both and beareth a bishop's cross, 
 Is hooked on one end to hale men from hell." 
 
 It is in this allegory "the Vision of Do Well: 
 Do Bet : Do Best " that the exaltation of the Plowman 
 takes place. 
 
 The question is put, "What is the Vita de Dobet ? " 
 And the answer, following the text of S. Paul's great 
 ode on " Charity," in i Corinthians xiii., is that the 
 life of Dobet is Love. But who is Love, asks the 
 dreamer ? " Without the help of Piers the Plowman," 
 is the reply, " thou canst never see His person." 
 
 " And that knoweth no clerke : no creature on earth 
 But Piers the Plowman. Petrus, id est Cristus." 
 
 And so under the guise of the Plowman, in his 
 suffering and humiliation, Christ Himself is repre- 
 sented as the great Social Emancipator ; and we are told 
 how the Jews, "who were gentilmen," despised Him
 
 LANGLAND 83 
 
 whom they ought to have honoured, and how His 
 followers were labouring men, and how still 
 
 " For our joy and our health, Jesus Christ of Heaven 
 In a poor man's apparell pursueth us ever, 
 
 And looketh upon us in their likeness and that with lovely cheer 
 To know us by our kind heart and casting of our eyes 
 Whether we love the lords here before our Lord of bliss. 
 For all we are Christ's creatures and of his coffers rich 
 And brethren as of one blood as well beggars as earls." 8 
 
 Once more the scene shifts, and the poet pictures 
 himself in Malvern Church, falling asleep during the 
 celebration of the Holy Mysteries, and dreaming this 
 dream of the Christ 
 
 " I fell eftsoon to sleep and suddenly I met 
 That Piers the Plowman, was painted all bloody, 
 And came in with a cross before the common people 
 And light like in all things to the Lord Jesus 
 And then called I Conscience to ken me the truth. 
 Is this Jesus the jouster ? quoth I, the Jews did to death ? 
 Or is it Piers Plowman ? who painted him so red ? 
 Quoth Conscience and kneeled then, these are Christes arms 
 His colours and coat armour, and he that cometh so bloody 
 It is Christ with his cross, Conqueror of Christendom." 
 
 And so with growing power and vividness the poem 
 draws to its close, with a description of the death of 
 Christ, of His triumph over Death and Hell told in 
 an allegory which is based on the text of the Gospel of 
 Nicodemus of His Resurrection, of His Ascension, 
 and of the meeting together of Truth and Mercy, 
 Righteousness and Peace, till, with this news of the 
 final victory of Love, the poet wakens from his dream 
 with the joy-bells ringing in his ears on the morning 
 of Easter Day. 9
 
 84 THE CHRIST OF ENGLISH POETRY 
 
 There are few passages, I venture to think, in 
 English sacred poetry more sublime in their concep- 
 tion of the Divine figure of Christ than this last 
 section of Langland's vision. True, the figure of the 
 Christ he reveals to us in His final triumph is no 
 imperial king reigning supreme in far-off splendour 
 in the glory of the heavenly palaces, or as in the 
 Christian saga-poem of Cynewulf, of which I spoke 
 to you last week leading to battle his thegns and 
 aethelings with the evil host of wicked angels, and 
 casting them down to doom in hell ; but a figure of the 
 homely and the friendly Christ, dwelling with humble 
 men, helping them with their crafts, teaching them to 
 plough and to ditch, and to live a leal life and a true : 
 a Divine Comrade, " who standeth at the right hand of 
 the Poor," who " in all their afflictions was afflicted, and 
 by the Angel of His Presence " the presence of a very 
 human Christ " saved them," and who also was full of 
 care and concern for the wider good of the common 
 weal : a Reformer, an Emancipator of the captive and the 
 oppressed, the Champion of social rights, the Inspirer of 
 social duty, the revealer of a social ideal for England in 
 the future a golden age in which folk of every grade 
 shall have learnt to " Do well, to do better, to do best." 
 
 And what, my friends, is the lesson of this fourteenth- 
 century poem ? Is it not this ? 
 
 " Jesus Christ of heaven 
 In poor man's apparell pursueth us ever." 
 
 The possibility, that is to say, that the full likeness 
 to Jesus Christ, the ideal Son of God, is stored up in
 
 LANGLAND 85 
 
 the Plowman, in the common man of the street, and of 
 the mill, and of the workshop ; this, I think, is the 
 lesson, which is at the very heart of William Langland's 
 message to his countrymen. It is, in fact, because of 
 his insistence upon the principle, revealed by Jesus 
 Christ, that humanity wherever it may be found has 
 an infinite value, and that consequently the common 
 man is the true unit of measure, not only for the 
 franchise of the Catholic Church, but also for the 
 Christian State, that his Vision has its chief interest 
 for us to-day, as a picture of those forces which, in 
 reaction from fourteenth-century Papalism and Feudalism, 
 were gradually building up that idea of duty which 
 gave to the England of the next two centuries that 
 social conscience that reformer's conscience which 
 is the necessary coefficient of safe Democracy. 
 
 There is no need, I think, to discriminate between 
 those elements of the Puritan movement which we may 
 directly trace to the influence of the rediscovered Bible 
 and those which it inherits from the Mother Church 
 of the Middle Ages. The former are more evident, 
 perhaps, in Langland's Vision. But the latter, includ- 
 ing that element of Individualism which, in order to 
 find itself, shut itself up in a monastery, are there also. 
 Both, indeed, are inseparable. For no one, in these 
 days of historical criticism, could surely imagine that 
 it was possible for a single generation to take a broad 
 jump, as it were, over the thirty generations preceding 
 it, and to come down on the clear ground of Biblical 
 truth.
 
 86 THE CHRIST OF ENGLISH POETRY 
 
 Some wise man of our own day has said " that the 
 key of the fourteenth century is to be found in the 
 hand of Dante." And we may, I think, assent to 
 that statement, if only we recognise that the witness to 
 the Christian belief in the consecration of all human 
 society to a definite moral end, as part of the purpose 
 of God, which is expressed in the " De Monarchia " 
 of Dante, and in his " Divina Commedia," is based, 
 just as the " Vision of Piers Plowman " by William 
 Langland is based, on the necessity of finding an answer 
 to this very simple question, "How to reconcile the 
 daily conduct of the average Christian with the revealed 
 principles of his religion ? " Reduced to simplest terms, 
 that is the question which is at the back of that great 
 social problem which has faced the Church of Christ 
 throughout her age-long history. For is it not true 
 that most of the sects and parties which have been 
 condemned by the Church as heretical Montanists, 
 Paulicians, Waldenses, the Fraticelli, the " Poor Priestes " 
 of WyclifF, the Lollards, the Anabaptists, unconnected 
 with each other in their origin all bear on their face 
 the mark of a common descent from a single principle, 
 namely, the desire to act on a literal interpretation of 
 Christ's precepts without any regard to the reserves of 
 Church tradition or worldly experience? And yet, 
 indeed, from the first it has been felt by the Church 
 itself that the authoritative leaders and teachers of 
 Christianity could not safely trust the interpretation of 
 the moral law of Christ, much less the practical appli- 
 cation of Christ's spiritual principles to life, entirely to 
 the intuitive perceptions of each individual Christian, or
 
 LANGLAND 87 
 
 even less perhaps to the average public opinion of each 
 individual group or church of Christians. There must, 
 they thought, be some legitimate place for the principle 
 of authority in relation to the Discipline of the Christian 
 life equally as in relation to the Doctrines of the Chris- 
 tian faith. And they were right. The privilege of the 
 individual conscience, the right of private judgment 
 Individualism, in a word was and is, of course, of the 
 very essence of Christianity ; but Individualism, it ought 
 never to be forgotten, if it is to be truly ethical, must 
 put itself wholly into social relationship. Only a perfect 
 individual, perfectly knowing and mastering himself, can 
 be truly in society, and only in society can a man become 
 a perfect individual, 
 
 For the imperfect individual, then, for the unus 
 multorum (Horace, Satires, i. ix. 71, 72), for the ordi- 
 nary Christian, for the average citizen of the world, 
 the kingdom of God upon earth revealed as an ideal 
 for all time in Christ's Sermon on the Mount that 
 poem of the world's second springtide bringing to 
 men new social chances, new social impulses, new 
 guarantees for civilised life, will always seem too ideal. 
 The counsels of the Sermon will always seem to him 
 " counsels of perfection." He will crave, therefore, 
 always for a more positive discipline, a more precise 
 plan of life, a fixed code of morals, mapping out the 
 whole department of conduct with prescribed maxims 
 and definite rules. 
 
 And the history of the Church, we know, at least, 
 on its institutional side, has largely been a record of the 
 attempt to supply this need for the imperfect individual.
 
 88 THE CHRIST OF ENGLISH POETRY 
 
 We are all quite aware how in the slow alchemy of 
 history, the evangelic liberty, the spontaneous enthusiasm 
 of the Sermon on the Mount came to be gradually 
 transmuted into the case-bound legalism of the Latin 
 penitentials with their ghastly catalogues of imagined 
 possibilities of sin, each with their own specific remedy. 
 The Free Church of the primitive age, such as Jesus 
 had conceived it (S. Matt, xviii. 20), such as S. Paul 
 a generation later had still understood it (2 Cor. i. 21), 
 such as Tertullian {Apolog. 39) and Origen (Celsus 3, 
 51) had described it, seemed to the legal precisians of 
 the end of the third century little better than the 
 promise of an anarchic Utopia. The fourth century did 
 not close before the victory of the Roman spirit of legalism 
 was complete. The " De Officiis Ministrorum " of S. 
 Ambrose of Milan, with its fusion of the Roman con- 
 ception of personal rights with the stoic conception of 
 reciprocal relations, is but a rechauffee of Cicero's " Manual 
 of Morals," compiled three centuries earlier. And 
 although the "De Civitate Dei" of Augustine does indeed 
 outline a new ideal of the kingdom of God upon earth, 
 it is no longer the primitive conception of the Sermon 
 on the Mount, but a Roman ideal in which the Empire 
 takes its place within the Church, and the Church sets 
 itself to the great secular task regere imperio populos. 
 Nine centuries later, when the complex system of medi- 
 aeval discipline was completely codified (as, for example, 
 in the " De Pcenitentia " of Gratian's " Decretals," or in 
 the second part of the " Summa " of S. Thomas Aquinas) 
 the Church of Christ appears as no other than ancient 
 imperial Rome itself, regaining its authority over the
 
 LANGLAND 89 
 
 Barbarians who have conquered it, imposing upon them 
 its decretals, as it formerly imposed its laws, governing 
 them by its cardinals as it once governed them by its 
 legates and proconsuls. The kingdom of God and His 
 Christ had almost become the kingdom of this world 
 and of the Prince of its power. 
 
 But the Spirit of Christ was not left without witness 
 even in those dark days. When the theologians and the 
 schoolmen had failed, God spake to His people by His 
 poets. 
 
 Dante Alighieri in Italy, William Langland in Eng- 
 land, the one appealing to the intellect of the cultured 
 classes as a philosopher in whose writings the s*eva in- 
 dignatio of the baffled Reformer is blended with the pene- 
 trative insight and the sublime optimism of the Poet ; the 
 other appealing to the hearts of the English people, as a 
 popular preacher of social justice and practical common 
 sense in religion, as a mystic apostle also of love and 
 conscience, and holy poverty, succeeded for a time in 
 reviving the memory of the lost ideal and the hope of 
 an immediate realisation of the kingdom of God upon 
 earth. 10 
 
 In Dante's vision we see "the best thought of 
 mediaeval Christendom, enriched with all the secular 
 and religious culture of the crowning century of the 
 Middle Age, inspired with the undimmed religious 
 fervour of the ' ages of faith,' keenly observant of the 
 stirring life of Christian Europe, reflecting upon the very 
 same problem that had busied the mind of Augustine 
 amid the wreck of a falling empire nine centuries before."
 
 90 THE CHRIST OF ENGLISH POETRY 
 
 But in the " De Monarchia " of Dante and in his 
 " Divina Commedia," we find, as we do not find in the 
 " De Civitate Dei " of Augustine, a belief in the essential 
 consecration of secular government and of human society 
 to a definite moral end as part of the distinct purpose 
 of God. " Without the Civitas terrena" says Dante, 
 "the Civitas Dei becomes unattainable, since only in 
 the brotherhood of mankind can man develop all the 
 capacities of the soul necessary for his entrance into 
 the kingdom of heaven. ... It is not as a governing 
 body, as a Societas Perfecta, that the Church will re- 
 generate human nature, but as a brotherhood." Dante's 
 vision, in fact, is saturated with the spirit, as we should 
 say, of modern thought, of socialistic morality, of civic 
 energy, of patriotism ; above all, perhaps, of the 
 supremacy of science. It is largely, no doubt, because 
 of this, because in Dante's philosophy of civilisation we 
 seem to see the Divine Right of the Church, and the 
 Historical Right of the State, giving way to that higher 
 principle of Law rooted in Liberty and of the moral 
 ends of society (which we believe to be the parent of all 
 that is best in modern civilisation), that so many of our 
 leaders and teachers in Church and State to-day can still 
 go to this fourteenth-century prophet to find an unfailing 
 source of inspiration and solace in face of the perplexing 
 social problems of the present. 
 
 The dream of the peasant poet of the Malvern 
 hills is necessarily of a less wide scope than that of 
 Dante. For Langland is a thoroughly typical English- 
 man, in all probability a descendant of one of the old
 
 LANGLAND 91 
 
 English yeoman families, using, for patriotic motives, 
 as his poetical instrument the rude alliterative measure 
 of the old English minstrelsy and the quaint dramatic 
 forms of old English miracle plays, judging, no doubt 
 rightly, that the popular audience for whom he wrote 
 would be more deeply touched by the ancient rhythms 
 of their race than by the meretricious attractions of the 
 newly-imported foreign verse of France. Trained in 
 the learning of the monastic schools, he embodies many 
 of the virtues which distinguished the men of the 
 Renaissance ; but he shares in a still larger measure 
 the virtues of the men of the Reformation the Puritan 
 earnestness of Bunyan and Milton, the practical common- 
 sense and humour of Chaucer and Shakespeare. It is a 
 characteristic feature of Dante's " Divina Commedia " 
 that the constant guide of the poet should be either Virgil, 
 the most learned of classic poets, or Theology, conceived 
 as an abstract figure. It is equally characteristic of 
 Langland that his guide to the Tower of Truth should 
 be either Peterkin the humble Plowman, or Conscience 
 regarded as a concrete personality, the Constable Inwit. 
 While Langland, in common with the Franciscan friars, 
 exalts the virtues of love and holy poverty, and exhorts 
 his hearers, in almost Dante's words, to make " glad 
 wonder and sweet looks the occasion of holy thought," * 
 he is obviously in sympathy with the political doctrines 
 of Wycliff, and even, perhaps, with the socialism of 
 John Ball, the mad priest of Kent. Langland, in 
 fact, realised quite as clearly as did Wycliff that 
 Christianity was a res communissima. Certainly he 
 
 * Paradiso, canto xi. 76.
 
 92 THE CHRIST OF ENGLISH POETRY 
 
 insists on the essential equality of all men, and the 
 strongest denunciations of his satire are directed against 
 the abuse of justice and the falsity and the hypocrisy 
 which corrupt the very springs of social action. Lang- 
 land is unlike Dante in this, however, that his con- 
 ception of society is not quite symmetrical or logical, 
 partly, no doubt, because he is less learned, partly be- 
 cause he is more practical. His social ideal is in many 
 respects a reflection of the actual order of things under 
 which he himself lived ; but he, just as much as Dante, 
 believed that the true ideal of social order was revealed 
 in the doctrines of the Christian Church. Both men, 
 in fact, find themselves face to face with practically 
 the same social disease, and the ideal remedy suggested 
 by each man proceeds from a similar method of imagina- 
 tive reasoning. 11 
 
 But neither the future of Dante's vision or of 
 Langland's came as quickly as they had hoped, or by 
 the means which Dante, at least, thought he foresaw. 
 Yet 
 
 " The old order changeth, giving place to the new, 
 And God fulfils Himself in many ways." 
 
 Faith in the principle of historic continuity, in other 
 words, the belief that society cannot make a fresh 
 beginning because true progress must always be a de- 
 velopment of order ; faith in the richness and variety 
 and complexity of human life always to be taken count 
 of in all our endeavours to hasten the kingdom of God 
 upon earth which is the essential basis of Dante's 
 philosophy faith in the fellowship of human service,
 
 LANGLAND 93 
 
 by which the weak brother ought ever to have as 
 champion and protector the public Christian conscience, 
 because 
 
 "Jesus Christ of Heaven 
 In poor man's apparell pursueth us ever " 
 
 a prospective faith in ultimate social perfection, be- 
 cause Christ has proclaimed a Fatherly will to be the 
 origin of all life and the root of humanity which is 
 the essential message of Langland's vision have come 
 to our modern age, but they have come by a God's way 
 of which neither Dante nor Langland dreamed. 
 
 For they have come, on the one hand, as the result 
 of that rebirth of literature and art and science which 
 we know by the name of the Renaissance, and which 
 we may sum up perhaps best in the splendid image of 
 a great interpreter of history, " Greece had risen from 
 the dead with the New Testament in her hands ; " 
 and, on the other, as a reaction from that affirmation 
 of Individualism which was the message of the Re- 
 formation and the systematic organ of emancipation, 
 alike in the two great transformations of society, the 
 one spiritual and ecclesiastical, the other economic and 
 industrial, which belong respectively to the sixteenth 
 and the eighteenth centuries. 
 
 Yes, I repeat, the essential message of Langland's 
 vision, the worship of a Christ, who " in poor man's 
 apparell pursueth us ever," a Christ who is the ideal 
 Son of God, and yet a Christ who reveals Himself 
 to us " through the least of His brethren," the common
 
 94 THE CHRIST OF ENGLISH POETRY 
 
 man of the street, of the mill, of the workshop, of the 
 field, has come to us, is ever coming to our modern 
 world in God's own way. 
 
 But how are we receiving it, you and I, this social 
 Gospel, this vision of Christ the social Emancipator ? 
 
 When, on the one hand, we consider the ideal of His 
 Church, " the splendid having and royal hope," the zeal 
 for souls, the sympathy for bodily needs, which are the 
 individual fruits of a single love, exhibited in the one 
 blessed life of Jesus, to be reflected in His Church, as 
 witnessing for Him, as representing Him in this present 
 world, as occupied with His work of setting up the 
 Kingdom of God under and amidst the natural everyday 
 conditions of human life ; and on the other, when we 
 consider the Babel life of our great cities, that black 
 cloud of pauperism brooding over the richest of the 
 countries of the earth, of drunkenness, with all its foul 
 brood of folly and sensuality and crime, of social revolt, 
 of the almost standing feud of Capital and Labour, of 
 endemic misery and avoidable disease, of all the countless 
 ills which make up the terrible inheritance of ancestral 
 error, of our social heredity and of our social environ- 
 ment when we think of these things, what a sorry 
 compromise, what a miserable evasion, what a vast con- 
 spiracy to be blind does not even the best side of our 
 Christian civilisation seem in England to-day ? Or, 
 again, when in the ethical realm of life-values we con- 
 sider the office of the Church of Christ in regard to the 
 greatest of her social duties, the formation and building 
 up of human character and the provision of the civic secu- 
 rities of character in a candid, enlightened, vigorous Public
 
 LANGLAND 95 
 
 Conscience, when we compare the ideal citizen of the 
 kingdom, as revealed in the Sermon on the Mount, as set 
 forth for us in the Apostolic writings, and in its measure 
 of the stature of the fulness of Christ, thinking first of 
 all of whatsoever things are lovely, pure, just, noble, and 
 of good report, with the actual result as seen, I will not 
 say, in the exceptional saintly characters of Christendom, 
 but as seen in the unit of citizen life, as we know him 
 to-day, not only in Russia or in France, but in our own 
 England the downmost man, in city or in field, the un- 
 employable man of the street, the dullest-witted labourer 
 of the village, the product of the rudest, homeliest life 
 of the people I ask you, putting these two types side 
 by side, who is not conscious of the depth of contrast ? 
 
 Many of you are familiar, no doubt, with Jean 
 Fran9ois Millet's picture of the " Man with the Hoe." 
 Some of you, perhaps, may know the fine interpretation 
 of that picture by a modern Californian poet. 
 
 " Bowed by the weight of centuries he leans 
 Upon his hoe and gazes on the ground, 
 The emptiness of ages in his face, 
 And on his back the burden of the world. 
 Who made him dead to rapture and despair, 
 A thing that grieves not and that never hopes, 
 Stolid and stunn'd, a brother to the ox ? 
 Who loosened and let down this brutal jaw ? 
 Whose was the hand that slanted back this brow ? 
 Whose breath ble\v out the light within this brain ? 
 Is this the thing the Lord God made and gave 
 To have dominion over sea and land ; 
 To trace the stars and search the heavens for power ; 
 To feel the passion of eternity ?
 
 96 THE CHRIST OF ENGLISH POETRY 
 
 Through this dread shape the suffering ages look ; 
 
 Time's tragedy is in that aching stoop ; 
 
 Through this dread shape humanity betrayed, 
 
 Plundered, profaned, and disinherited, 
 
 Cries protest to the Judges of the world, 
 
 A protest that is also prophecy. 
 
 O masters, lords and rulers in all lands, 
 
 Is this the handiwork you give to God ? 
 
 This monstrous thing distorted and soul quenched, 
 
 How will you ever straighten up this shape ? 
 
 Touch it again with immortality, 
 
 Give back the upward looking and the light, 
 
 Rebuild in it the music and the dream, 
 
 Make right the immemorial infamies, 
 
 Perfidious wrongs, immedicable woes ? " 
 
 My friends, I ask you to place this picture of the 
 twentieth-century poet beside that of his fourteenth- 
 century brother, concerning whom I have been speaking 
 to you to-day, and to regard both of them in the light 
 of the judgment of that Master " Who standeth 
 at the right hand of the Poor," and how does the 
 protest of either and of each of them appeal to your 
 conscience to-day, to the public Christian conscience 
 of to-day? 
 
 Is not the protest also a prophecy ? " Then shall 
 the King say, * Depart from ME, ye cursed : for I was 
 an hungered and ye gave ME no meat : I was thirsty 
 and ye gave ME no drink : I was a stranger and ye 
 took ME not in : naked and ye clothed ME not : I 
 was sick and ye visited ME not : I was in prison and 
 ye came not unto ME : . . . Verily I say unto you, 
 inasmuch as ye did it not unto one of the least of 
 these My brethren, ye did it not unto ME.' '
 
 NOTES AND ILLUSTRATIONS TO 
 LECTURE II 
 
 NOTE i, p. 67. 
 
 THERE is, no doubt, a wide distinction between the point of 
 view which regards the teaching of Jesus as possessing in itself 
 a quality and a character which inevitably suggest a social 
 Gospel, such as our modern world especially needs to hear, and 
 the point of view which pictures the actual personality of Jesus 
 Himself as of a definitely demagogic character, and claims for 
 Him on this account a new loyalty from the democratic forces 
 of to-day as the Poor Man's Champion, the Best of Socialists, 
 the Ideal Leader of Working-men. Nevertheless, I think it may 
 be useful to quote one or two representative passages from not 
 unimportant modern critics to show how far in this direction 
 perhaps in an inevitable reaction from a too metaphysical 
 Christology this conception of the human Christ has been 
 carried. 
 
 " The prophets of Israel," writes Renan, the first probably of 
 modern biographers of Jesus to emphasise this view of the person 
 and office of Jesus Christ, " are fiery publicists of the description 
 we should now call socialists or anarchists. They are fanatical 
 in their demands for social justice, and proclaim aloud that, if the 
 world is not just, nor capable of becoming just, it were better 
 it were destroyed a most false and yet most fecund mode of 
 viewing the matter ; for, like all desperate doctrines, as, for 
 instance, Russian Nihilism at the present day, it produces heroism 
 and a great awakening of human forces. The founders of 
 Christianity, the direct continuers of the prophets, conclude by 
 
 97 G
 
 98 THE CHRIST OF ENGLISH POETRY 
 
 an incessant invocation of the end of the world, and, strange to 
 say, they really do change it " (Histoire du Peuple Israel}. . . . 
 
 " Jesus was in one view an anarchist, for He had no idea of 
 civil government. That government seemed to Him purely 
 and simply an abuse. . . . Every magistrate appeared to Him a 
 natural enemy of the people of God. ... A great social re- 
 volution in which rank will be overturned, in which all 
 authority in this world will be humiliated, was His dream. . . . 
 Pure ebionism that is, the doctrine that the poor (ebionim) alone 
 shall be saved, that the reign of the poor is approaching was 
 therefore the doctrine of Jesus. . . . He pardoned the rich 
 man, but only when the rich man, in consequence of some 
 prejudice, was disliked by society. . . . Jesus returned to 
 Galilee, having completely lost his Jewish faith, and filled with 
 revolutionary ardour. . . . His conception of the world was 
 socialist, with a Galilean colouring. ... At times we should 
 take Him for a democratic leader desiring only the triumph of 
 the poor and the disinherited. . . . No revolution is effected 
 without some harshness. If Luther or the actors in the French 
 Revolution had been compelled to observe the rules of politeness, 
 neither the Reformation nor the Revolution would have taken 
 place. Let us congratulate ourselves in like manner that Jesus 
 encountered no law which punished the invectives He uttered 
 against one class of citizens " (Vie de Jesus). 
 
 On the title-page of his book Der radikale deutsche Socialismus 
 und die christiche Gesehchaft^ Rudolf Lodt, a distinguished 
 German scholar, placed these words : " Whosoever would under- 
 stand the social question and wishes to aid in solving it must 
 have on his right hand the works of political economy, on his 
 left those of scientific socialism, and before him must keep open 
 the New Testament." A chapter on " The Social Doctrines of 
 the New Testament " he sums up in these words : " With the 
 exception of its atheism . . . the theory of Socialism cannot be 
 opposed from the point of view of the Gospel. Its principles 
 not only conform to the tests of the New Testament, but
 
 NOTES TO LECTURE II 99 
 
 contain evangelical and Divine truths." The establishment of 
 the Evangelical Social Congress in Germany was largely due to 
 the influence of Lodt, Stacker, and their friends. In a paper 
 read before this Congress in 1898 Pastor Kade gave a series of 
 interesting opinions expressed by German working men on their 
 conception of a Socialistic Christ. "The real Jesus seems 
 indeed," writes Dr. Peabody, from whom I quote this testimony 
 (* Jesus Christ and the Social Question/ p. 64), " to many of 
 these handworkers to have been rediscovered by them, as though 
 beneath some mediaeval fresco of an unreal and mystical Christ 
 there had been freshly laid bare the features of the Man of 
 Nazareth." "Christ," answered one German working-man to 
 an inquirer, " was a true friend of the working people, not in 
 His words alone, but in His deeds. He was hated and perse- 
 cuted as is the modern Socialist, and if He lived to-day He 
 would, without doubt, be one of us." " Christ," wrote another, 
 " was a great revolutionist ; if any one now preached as He did 
 he would be arrested." " He would have accomplished more," 
 adds a third, " if He had given His efforts rather to economic 
 and scientific ends than to religion." " He was a man of the 
 common people," concludes a fourth, " who fought a hard fight 
 for their moral and economic welfare." 
 
 " Besides the powerful influence of religion in the critical and 
 exceptional moments of our lives, the influence of Christ would 
 come full of strength and blessing to the working-men of 
 England, even if they acknowledged Him, at first, in the most 
 articulate of creeds, as the man whom they admired most. ' We 
 used to think that Christ was a fiction of the priests ; at all 
 events not a man like us in any way, a different sort of being 
 altogether, one who could do what He liked so people said 
 and turn the world upside down if He pleased ; and then we 
 could not make Him out at all. Why, thought we, did He not 
 turn the world upside down, and make it better if He could ? 
 It is all a mystery to us. But now, we find, He was a man 
 after all, like us ; a poor working-man who had a heart for the
 
 poor and wanted to turn the world upside down, but could not 
 do it at once ; and He went a strange way and a long way round 
 to do it ; but He has come nearer doing it, spite of His enemies, 
 than any man we know ; and, now that we understand this, we 
 say though we don't understand it all or anything like it " He 
 is the Man for us ! " I say that if even this rudimentary 
 feeling of gratitude and admiration for their great Leader could 
 possess the hearts of English working-men and this is surely 
 not too much to expect much would come from even this 
 inadequate worship. And for myself, I unhesitatingly declare 
 that I would sooner be in the position of a working-man who 
 doubts about Heaven and Hell, and even about God, but can say 
 of Christ, * He is the Man for me ! ' than I would be in the 
 position of the well-to-do manufacturer who is persuaded of the 
 reality of Heaven and Hell and of the truth of all the theology 
 of the Church of England, but can reconcile his religion 
 with the deliberate establishment of a colossal fortune on the 
 ruin of his fellow-creatures " (Dr. Abbott, " Kernel and the 
 Husk," p. 334). 
 
 Finally, I may quote the following passage from the report on 
 " Socialism " attached to the Encyclical Letter of the Anglican 
 Bishops issued by the Lambeth Conference in 1899. It may 
 perhaps serve to show that, in thus holding a wise balance 
 between the Christology which ignored the social question 
 altogether and one which finds the social question the very 
 centre of the Gospel, the Anglican Episcopate has learnt, in 
 these modern days, to get behind those traditions of aristocratic 
 feudalism with which it is too often supposed to be still 
 encrusted, and to exhibit much of that manly strength and 
 vigour, of that directness of appeal or rebuke which characterised 
 the representative and fraternal episcopate of the early Church. 
 
 " The primary duty of the Church, as such, and within 
 her, of the clergy, is that of ministry to men in the things of 
 character, conscience, and faith. In doing this she also does her 
 greatest social duty. Character in the citizen is the first social
 
 NOTES TO LECTURE II 101 
 
 need ; character with its securities in a candid, enlightened, and 
 vigorous conscience, and a strong faith in goodness and in God. 
 The Church owes this duty to all classes alike. Nothing must 
 be allowed to distract her from it, or needlessly to impede or pre- 
 judice her in its discharge, and this requires of the clergy, as 
 spiritual officers, the exercise of great discretion in any attempt to 
 bring within their sphere work of a more distinctively social kind. 
 
 " But while this cannot be too strongly said, it is not the 
 whole truth. Character is influenced at every point by social 
 conditions, and active conscience, in an industrial society, will 
 look for moral guidance on industrial matters. 
 
 " Economic science does not claim to give this, its task being 
 to inform, but not to determine, the conscience and the judgment. 
 But we believe that Christ our Master does give such guidance 
 by His examples and teachings, and by the present workings of 
 His Spirit ; and therefore, under Him, Christian authority must 
 in a measure do the same, the authority, that is, of the whole 
 Christian body, and of an enlightened Christian opinion. This 
 is part of the duty of a Christian society, as witnessing for Christ, 
 and representing Him in this present world, occupied with His 
 work of setting up the kingdom of God, under and amidst the 
 natural conditions of human life." 
 
 NOTE 2, p. 68. 
 
 "Under the protection, generally, though not always effec- 
 tual, of their sacred character, the Prophets were a power in the 
 nation, often more than a match for kings and priests, and kept 
 up, in that little corner of the earth, the antagonism of influences 
 which is the only real security for continued progress. Religion 
 consequently was not there, what it has been in so many other 
 places a consecration of all that was once established, and a 
 barrier against further improvement. The remark of a dis- 
 tinguished Hebrew, M. Salvador, that the Prophets were in 
 Church and State the equivalent of the modern liberty of the
 
 102 THE CHRIST OF ENGLISH POETRY 
 
 press, gives a just but not an adequate conception of the part 
 fulfilled in national and universal history by this great element 
 of Jewish life ; by means of which the canon of inspiration never 
 being complete, the persons most eminent in genius and moral 
 feeling could not only denounce and reprobate with the direct 
 authority of the Almighty whatever appeared to them deserving 
 of such treatment, but could give forth better and higher inter- 
 pretations of the national religion, which thenceforth became part 
 of the religion. Accordingly whoever can divest himself of the 
 habit of reading the Bible as if it was one book, which until 
 lately was equally inveterate in Christians and in unbelievers, sees 
 with admiration the vast interval between the morality and re- 
 ligion of the Pentateuch or even of the historical books (the un- 
 mistakable work of Hebrew conservatives of the sacerdotal order), 
 and the morality and religion of the Prophecies, a distance as 
 wide as between these last and the Gospels. Conditions more 
 favourable to progress could not easily exist ; accordingly the Jews, 
 instead of being stationary like other Asiatics, were, next to the 
 Greeks, the most progressive people of antiquity, and jointly with 
 them have been the starting-point and main propelling agency of 
 modern cultivation " (J. S. Mill, " Representative Government," 
 chap. ii.). 
 
 NOTE 3, p. 70. 
 
 "The value of a truly great man, as I saw it put lately, consists 
 in his increasing the value of all mankind. It is here, truly, that 
 the highest significance of great men lies : to have enhanced, 
 that is, to have progressively given effect to human value to 
 the value of that race of men which has risen up out of the dull 
 ground of Nature. But Jesus Christ was the first to bring the 
 value of every human soul to light, and what He did no one can 
 any more undo. We may take up what relation to Him we will ; 
 in the history of the past no one can refuse to recognise that it 
 was He who raised humanity to this level. This highest esti- 
 mate of a man's value is based on a transvaluation of all values.
 
 NOTES TO LECTURE II 103 
 
 (Eine umwersung der iverthe liegt dieser fiSchsten werth schat- 
 zung zu grunde. German edition, p. 44.) To the man who 
 boasts of his possessions, He says, * Thou fool ! ' He con- 
 fronts every one with the thought : * Whosoever will lose his life 
 shall gain it.' He can even say : ' He that hateth his life in 
 this world shall keep it unto life eternal.' This is the trans- 
 valuation of values of which many before Him had a dim idea ; 
 of which they perceived the truth as through a veil ; the redeem- 
 ing power of which that blessed mystery they felt in advance. 
 He was the first to give it calm, simple, and fearless expression, 
 as though it were a truth that grew on every tree. It was just 
 this that stamped His peculiar genius ; that He gave perfectly 
 simple expression to profound and all-important truths, as though 
 they could not be otherwise ; as though He were uttering 
 something that was self-evident ; as though He were only re- 
 minding them of what they all knew already, because it lives in 
 the innermost part of their souls " (Harnack, " What is Chris- 
 tianity ? " p. 67). 
 
 NOTE 4, p. 71. 
 
 In illustration of this proposition I may perhaps be allowed to 
 quote from a sermon of my own preached in the Cambridge Univer- 
 sity pulpit more than twenty years ago. " It is the contention of 
 those who accept the Christian philosophy of History as the true 
 one, that the struggle for liberty in its various forms, which has 
 in effect been the subject of the civil history of modern Europe 
 since the time of Christ, is directly to be traced to the Christian 
 doctrine of the intrinsic value of the human soul as such. That, 
 it may be said, is a spiritual idea. True, but it is a spiritual idea 
 which easily bears translation into a political one. ' The con- 
 sciousness of freedom,' says the German philosopher Hegel, 
 * arose first in religion, in the inmost region of spirit. It is the 
 freedom of spirit which constitutes its essence. . . . Freedom 
 first arose among the Greeks ; but they and the Romans likewise 
 knew only that some men were free, not man as such. Even
 
 io 4 THE CHRIST OF ENGLISH POETRY 
 
 Plato and Aristotle knew not this. . . . That was an idea 
 which came into the world through Christianity, which recog- 
 nised that the individual as such had an infinite worth.' 
 
 "Can any one doubt, for example, that the institution of slavery, 
 upon which the civil order both of Greece and Rome was econo- 
 mically based, must have been definitely affected by the Christian 
 doctrine of the inherent dignity of human nature, the witness, 
 that is to say, in behalf of that which is essentially spiritual in all 
 men, apart from all accidental distinctions of status or condition ? 
 It is true that the beneficial influence of the Christian Church 
 upon slavery was very slow in its action slavery lasted in Europe 
 down to the thirteenth century yet of the final result there surely 
 could be no doubt, so long as both Christian slave and Christian 
 freeman were equally taught * As many as are led by the 
 Spirit of God, they are the sons of God : ' ' The Spirit beareth 
 witness with our spirit that we are children of God,' ' partakers 
 of the divine nature ; ' < He hath made of one blood all nations 
 of men for to dwell on all the face of the earth. There is no 
 distinction of Jew or Greek, there can be neither bond nor free, 
 for in one Spirit were ye all baptized into one body, whether 
 Jews or Greeks, whether bond or free, and where the Spirit of 
 the Lord is, there is liberty. 1 " 
 
 " Similarly, can we doubt that that conception of family life 
 which in modern times we regard as the surest guarantee for the 
 social happiness and moral progress of man would have been 
 much more difficult of realisation, had not that same Christian 
 principle of equal freedom and individual responsibility succeeded 
 in abolishing the despotism of paternal power, which was the 
 dominant idea in the domestic life of Grasco-Roman civilisation ? 
 Or again, when we remember that social contention among the 
 disciples, which Christ rebuked with the words 'The rulers 
 of the Gentiles have lordship over them ; and they that have 
 authority over them are called benefactors. But ye shall not be 
 so: but he that is greater among you, let him become as the 
 younger ; and he that is chief, as he that doth serve,' does there
 
 NOTES TO LECTURE II 105 
 
 seem anything but what is most consonant with His spirit and 
 with the genius of His religion, in the ready adaptation of the 
 democratic municipal system of the proconsular towns of Asia 
 Minor to the needs of primitive church organisation, or in the 
 adoption of the principle of merit, rather than the principle of 
 birth (which Jewish analogy would have suggested), in the con- 
 stitution of the Christian priesthood, or in the attempt to find a 
 settlement of doctrine by popular appeal, which gave its origin to 
 the earliest ecclesiastical councils r And although it cannot, of 
 course, be denied that much of the early independence of Christian 
 character died away as the democratic tendencies of primitive 
 church polity gradually gave way before the monarchical idea, 
 which was the hereditary instinct of Rome, yet what impartial 
 student of history will deny that in the crisis of the great change, 
 when Roman civilisation was declining before the repeated 
 attacks of the Germanic races, it was the Christian Church 
 which went forth once more ' into that wilderness of the 
 peoples,' and found sympathetic response in Teutonic hearts 
 for a new reading of their own characteristic virtues of liberty 
 and loyalty, which has formed the basis of all that is most stable 
 in the social order of the present ? 
 
 " In the history of our own country, do you forget that the 
 political principle of representation, which is the radical doctrine 
 of true democratic government and remember that the union 
 of the democratic principle with representative government is 
 an entirely modern fact, which throws out of court all interested 
 appeals to the failure of the democratic principle in ancient 
 history is directly to be traced to the action of the Christian 
 Church in England. The Church in this country I sum- 
 marise the eloquent words in which my kinsman, the historian 
 of our constitution, has recounted the early debt of the English 
 nation to the English Church < has been not only the agency 
 by which Christianity was brought to a heathen people, a herald 
 of spiritual blessings and glorious hope in another life ; it has 
 been not merely the tamer of cruel natures, the civiliser of the
 
 rude, the cultivator of the waste places, the educator, the guide, 
 and the protector, whose guardianship was the only safeguard of 
 the woman, the child, and the slave, against the tyranny of their 
 lord and master. The Church has been this in many other 
 countries besides Britain, but here it has been much more. The 
 unity of the Church in England was the pattern of the unity 
 of the State ; the cohesion of the Church was for ages the 
 substitute for the cohesion which the divided nation was unable 
 otherwise to realise. Strong in its own conformation, it was 
 more than a match for the despotic rule of the early kings, and 
 was the guardian of liberties as well as the defence of the 
 oppressed. It was to an extraordinary degree a national Church 
 national in its comprehensiveness as well as its exclusiveness. 
 Englishmen were in their lay aspect Mercians or West-Saxons ; 
 only in their ecclesiastical relations could they feel themselves 
 fellow-countrymen and fellow-subjects. . . . The ecclesiastical 
 and the national spirit thus growing into one another supplied 
 something, at least, of that strong passive power which the 
 Norman despotism was unable to break. The churches were 
 schools and nurses of patriots," depositories of old traditional 
 glories, and the refuge of the persecuted. The English clergy 
 supplied the basis of the strength of Anselm, when the Norman 
 bishops sided with the king. They trained the English people 
 for the time when the kings should court their support and 
 purchase their adherence by the restoration of liberties that 
 would otherwise have been forgotten. The unity of the Church 
 was, in the early period, the only working unity ; and its liberty 
 in the evil days that followed, the only form in which the 
 traditions of the ancient freedom lingered. It was again to be 
 the tie between the conquered and the conquerors ; to give to the 
 oppressed a hold on the conscience of the despot ; to win new 
 liberties, and revive the old ; to incite Norman and Englishman 
 in the resistance to tyrants ; and educate the growing nation for 
 its distant destiny as the teacher and herald of freedom to all the 
 world.'* 
 
 * Stubbs, "Constitutional History," vol. i. p. 245.
 
 NOTES TO LECTURE II 107 
 
 " Nor, again, can we forget that it was at Northampton, in the 
 year 1214, that Stephen Langton, the Archbishop of Canterbury, 
 overtook King John in his futile march against the north-country 
 barons, and endeavoured to persuade him of the justice of those 
 demands for political liberty and self-government which six 
 months later were embodied, under his leadership, in the great 
 charter of liberties signed at Runnymede. And if you remember 
 this, you ought not in justice surely to forget that it was an 
 English Churchman who organised that great national movement 
 for freedom which culminated in the signing of Magna Carta, 
 refusing to separate the liberty of the Church from the liberty of 
 the nation, but upholding that 'the cause of the people was 
 alone worthy to be considered (I use his own phrase) as the cause 
 of God and of the Holy Church.' 
 
 " Nor ought we to forget the influence that was exerted by the 
 Church of Christ in this country as a director of those new 
 forces by which society has gradually been reconstituted on an 
 industrial rather than a military basis ; how, for example, at that 
 time in our history which is known as the Epoch of the Peasant 
 Revolt, when the cultivation of the soil was passing into a new 
 phase under feudal influences, and there seemed no security that 
 the serf might not relapse once more into the condition of the 
 slave, the Church interposed, and not only prevented any such 
 backward tendency, but prepared the way for that complete 
 emancipation of the serf which has resulted in his transformation 
 into the free labourer of modern times ; or how, at a later time, 
 that same influence was exerted in fostering the growth of the 
 early guilds and industrial corporations, which, whatever may 
 have been their subsequent evil effects, were the necessary agents 
 in the creation, at the epoch of the enfranchisement of towns, of 
 that industrial property springing from labour which from that 
 time has had a position in our social system independent of and 
 rivalling that territorial property whose origin and constitution 
 is purely military " (" Christ and Democracy," pp. 6, 56).
 
 io8 THE CHRIST OF ENGLISH POETRY 
 
 NOTE 5, p. 73. 
 
 The " pore priestes," in fact, " honeycombed the mind of the 
 upland folk with what may be called religious socialism. By 
 WyclifPs labours the Englishman had been introduced to the 
 new world of the Old Testament, to the history of the human 
 race, to the primeval garden and the young world, when the first 
 parents of all mankind lived by simple toil, and became the 
 ancestors of the proud noble and knight, as well as of the down- 
 trodden serf and despised burgher. They read of the times when 
 there was no king in Israel, when every man did that which was 
 right in his own eyes, and sat under his own vine and his own 
 fig-tree, none daring to make him afraid. They read how God, 
 through his prophet, had warned Israel of the evils which would 
 come to them when a king should reign over them, and how 
 speedily this was verified in the conduct of the young Rehoboam, 
 with his depraved and foolish councillors, of how woe had been 
 predicted to the people over whom a child should rule. The 
 God of Israel had bade his people be husbandmen and not knights 
 and men at arms. But most of all the preacher would dwell on 
 his own prototype, on the man of God, the wise prophet who 
 denounced kings and princes and high priests, and by God's 
 commission made them like a potter's vessel in the day of his 
 wrath ; or on those bold judges who were zealous even to 
 slaying. For with this book, so old, yet so new, the peasant 
 preacher we are told that many learned to read when they were 
 old that they might tell the Bible story could stir up the souls of 
 these peasants with the true narrative of another people, and 
 would be sure that his way to their hearts and his confidence 
 would be, as it always had been with the leaders of a religious 
 revival, by entirely sympathising with their wrongs, their suffer- 
 ings, and their hopes. And when they told them that the lords 
 had determined to drag them back to their old serfdom, the 
 preacher could discourse to them of the natural equality of men, 
 of the fact that all kings, lords, and priests live by the fruits of
 
 NOTES TO LECTURE II 109 
 
 the earth, and the labour of the husbandmen, and that it would 
 be better for them to die with arms in their hands than to be 
 thrust back, without an effort on their part, into the shameful 
 slavery from which they had been delivered. And as their eyes 
 kindled, and they grasped their staves, he would tell them to 
 keep their ears open for the news of their deliverance, that on 
 the password being given they were at once to hie to the 
 appointed place, when a great work would be done for God's 
 people by his appointed servant " (Professor Rogers, " Work and 
 Wages," p. 254). 
 
 But although, as I have said in my lecture, the essential spirit 
 of Langland's poem is revolutionary in effect, it must not be 
 supposed that it was intended by its author to be actively revolu- 
 tionary. Nowhere in his poem has he the intention to encourage 
 social revolution, or to rouse the flame of rebellion : very much 
 the contrary. But his outspokenness on the vices of the time 
 caught the ear of the populace, and his bold words were seized 
 upon by the popular leaders of the peasant revolt, and perverted 
 into catchwords of revolution. One of the moving spirits of 
 that revolt was a certain John Ball, "a crazy priest of Kent," as 
 he is called by Froissart. The socialistic nature of his teaching 
 is summed up in the quaint lines which he appears to have taken 
 as his text when he addressed the insurgents on Blackheath. 
 
 " When Adam delved and Eve span 
 Who was then the gentleman." 
 
 A remarkable letter by John Ball is extant, written by him 
 to the rebels of the county of iEssex, in which direct allusions to 
 Langland's poem, and the characters of Piers the Plowman, 
 Dowel, and Dobet occur. It runs to this effect : 
 
 " John Schep, som tyme Seynt Marie prest of York, and now 
 of Colchestre, greteth welle Johan Nameles, and Johan the 
 Mullere, and Johan Cartere, and biddeth hem that they ware of 
 gyle of borugh, and stondeth togidder in Goddis name, and 
 biddeth Peres Plowman go to his werke, and chastise well Hobbe
 
 the robber, and taketh with you Johan Trewman, and all his 
 felaws, and no mo, and loke schappe you to on hened, and no mo. 
 
 'Johan the Mullere heth ygrownde smal, smal, smal, 
 The Kyngis sone of Hevene shall paye for alle. 
 Be ware or ye be too, 
 Knoweth your frende, from your foo, 
 Haveth ynowe, and seythe ' Hoo ' ; 
 And do ivel/e and bettre, and fleth synne 
 And seketh pees and holde therynne : ' 
 
 And so biddeth Johan Trewman and alle his fellawes." 
 
 (Cf. Thomas of Walsingham, Historia Angllcana, voL ii. p. 33, 
 Rolls Series.) 
 
 NOTE 6, p. 76. 
 
 "'Piers Ploughman' is the best example I know of what is 
 called popular poetry of compositions, that is, which contain all 
 the simpler elements of poetry, but still in solution, not crystal- 
 lised around any thread of artistic purpose. In it appears at her 
 best the Anglo-Saxon Muse, a first cousin of Poor Richard, full 
 of proverbial wisdom, who always brings her knitting in her 
 pocket, and seems more at home in the chimney-corner. It is 
 genial ; it plants itself firmly on human nature with its rights 
 and wrongs ; it has a surly honesty, prefers the downright to the 
 gracious, and conceives of speech as a tool rather than a musical 
 instrument. If we should seek for a simple word that would 
 define it most precisely, we should not choose simplicity, but 
 homeliness. There is more or less of this in all early poetry, to 
 be sure ; but I think it especially proper to English poets and 
 to the most English among them, like Cowper, Crabbe, and one 
 is tempted to add Wordsworth where he forgets Coleridge's 
 private lectures. In reading such poets as Langland, also, we 
 are not to forget a certain charm of distance in the very language 
 they use, making it unhackneyed without being alien. As it is 
 the chief function of the poet to make the familiar novel, these
 
 NOTES TO LECTURE II in 
 
 fortunate early risers of literature, who gather phrases with the 
 dew still on them, have their poetry done for them, as it were, 
 by their vocabulary " (J. R. Lowell, " My Study Windows," 
 p. 195). 
 
 NOTE 7, p. 82. 
 
 Cf. Note on the " Gifts of Grace," in Lecture on " Cyne- 
 wulf." The whole passage, from which the extract in the 
 lecture is taken, occurs in passus xix. of the B text the " Pro- 
 logue to Dobest " and is as follows : 
 
 " And gave each man a grace to guide himself with, 
 That idleness encumber him not envy nor pride, 
 
 Divistoncs graciarum sunt, etc. 
 
 Some he gave wit with words to show 
 
 Wit to win their livelihood with as the world asketh 
 
 As preachers and priests and prentices of law 
 
 They loyally to live by labour of tongue 
 
 And by wit to make wise others as Grace would them teach. 
 
 And some he learned craft and cunning of sight 
 
 With selling and buying their living to win, 
 
 And some he learned to labour a leal life and a true 
 
 And some he taught to till to ditch and to thatch ; 
 
 And some to divide and divine numbers to know. 
 
 And some to design skilfully and colours to make, 
 
 And some to see and to say what should befall 
 
 Both of weal and of woe tell it as it falls out. 
 
 As astronomers to study astronomy and philosophers wise. 
 
 And some to ride and to recover what unrightfully was won, 
 
 He taught them to win it again through swiftness of hand. 
 
 And to fetch it from false men by force of law. 
 
 And some he learned to live in a longing to go hence 
 
 In poverty and in penance to pray for all Christians. 
 
 And all he learned to be loyal and each craft to love others. 
 
 And forbade them all debate that it should not be among them 
 
 * Though some be cleaner than some see ye well/ said Grace.
 
 ii2 THE CHRIST OF ENGLISH POETRY 
 
 * That he that useth the fairest craft to the foulest I could have 
 
 put him. 
 
 Let all remember,' said Grace ' that grace cometh of my gift. 
 Look that none blame other but love all as brethren, 
 And who that most mastery has or mildest of bearing, 
 And crown Conscience king and make Skill your steward, 
 And after Skill's counsel clothe you and feed. 
 For I make Piers the Plowman my proctor and my reeve, 
 And Register to receive redde quod deles. 
 My prover and my plowman Piers shall be on earth, 
 And to till Truth a team shall he have.' 
 Grace gave Piers a team four great oxen, 
 That one was Luke, a large beast with a low head, 
 And Mark and Matthew the third mighty beasts both, 
 And joined to them one John surpassing all other, 
 And Grace gave Piers of his goodness four stots. 
 All that his oxen ploughed they were to harrow after. 
 One called Austin and Ambrose another, 
 Gregory the Great Clerk and Jerome the good : 
 These four the faith to teach to follow Piers team 
 And harrowed in an handwhile all Holy Scripture 
 With two harrows that they had the Old and the New. 
 Id est vet us testamentum et novum." 
 
 (Lines 222-268.) 
 
 NOTE 8, p. 83. 
 
 We may place beside Langland's picture of "Jesus Christ of 
 Heaven in poor man's apparel" Chaucer's picture of Christ as 
 " the first stock-father of gentillnesse " in the ballad in which he 
 tells of the man who is worthy to be called " gentle." 
 
 " The firste stock, father of gentillnesse 
 
 What man descrieth gentle for to be 
 Must follow his trace, and all his wittes dress 
 
 Virtue to love, and vices for to flee : 
 
 For unto virtue longeth dignitye 
 And not the reverse falsely dare I deem 
 All weare he mitre, crown or diademe.
 
 NOTES TO LECTURE II 113 
 
 The firste stock was full of righteousness ; 
 
 True of his word, sober, piteous and free, 
 Clean of his ghost, and loved busyness 
 
 Against the vice of sloth in honesty ; 
 
 And but his heir love virtue as did he, 
 He is not gentle though he rich seem, 
 All wear he mitre, crown or diademe. 
 
 Vyce may well be heir to old richesse 
 
 But there may no man, as men may well see 
 
 Bequeathe his heir his virtue's noblenesse 
 That is appropried into no degree 
 But to the first father in majestye, 
 
 That maketh his heires whom he deem, 
 
 All wear he mitre, crown or diademe." 
 
 NOTE 9, p. 83. 
 
 Of this concluding part of the poem, Professor Skeat says: 
 " I cannot refrain from adding here my conviction, that there are 
 net many passages in English poetry which are so sublime in 
 their conception as this eighteenth passus. Some of the lines 
 are rudely and quaintly expressed, but there are also many of 
 great beauty and power, and which buoyantly express the glorious 
 triumph of Christ" (Skeat 's Introduction to "The Vision of 
 William concerning Piers the Plowman," 6th ed., Clarendon 
 Press, xxxv.). As an illustration I give the following lines from 
 the conclusion of this passus. I have used the Crowley or B 
 text of the poem, as edited by Professor Skeat for the Early 
 English Text Society, 1869. I have rendered obsolete words in 
 modern English, but have not attempted otherwise to change the 
 structure of the lines. It may serve to give some impression of 
 the general style and character of the poem. 
 
 " mors fro mors tua ! 
 
 Then came Pilatus with much people sedens pro tribunali, 
 To see how doughty Death should do and deem her . . 
 
 H
 
 ii4 THE CHRIST OF ENGLISH POETRY 
 
 The Jews and the Justice against Jesus they were 
 
 And all their court cried on Him Crucifige sharpe ; 
 
 Then stood him forth a robber ; before Pilate, and said 
 
 This Jesus japed and despised at our Jewish temple 
 
 To destroy it on a day and in three days after 
 
 To buiid it up again (here he stands that said it) 
 
 And yet maken it as much in all manner of points 
 
 Both as long and as large aloft and on ground. 
 
 ' CrucifigeJ quoth a catchpoll, I warrant Him a witch. 
 
 ' Tol/e, to/if,' quoth another and took of keen thorns, 
 
 And began of keen thorns a garland to make, 
 
 And set it sore on His head and said in envy 
 
 A-ve Rabbi ! ' quoth that ribald and threw reeds at Him, 
 
 Nailed Him with three nails naked on the Rood, 
 
 And poison on a pole they put up to His lips 
 
 And bade Him drink His death-ill, His days being done. 
 
 ' If that Thou be skilfull save now Thyself. 
 
 If Thou be Christ and King's son come down from the rood 
 
 Then shall we leave Thee that life Thou lovest and will not let 
 
 Thee die.' 
 
 ' Consummatum est ' quoth Christ, and began for to swoon 
 Piteously and pale like a prisoner that dyeth, 
 The Lord of life and of light then closed His eyes together. 
 The Day for dread withdrew and dark became the sun. 
 The wall trembled and cleft in twain and all the world shook 
 Dead men because of that din came out of deep graves 
 And told why that tempest so long time endured. 
 * For a bitter battle ' the dead body said 
 ' Life and death in this darkness the one destroys the other 
 Shall no man know truly who shall have the mastery 
 Before Sunday about sun rising/ and sank with that to earth. 
 Some said that He was God's son who died so fair 
 
 Verejifius de't erat iste. 
 
 And some said He was a witch ' good is it that we try 
 Whether He be dead or not dead ere He be taken down.' 
 Two thieves also suffered death that time 
 Upon a cross beside Christ so was the common law.
 
 NOTES TO LECTURE II 115 
 
 A catchpole came forth and cracked both their legs, 
 
 And their arms after of both the thieves, 
 
 And was no boy so bold God's body to touch, 
 
 For He was knight and king's son nature forgave that time 
 
 That no harlot were so hardy to lay hands upon Him. 
 
 But there came forth a knight with a keen spear in rest, 
 
 Named Longeus, as the letter telleth and long had lost his sight. 
 
 Before Pilate and other people in the place he waited about, 
 
 In spite of his many words he was made that time 
 
 To take the spear in his hand and joust with Jesus 
 
 For all the rest were unbold who waited on horse or afoot 
 
 To touch or to handle Him or take Him down from the Rood 
 
 But this blind bachelor then pierced Him through the heart 
 
 The blood sprang down by the spear and unfastened the knight's eyes. 
 
 Then fell the knight upon his knees and cried for mercy. 
 
 'Against my will it was, Lord to wound Thee so sore' 
 
 He sighed and said ' sore it me athinketh, 
 
 For the deed that I have done I place me in your grace, 
 
 Have on me pity, O just Jesus ! ' and right with that he wept. 
 
 Then began Faith the false Jews to upbraid 
 
 To call them caitiffs accursed for ever 
 
 For this foul villainy vengeance to you all 
 
 To do this blind deed on Him ybound it was a boy's counsel 
 
 Cursed caitiff- knighthood was it never 
 
 To misdo a dead body by day or by night 
 
 The prize hath he gotten for all his great wound. 
 
 For your champion chevalier chief knight of you all 
 
 Hath yielded himself recreant right to Jesus' will 
 
 For because of this darkness his death is avenged 
 
 And ye lordlings have been worsted for life shall have the mastery 
 
 And your franchise which was free hath fallen into thraldom, 
 
 And you, churls and your children, thrive shall you never 
 
 Nor have lordship in land, nor land to till 
 
 But all barren be and live only by usury, 
 
 Which is a life that our Lord in all laws accurseth. 
 
 Now your good days are done as Daniel prophesieth 
 
 When Christ came * of her kingdom the crown should cease.' 
 
 * Cum veniat sanctus sanctorum, cessablt unx'io vcsira.' '
 
 Then follows a scene in which Mercy and Truth, and 
 Righteousness and Peace, are represented discoursing together 
 in the darkness on the scheme of redemption, and wondering as 
 to the light which is seen burning afar off about the gates of 
 hell. Then once more, with rapid transition, the poet carries us 
 away to listen to the dialogue between the powers of darkness 
 and the victorious Saviour, who demands admission to the 
 infernal dungeon. Satan, Lucifer, and their peers vainly resist 
 His voice, but the gates of hell may not prevail against Him, and 
 amid the triumphant chorus, " Undo the gates that the Lord of 
 might and main and all manner of virtue, the King's Son of 
 Heaven, may come in," the gates are broken, and Christ 
 descends into hell, offers soul for soul, life for life, death for 
 death, and claims His own, binds Satan with chains, and brings 
 forth the souls of them whom He liked and listed. And so the 
 poem comes to an end. 
 
 " Many hundreds of angels harped and sang 
 
 Cutyat caro, pur gat caro ; regnat deus del caro. 
 Then piped Peace of Poetry a note, 
 
 ' Clarior est solito post maxima nebula phrbus, 
 
 Post inimicitias clarior est et amor,' 
 
 ' After sharp showers,' saith Peace, ' most sheen is the sun, 
 Is no weather warmer than after watery clouds ; 
 Nor no love dearer nor dearer friendship, 
 Than after war and wo when Love and Peace be masters. 
 Was never war in this world nor wickedness, so keen, 
 That love and his desire did not bring them to laughing, 
 For Peace, through Patience, will all peril stop.' 
 * True it is,' said Truth, ' thou tellest truth, by Jesu, 
 Embrace we in covenant, and let each kiss the other.' 
 ' And Jet no people,' said Peace, ' perceive that we chide, 
 For impossible is nothing to Him that is Almighty.' 
 ' Thou sayeth truth,' said Righteousness, and reverently her kissed. 
 Peace and Peace here ! per s ecu/a seculorum. 
 Misericordia et vcritas obvaverunt sib't, 
 
 Justicia et pax osculati sunt.
 
 NOTES TO LECTURE II 117 
 
 Truth blew her trumpet and sang te dcum laudamus, 
 And then luted Love in a loud note, 
 
 Ecce quam bonum, et quam jocundum, etc. 
 Till the day dawned these damsels danced, 
 And men rang the Easter bells and right with that I \vaked, 
 And called Kit my wife, and Kalote my daughter, 
 * Arise ye and reverence God's Resurrection, 
 And creep to the Cross on knees and kiss it for a jewel ! 
 For God's blessed body it was pierced for our good, 
 And it frighteth the evil one for such is its might. 
 May no grisly ghost glide where it shadoweth.' ' : 
 
 NOTE 10, p. 89. 
 
 " Nothing can illustrate more vividly the universality of the 
 forces which in the fourteenth century were undermining the 
 fabric of the mediaeval European order than the fundamental 
 likeness between l The Divine Comedy ' and ' The Vision of 
 Piers Plowman.' On a superficial view, indeed, many features 
 in the two poems stand out in vivid contrast. Writing half a 
 century after the death of Dante, there is nothing to show that 
 Langland had read or even heard of the work of his great 
 predecessor. That work, with its sharp, clear-cut, and precise 
 forms, with its consta it allusions to particular places, persons, and 
 events, offers as clear a mirror of Italian city life as the l Vision 
 of Piers Plowman,' so crowded with scenes of generic painting, 
 so free from individual names and details, affords of the semi- 
 barbarous society of feudal England. No less striking is the 
 contrast between the persons of the two poets ; the Florentine 
 of noble birth, deeply versed in all the art and science of his age, 
 experienced in civil affairs, master of a beautiful and harmonious 
 form of verse ; the Englishman, the descendant perhaps of small 
 landowners, bred in the monastic school, the observer of ditchers, 
 hucksters, and cut-purses in country lanes and London ale-houses, 
 using as his poetical instrument the rude alliterative measure long 
 neglected even by the Saxon minstrel.
 
 n8 THE CHRIST OF ENGLISH POETRY 
 
 " For all this, the two men find themselves face to face with the 
 same social diseases ; and the ideal remedy for these evils, which 
 each suggests, proceeds from a similar method of imaginative 
 reasoning. Both held that the corruptions of their time arose 
 out of the confusion between the temporal and spiritual powers ; 
 both conceived that it was the duty of Church and State to 
 pursue their separate objects in the closest alliance ; each was 
 a firm upholder of the monarchical principle ; each believed 
 that the true image of social order was revealed in the doctrines 
 of the Catholic Church. The divergence between their ideas 
 was due to a difference in the local circumstances to which the 
 ideas had to be applied " (Courthope, " History of English 
 Poetry," vol. i. p. 226). 
 
 There are many similarities of detail between the two poems, 
 however, which, although they are doubtless, as Mr. Courthope 
 implies, merely the result of similarity of aim and mood in the 
 two poets, are curious to notice. The dialogues between Piers 
 Plowman and Holy Church continually seem to echo the dialogue 
 of Dante and Virgil. Dante, like the hero of Langland's poem, 
 meets the seven deadly sins : he wakes and sleeps again, he 
 dreams new dreams: he sees a mystical representation of the 
 Gospel story. Both poets accept the legend that Trajan was 
 saved : both refuse to admit that the heroes of the classic world 
 were indiscriminately cast into hell. Socrates, Plato, Aristotle, 
 " the master of them that know," " hawk-eyed Caesar," Horace, 
 Ovid, Lucan, are placed by Dante in the first circle of Limbo. 
 Langland also protests against the idea of Aristotle being damned. 
 
 " For Solomon the sage that sapience taught 
 God gave him grace of wit, and all his good after 
 He deemed well and wisely, as holy writ telleth. 
 Aristotle and he, who taught men better ? 
 Masters they of God's mercy, to teach men and preach 
 Of their words they taught us, the wisest of their time, 
 And doth all Holy Church hold them both ydamned?"
 
 NOTES TO LECTURE II 119 
 
 And so also in the English poem Trajan tells how he was 
 released from hell by grace of God, and as he says 
 
 " Withouten any bede-bidding his boon was received 
 And I saved, as ye may say, without singing of masses, 
 By love and by learning of my living in truth. 
 
 Well ought ye lords, that laws keep, this lesson to have in mind 
 And on Trajan's truth to think, and do truth to the people." 
 
 "Vision of Piers," B text, passus xi. 144. 
 
 NOTE n, p. 92. 
 
 "This extraordinary manifestation of the religion, of the 
 language, of the social and political notions, of the English char- 
 acter, of the condition, of the passions and feelings of rural and 
 provincial England, commences, and with Chaucer and Wycliffe 
 completes the revelation of this transition period, the reign of 
 Edward III. Throughout its institutions, language, religious 
 sentiment, Teutonism is now holding its first initiatory struggle 
 with Latin Christianity. In Chaucer is heard a voice from the 
 court, from the castle, from the city, from universal England. 
 The orders of society live in his verse, with the truth and 
 individuality of individual being, yet each a type of every rank, 
 class, every religious and social condition and pursuit. And there 
 can be no doubt that his is a voice of freedom, of more or less 
 covert hostility to the hierarchical system, though more playful, 
 and with a poet's genial appreciation of all which was true, 
 healthful, and beautiful in the old faith. In Wycliffe is heard a 
 voice from the university, from the seat of theology and scholastic 
 philosophy, from the centre and stronghold of the hierarchy ; a 
 voice of revolt and defiance, taken up and echoed in the pulpits 
 throughout the land, against the sacerdotal domination. In the 
 * Vision of Piers Plowman ' is heard a voice from the wild Malvern 
 Hills, the voice it should seem of an humble parson, or secular 
 priest. . . . The poet is no dreamy, speculative theologian ; he
 
 120 THE CHRIST OF ENGLISH POETRY 
 
 acquiesces seemingly with unquestioning faith in the Creed and 
 the usages of the Church. ... It is in his intense absorbing 
 moral feeling that he is beyond his age : with him outward 
 observances are but hollow shows, mockeries, hypocrisies, without 
 the inward power of religion. It is not so much in his keen, 
 cutting satire on all matters of the Church as in his solemn 
 installation of Reason and Conscience as the guides of the self- 
 directed soul, that he is breaking the yoke of sacerdotal domina- 
 tion ; in his constant appeal to the plainest, simplest scriptural 
 truths, as in themselves the whole of religion, he is a stern 
 reformer " (Dean Milman, " Latin Christianity," book xiv. 
 chapter vii.).
 
 LECTURE III 
 SHAKESPEARE
 
 " Others abide our question. Thou art free. 
 
 We ask and ask thou smilest and art still, 
 
 Out-topping knowledge. For the loftiest hill, 
 Who to the stars uncrowns his majesty, 
 Planting his steadfast footsteps in the sea, 
 
 Making the heaven of heavens his dwelling-place, 
 
 Spares but the cloudy border of his base, 
 To the foiled searching of mortality ; 
 And thou, who didst the stars and sunbeams know, 
 
 Self-school'd, self-scann'd, self-honour'd, self-secure, 
 Didst tread on earth unguessed at Better so ! 
 
 All pains the immortal spirit must endure, 
 All weakness which impairs, all griefs which bow, 
 Find their sole speech in that victorious brow." 
 
 MATTHEW ARNOLD.
 
 LECTURE III 
 
 SHAKESPEARE 
 
 " My beloved had withdrawn Himself , and was gone. . . . I sought Him 
 but I could not find Htm ; I called Him but He gave me no answer." 
 
 CANTICLES v. 6. 
 
 " // is the Spirit that bearetb witness, because the Spirit is Truth." 
 
 i JOHN v. 6. 
 
 THE witness of the poetry of the Renaissance to the spirit 
 of Christianity, if not directly to the personality of Jesus 
 Christ, ought to be found, one would suppose, in the 
 literature of sixteenth-century England. And yet I am 
 sure that in naming Shakespeare as the representative 
 of that witness you will think that my choice of subject 
 to-day needs some justification. 
 
 Shakespeare was undeniably the. most potent voice, 
 the most expressive voice, of Elizabethan England, the 
 poet most representative of that mental exaltation of the 
 English people, which had been aroused by the great 
 events of those most spacious times. 1 But it would be 
 quite natural to doubt whether Shakespeare was the best 
 representative, among the poets of his time, of the religion 
 of England. 
 
 I have said in a former lecture quoting in effect a 
 well-known passage in Shelley's "Defence of Poetry" 
 
 123
 
 124 THE CHRIST OF ENGLISH POETRY 
 
 that " the poets even more than the theologians are the 
 representative men of their own age, the most prophetic 
 men of their own time." Yet I can quite understand 
 that, when I propose to take Shakespeare as England's 
 representative poet for my purpose to-day, some such 
 objections as these should be put to me. 
 
 Can you speak, even in the Shelley sense, of Shake- 
 speare as a national prophet ? Can you speak, indeed, 
 in any representative sense at all, of Shakespeare as even 
 a religious man, a good man ? It is true, of course, we 
 are well aware, that in the plays of Shakespeare there is 
 much allusion to religious institutions and to religious 
 traditions. Prominent among his dramatis person* are 
 the official representatives of religion monks and friars, 
 bishops and cardinals. In his poetry there is even mention 
 of saints, although none, at least of the male sex, are ever 
 presented to us in person. Biblical ideas, biblical phrases 
 are quite common, for Shakespeare certainly knew his 
 Bible. It did not need the book of painful quotation by 
 Bishop Wordsworth of St. Andrews to prove that. Any 
 pupil of the Stratford Grammar School of his day, would 
 probably show a similar familiarity with the words of 
 Scripture. But there is no real sense of religion in all 
 this, no expression at anyrate of any deep personal religious 
 conviction. Shakespeare does not even put the expression 
 of such conviction into the mouths of his characters. His 
 clergy, for example, if they have any wisdom at all, have 
 an earthly, not a spiritual wisdom. Friar Lawrence culls 
 his herbs like a more benevolent Medea. Cardinal 
 Wolsey flings away ambition with a profoundly Pagan 
 despair. Juliet goes to shrift, it is true, but it is to
 
 SHAKESPEARE 125 
 
 arrange her love affairs. Ophelia ought to go to a 
 nunnery to forget hers. Hamlet sees a true ghost the 
 representative apparently of hidden ultimate power, a 
 messenger of divine justice but he is so little Christian 
 that shortly after he is ready to die with a sacred duty 
 still consciously undone. And so on, and so on. 
 
 Now, in answer to objections such as these, let me 
 say this. 
 
 And in the first place let me read to you this passage 
 from a thoughtful writer of the last generation : 
 
 "If," says the late Mr. Walter Bagehot 2 "if the 
 underlying and almighty essence of this world be good, 
 then it is likely that the writer who most deeply ap- 
 proached to that essence will be himself good. There is 
 a religion of week-days as well as of Sundays, of ' cakes 
 and ale ' ^ as well as of pews and altar-cloths. This 
 England lay before Shakespeare as it lies before us all, 
 with its green fields and its long hedgerows, and its 
 many trees, and its great towns and its endless hamlets, 
 and its motley society, and its long history and its bold 
 exploits, and its gathering power, and he saw that they 
 were good. To him, perhaps, more than any one else, has 
 it been given to see that they were a great unity, a great 
 religious object ; that if you could only descend to the 
 inner life, to the deep things, to the secret principles of 
 its noble vigour, to the essence of character, to what we 
 know of Hamlet and seem to fancy of Ophelia, we might, 
 so far as we are capable of so doing, understand the 
 nature which God has made. Let us then think of him, 
 
 * " Twelfth Night," iii. 2.
 
 126 THE CHRIST OF ENGLISH POETRY 
 
 not as a teacher of dry dogmas, or a sayer of hard sayings, 
 
 but as 
 
 * A priest to us all 
 Of the wonder and bloom of the world ' * 
 
 a teacher of the hearts of men and women : one from 
 whom may be learned something of that inmost principle 
 that ever modulates 
 
 * With murmurs of the air, 
 And motions of the forest and the sea, 
 And voice of living beings, and woven hymns 
 Of night and day and the deep heart of man.' " f 
 
 Mr. Bagehot, I think, is right. Shakespeare was not 
 a prophet or a preacher, of course, in the ordinary sense, 
 but perhaps he was something better and higher. He 
 rises above mere morals, and preaches to us, prophesies 
 to us, of life. He gives us men and women to know, 
 instead of maxims or proverbs. 
 
 The Gospel of Jesus Christ, remember, is not theo- 
 logy only, not morality only, but the story of a Person- 
 ality, of a Life ; of a Personality and a Life in which 
 all men can see the perfection of human character, the 
 divinity of forgiveness, of perpetual mercy, of constant 
 patience, of everlasting gentleness, the stainless purity of 
 thought and motive, the clear-sighted perception of a 
 soul of goodness even in things evil, the unfailing sense 
 of the equal providence of justice, the royalty of witness 
 to the sovereignty of truth. Now is there any pro- 
 phet of our modern dispensation who knew these things 
 
 * Matthew Arnold, "Youth of Nature." 
 t Shelley, " Alastor."
 
 SHAKESPEARE 127 
 
 better, or could prophesy of them more vividly through 
 life, through " words made flesh," than did Shakespeare ? 
 
 In an evil day too, remember, Shakespeare prophesied ; 
 he taught the most gracious and gentle precepts too 
 good, I fancy, almost to have been listened to if men had 
 quite known what they were receiving. There are some 
 things in Shakespeare I almost think that he might have 
 been burnt for had he been a theologian, just as certainly 
 that there are things about politics, about civil liberty, 
 which, had he been a politician, would have brought him 
 to the block. 
 
 But God made him a player, and neither of these 
 other things. And so he could teach a message to his 
 age which it much needed lessons of peace, gentleness, 
 mercy, patience, long-suffering, tolerance. Shakespeare 
 was no priest, it is true ; he waved no censer, yet who 
 can tell, when we consider the thousands of souls who 
 have learnt the lessons of Shakespeare, how much he 
 has done to humanise, and therefore to Christianise, man- 
 kind ? His doctrine may not be preached to men in set 
 dogma and maxim. It may rather perhaps distil as dew. 
 Yet many a man who has read the " Merchant of Venice," 
 or pondered over that sad drama of a sinful soul in 
 " Macbeth," or in " King Lear," has been startled and 
 terrified at the thought that the folly of the king and the 
 ingratitude of his daughters are no mere accidents in 
 an evil world ; or who has watched in " Hamlet " that 
 terrible attempt of the wicked king to pray ; or who in 
 " Measure for Measure " has grasped the key to that 
 marvellously sad, but most moral story, in the lines 
 
 " He who the sword of Heaven would bear 
 Must be holv as severe"
 
 128 THE CHRIST OF ENGLISH POETRY 
 
 has heard sermons more conscience-piercing probably than 
 any homilies of the pulpit, lessons, I venture to think, as 
 poignant and as tender as any that have fallen on the 
 world since the days of the apostles. 3 
 
 There is, moreover, a further consideration which I 
 would venture to advance in answer to those who find it 
 difficult to accept Shakespeare as in any sense a fair 
 representative of the religious attitude of Elizabethan 
 Englishmen towards Christ and Christianity. And it is 
 this : I will put it in the form of a question to the students 
 of Elizabethan Church history; I may take it for granted 
 that such student will be familiar with the distinctive notes 
 of modern English Churchmanship (i) the personal 
 devotion of the individual soul to Jesus Christ as the 
 central object of worship and as the central motive of 
 Deity; (2) the sober standard of Christian character as 
 governed by a traditional and religious reverence for the 
 heroes of faith, the saints of God ; (3) the ideal life of a 
 faith which can only be lived in its fulness in a society 
 in a Church, of which Christ is the only and the immor- 
 tal Head ; and I will ask such student where, in the 
 writings of the prominent theologians of the sixteenth 
 century in England, do you find the expression of these 
 distinctive notes ? 
 
 You will, I think, find them with difficulty. In the 
 opening scenes of the Reformation drama you will, it is 
 true, find them in the sayings of men like Dean Colet 
 and Grocyn, like Sir Thomas More and Erasmus. 
 
 " Gracious God ! " exclaims Colet in one of his 
 sermons, " here may one perceive how clean and how
 
 SHAKESPEARE 129 
 
 pure he that professes Christ ought to be ; how inwardly 
 and thoroughly washed ; how white, how shining, how 
 utterly without blemish and spot : in fine, how perfected 
 and fitted, according to his measure, with Christ Him- 
 self." You will find also the symbol of this personal de- 
 votion to Christ in the image of " the child Jesus " which 
 the Dean caused to be placed in his S. Paul's School over 
 the headmaster's desk, with the motto, " Hear ye Him ! " 
 You will find more than a hint of the same distinctive 
 note in such words as these of Erasmus : " If the foot- 
 prints of Christ are anywhere shown to us, we kneel down 
 and adore. Why do we not rather venerate the living 
 and breathing picture of Him in these books (of His 
 Gospel) ? If the vesture of Christ be exhibited, where 
 will we not go to kiss it ? Yet were His whole wardrobe 
 exhibited, nothing could represent Christ more vividly 
 and truly than these evangelical writings. Statues of 
 wood and stone we decorate with gold and gems for the 
 love of Christ. They only profess to give us the form 
 of His body ; these books present us with a living image 
 of His most holy mind. Were we to have seen Him 
 with our own eyes, we should not have so intimate a 
 knowledge as they give of Christ speaking, healing, 
 dying, rising again, as it were, in our own actual pre- 
 sence. . . . The sun itself is not more common and 
 open to all than the teaching of Christ. ..." The mys- 
 teries of kings it may be safe to conceal, but Christ 
 wished His mysteries to be published as openly as pos- 
 sible. ... I wish that even the weakest woman should 
 read the Gospels. ... I long that the husbandman 
 should sing portions of them as he follows the plough ;
 
 130 THE CHRIST OF ENGLISH POETRY 
 
 that the weaver should hum them to the tune of his 
 shuttle ; that the traveller should beguile with their 
 stories the tedium of his journey." 
 
 And you will find the same distinctive spirit shining 
 forth again half a century later, when the polemics in 
 the early Reformation period are somewhat abating their 
 fury, in the " Devotions " of the saintly Bishop Andrews, 
 and later again, and more completely, in the " Temple " 
 of George Herbert, in such words as these : 
 
 " Lord, when the sense of Thy sweet grace 
 Sends up my soul to seek Thy face, 
 Thy blessed eyes breed such desire, 
 I die in Love's delicious fire. 
 O Love, I am Thy sacrifice : 
 Be still triumphant, blessed eyes ! 
 Still shine on me, fair suns, that I 
 Still may behold, though still I die. 
 
 For while Thou sweetly slayest me, 
 Dead to myself I live in Thee." 
 
 But in the intervening years you will find the expression 
 of the same spirit with difficulty in the writings of the 
 protagonists of the English Reformation settlement 
 Parker, Jewel, Grindal, Whitgift, or even Hooker. 
 " My beloved hath withdrawn Himself and is gone. . . . 
 I sought Him, but I could not find Him. I called Him, 
 but He gave me no answer." 
 
 Why is this ? Because, surely, in the first place, the 
 natural outcome of an age of religious controversy is the 
 decay of reverence and of godly fear. When the deepest 
 mysteries of the faith become the subject of theological 
 contention, are debated, as it were, at every street corner ;
 
 SHAKESPEARE 131 
 
 when Church life comes to mean the balance of parties, 
 compromises this way and that according to the exigencies 
 of times and seasons ; when even the greatest intellect, 
 the most philosophic thinker of the Reformed English 
 Church is driven to public and unseemly dispute with 
 his afternoon lecturer at the Temple Church, so that, in 
 Fuller's phrase, " the pulpit spake pure Canterbury in 
 the morning and Geneva in the afternoon," and only 
 recovers spirituality, and that large good sense which 
 is the special greatness of his " Ecclesiastical Polity," 
 by retreat to the solitude of a country parsonage ; it 
 is not to be wondered at that the object of such 
 ceaseless and embittered theological disputing should 
 cease to be an object of worship. The Spirit of Christ 
 does not long abide with the spirit of contention. For in 
 the strife of party and school even theologians are apt to 
 forget the calm and generous presence of Him who is the 
 Head and the Heart of the Church. And, undoubtedly, 
 the official theology of Elizabethan England does appear 
 to be based upon a Christianity from which the Person- 
 ality of Christ Himself seems to have almost vanished. 4 
 
 Is it surprising, therefore, that Shakespeare, who, 
 though he was a poet, was by profession a play-actor 
 and not a theologian, should prefer to stand aloof from 
 such religion ? From what we know of him as a man, 
 it is likely, I think, that he would do that. To be 
 religious in his day had already begun to mean to be 
 puritanical ; and he had an objection, I fancy, to grim 
 people. Anyway, he would have enjoyed the society of 
 Mercutio certainly far better than that of the afternoon
 
 132 
 
 lecturer at the Temple Church. I suspect that " Via, 
 Goodman Dull ! " would have been his probable feeling 
 at the advent of Mr. Travers, though he was far too 
 gentle a soul, of course, to have put that greeting into 
 words. " We have lookt so long," said even puritan 
 John Milton, " at the blaze that Zwinglius and Calvin 
 have beaconed to us that we have become stark-blind." 
 And Shakespeare certainly was already, as an artist, 
 " stark-blind " to the things of Puritan religion on its 
 narrower and official side. He could know nothing, of 
 course, as Milton did afterwards, of the grandeur of 
 Puritanism, of its invigorating virtues, of its ennobling 
 life, of its stern morality, of its high seriousness, of its 
 intense conviction of the omnipotence of God and the 
 littleness of man. For Shakespeare was steeped in the 
 spirit of the Renaissance. He was, indeed, as much the 
 central figure of English Renaissance as Leonardo da 
 Vinci was of Italian. The passionate and romantic 
 embroideries of life, its beauty and its charm, which it 
 was the delight of a Renaissance poet to trace, would 
 to Shakespeare seem to have nothing to do with those 
 painful controversies and contentions which made the 
 temper of the Puritan so acrid and so sad. In the 
 divorce, therefore, between the fulness of life, which is 
 the distinctive note of the Renaissance, and the depth 
 and unity of faith which is the distinctive note of the 
 Reformation, there could be little doubt as to which side 
 a man of imagination instinctively would attach himself. 
 It is not wonderful, therefore, I think, that religion, 
 in the popular sense, should not have been congenial to 
 Shakespeare's mind, and, in the narrower and official
 
 SHAKESPEARE 133 
 
 sense, should have been practically overlooked in his 
 plays, which are accordingly confined to a representation 
 of life in its purely secular aspect. At the same time 
 I think it is fair to say that, if the Christian in Shake- 
 speare was not the real man, we should have expected, 
 at least, that the Pagan would have spoken more frankly. 
 And certainly, apart from this, the purity and high 
 tone of Shakespeare as compared with his contemporary 
 dramatists would be little short of marvellous. 5 
 
 But whatever may have been Shakespeare's relations 
 with the official religion of his day, religion in its deepest 
 sense is never absent from his world. 
 
 " There's a divinity doth shape our ends, 
 Rough-hew them how we will " 
 
 is of the very essence of his creed. But the Divinity 
 is the Divinity of moral law, supreme throughout the 
 universe. The ultimate power, in fact, in his tragic 
 world is the power of moral order. That supremacy 
 is acknowledged by Shakespeare in the minutest as 
 well as in the greatest concerns of human life. The 
 faithful witness of conscience, " the dagger of the 
 mind," an actual sense of sin, an actual need for right- 
 eousness conceived as belonging to the inner self of 
 each human being, self-mastery, justice, fraternity, 
 courtesy, constancy these are all prime elements in the 
 ideal human character as interpreted by Shakespeare. 
 Character, indeed, with him is the one thing which 
 is eternal. It is character, not circumstance, which de- 
 termines destiny. No inexorable Fate broods over the
 
 134 THE CHRIST OF ENGLISH POETRY 
 
 actions of men and women in Shakespeare's plays as in 
 the great tragedies of ancient Greece. The only fatality 
 which rules in Shakespearean drama is the fatality of 
 character, and even then it is a fatality which is entirely 
 consonant with the freedom of the human will. A 
 single act, the act of a single day, the act of a single 
 hour, may fix the fate of an entire life, but in that day 
 or hour the man was free, and the sole arbiter of his 
 own destiny. 
 
 The drama of Shakespeare, in one word, is the 
 drama of individuality. 
 
 And it is just here in his interpretation of the prin- 
 ciple of individuality, of individual freedom, which is, 
 of course, directly traceable to the Christian doctrine of 
 the intrinsic value of the human soul as such, and which 
 also is the idee mtre of our modern civilisation, that 
 Shakespeare becomes the prophet of Christian truth 
 to his age, and a witness, therefore, to Christ and 
 Christianity. 
 
 Those of you who may be familiar with the writings 
 of the Italian reformer Mazzini, may perhaps remember 
 how powerfully, in his essay on the Historical Drama 
 (published almost a century ago in the Antologia of 
 Florence), he has commented on this conception of 
 Shakespeare as the prophet of his epoch, the interpreter 
 of that religious principle which has proved itself the 
 mother idea ruling the social development of modern 
 England up to our own day. 6 
 
 "Starting," Mazzini said, "from a conception of 
 human life founded upon human individuality alone,
 
 SHAKESPEARE 135 
 
 it was impossible that man should reach the idea of 
 God as the supreme Educator of Humanity." For the 
 life of humanity, in his thought, was the incarnation of 
 a Divine idea of social perfectibility. That life was 
 built up like those Eastern pyramids of which we read, 
 to which each passing traveller added a stone. Each 
 man, each people, each age, had its own special gift 
 with which to enrich the patrimony of the race. From 
 labour to labour, from belief to belief, the design of 
 God was gradually being worked out. It was, however, 
 his contention, that when the vital principle of any age 
 had attained its fullest development and become identified 
 with the progress of civilisation, it gave way to another 
 more in accordance with the wants of the age, one more 
 fitted to guide mankind through a further stage of pro- 
 gress. The centre of faith was thus always moving one 
 degree onwards. The intellectual hypothesis of one 
 age became the practical principle of the next. But 
 that principle was only then verified in men's actions 
 when a new hypothesis was dawning upon their thoughts. 
 Each age had its own dogma to propound, but the prin- 
 ciple involved in that dogma was not reduced finally 
 to practice until the human intellect was already absorbed 
 with the thought of its successor. It was by the light 
 of the coming dogma that men were enabled practically 
 to execute the duties commanded by the dogma of the 
 foregone age. 
 
 Thus, for example, the principle of individuality 
 which was, in Mazzini's idea, the intellectual hypothesis 
 of the pre-Reformation age, has been in effect the work- 
 ing principle of the post-Reformation centuries. Alike,
 
 136 THE CHRIST OF ENGLISH POETRY 
 
 that is to say, in the two great transformations of society, 
 the one spiritual and ecclesiastical, the other economic 
 and industrial, which belong respectively to the sixteenth 
 and the eighteenth centuries, has that principle been the 
 systematic organ of emancipation. But it has equally 
 been the chief directing force of the development of 
 national character. And I cannot help thinking that 
 Mazzini is right when he contends, that if you would 
 learn the secret of that development, you can find it 
 nowhere in English literature more clearly indicated 
 than in the dramas of Shakespeare. 
 
 The dramas of Shakespeare, in fact, have summed 
 up and expressed for Englishmen the great emancipat- 
 ing forces which have moulded the national character 
 more completely than could have been done by the 
 greatest historian. Shakespeare, it may be truly said, 
 came into the world to teach this one truth above all 
 others, a truth of the profoundest social import, a truth 
 which needed telling that every man and woman born 
 into the world differs from every other man and woman. 
 He was, in fact, the prophet of individuality. He took 
 the individual human soul for his province ; and that 
 civilised human soul, which hitherto had been only 
 systematically studied in the confessional, became for 
 Shakespeare the very woof and warp of that dramatic 
 canvas upon which his emancipated art revealed to the 
 world sub specie tettmitatis the inner secrets of human 
 nature. In his dramatic exposition of human life the 
 individual is everything to Shakespeare. In the art of 
 depicting individual character he is without a rival. 
 He does not laboriously copy, he casts the whole in
 
 SHAKESPEARE 137 
 
 a single mould. He does not evoke, he creates. His 
 personages live and move as if they had just come forth 
 from the hand of God. The human being in Shake- 
 speare is not defined by its most prominent faculty, nor 
 is life defined by its most potent manifestation. The 
 beings themselves life itself are brought before us in 
 his piays with a reality, with a truth, with a perfec- 
 tion, the highest, I suppose, ever attained by man. It is 
 true that we do not find in Shakespeare any conscious- 
 ness of the fact that in thus emphasising in his method 
 of dramatic portraiture this principle of individuality 
 which, by the way, has been the strong point of English 
 art ever since he was also emphasising the inspiring 
 motive of the social evolution of the English nation 
 during the next three centuries. The liberty of the 
 individual man to be himself individual liberty as the 
 one condition of individual development, this was suffi- 
 cient for Shakespeare. It did not apparently occur to 
 him to work out the principle in relation to social evolu- 
 tion in relation, for example, to practical politics. That 
 was to be the combined problem of eighteenth-century 
 Rationalism and of early nineteenth-century Romanticism. 
 Indeed, it has been argued by some critics, from cer- 
 tain indications in the plays (the Jack Cade scenes, for 
 example, in " 2 Henry VI. "), that Shakespeare had no 
 sympathy \vith political liberty or with democratic ideas : 
 had, indeed, a very wholesome disdain of the many- 
 headed monster. 7 And it is true, no doubt, that Shake- 
 speare was not a modern democrat. But it was equally 
 true that there was not a modern democracy in " the 
 spacious days of great Elizabeth." In the Tudor
 
 138 THE CHRIST OF ENGLISH POETRY 
 
 period the representative people had not emerged. 
 Representative Democracy, in fact, is an entirely modern 
 institution, which throws out of court, therefore, all 
 interested appeals to the sad fate of democratic, so- 
 called, institutions in old days. And there are certainly 
 those among Shakespearean students (Werner, for ex- 
 ample, in his Jahrbuch} who discover in the author of 
 " Hamlet " and " King Lear" a thinker in the foremost 
 ranks of modern and patriotic spirits ; a forerunner of 
 the struggle for freedom in which England was to engage 
 first among the nations of Europe. But Shakespeare 
 was too human, and too permanent shall we say, too 
 "eternal" ? to be a party politician. " A plague on both 
 your houses ! " is his nearest to a political cry. A poet 
 of the nineteenth century, of course, who had no care 
 for political theories and philosophies of history, would 
 show himself to be lacking in that very sympathy with 
 humanity which made Shakespeare what he was. But 
 Shakespeare himself dealt with men, not with philo- 
 sophical ideas. He has no abstract political principles 
 to apply, even in his story of the contest of Lancaster 
 and York. And the nearest to a political principle 
 you can get anywhere in Shakespeare, is the conscious- 
 ness of his faith in the divine right of the kingliest nature 
 to be king. 
 
 I cannot pursue the argument further. It will be 
 sufficient for the present to remember that, in the light 
 of the Christian doctrine of the intrinsic value of the 
 human soul as such, the stuff of conscience is immea- 
 surably great, and that Shakespeare's new emphasis on 
 the importance of the individual man and woman, gave
 
 SHAKESPEARE 139 
 
 to the Christian principle of Individuality a root as 
 deep as the bottom of things, and endowed it with a 
 sovereign authority in history. Let us hope, for the 
 future stability of both Church and State in England, 
 that we shall all remember that the wild rose of De- 
 mocracy must not forget her kinship with the mystic 
 rose of " the companions of the kingdom and patience 
 of Jesus Christ." 
 
 Let us pass to another consideration. 
 
 I am sure that you must all be familiar with that 
 beautiful passage in Mr. Ruskin's " Sesame and Lilies," 
 in which that great writer calls attention to the fact 
 that, in the strict sense of the word, Shakespeare has 
 no heroes only heroines. 8 " There is not one entirely 
 heroic figure," Mr. Ruskin says, " in all his plays, ex- 
 cept the slight sketch of Henry V. ... whereas there 
 is hardly a play that has not a perfect woman in it, 
 steadfast in grave hope and errorless purpose : Cor- 
 delia, Desdemona, Isabella, Hermione, Imogen, Queen 
 Katharine, Perdita, Sylvia, Viola, Rosalind, Helena, and 
 last and perhaps loveliest, Virgilia, are all faultless, con- 
 ceived in the highest heroic type of humanity.'* 
 
 What is the explanation of this ? Why is it that 
 Shakespeare's women are such divine creations, sacred 
 to the deepest of Christian virtues, love, innocence, 
 resignation, constancy ? 
 
 But before I answer that question, let me point a 
 personal lesson which I think Mr. Ruskin, in his charac- 
 terisation, himself misses. I do not think that Mr. 
 Ruskin is quite right, that is to say, in the lesson which
 
 140 THE CHRIST OF ENGLISH POETRY 
 
 he would seem to draw from the heroic character of 
 Shakespeare's women. It is not, I think, that women 
 are really perfect in character, as he suggests " infallibly 
 faithful and wise counsellors incorruptibly just and 
 pure examples strong always to sanctify, even when 
 they cannot save" in a way which is not possible to 
 men. But the lesson is surely this that Shakespeare 
 himself evidently thought them so. That, I think, is the 
 point to be grasped. Shakespeare kept true through his 
 whole life to the youthful, the chivalric ideal of a good 
 woman, expressed in words which, in " Measure for 
 Measure," he puts into the mouth of the jesting Lucio, 
 describing Isabella in her virginal strength and self- 
 possessed dignity, perhaps the noblest of all the heroines 
 of the plays : 
 
 " I hold you as a thing enskyed and sainted ; 
 By your renouncement an immortal spirit, 
 And to be talked with in sincerity, 
 As with a saint." 
 
 Ah, young men ! I tell you that what is worth 
 remembering about this reverence of Shakespeare for 
 women, which surrounds them for him to the end of his 
 days it is in "The Winter's Tale," one of his latest plays, 
 that he draws for us the gracious simplicity, the wifely 
 perfection of Hermione, and in "The Tempest," the latest 
 of his plays, the peerless purity, the maiden sweetness of 
 the most admired Miranda with an almost divine light 
 and glamour, is that it is just what the ordinary man 
 of the world too often despises as the mistake of his 
 inexperienced youth. And yet who was more " the 
 man of the world " than Shakespeare ? His knowledge
 
 SHAKESPEARE 141 
 
 of human nature was immense, if not infallible, and 
 in no sense did he avoid the world and its temptations. 
 He lived, too, in the midst of London town life, of 
 theatrical life, such as we know it to have been in 
 Elizabeth's day, coarse, corrupt, feculent. As a play- 
 wright, too, and an artist he had specially before him 
 the example of the superb but vicious genius of Mar- 
 lowe, and yet he preserved in his heart the feeling 
 natural, I venture to assert, to uncorrupted youth 
 of the divinity and sacredness of womanhood, so that 
 in his latest, as in his earliest plays, his strong spirit, 
 so keen to detect human weakness and sin, pays woman 
 the involuntary homage of laying aside, in face of her 
 excellence, its weapon of criticism. It is lago, who is 
 nothing if not critical, who dares to doubt of Des- 
 demona's truth. He, it is true, as Mrs. Jameson has 
 said in her "Characteristics of Women," "would have 
 bedevilled an angel." Alas ! there are men in our 
 own day who, with none of lago's wickedness, in either 
 intention or act, are still stained by the evil spirit 
 of the world, and in their inmost thought dare to judge 
 as he did of the virtue of woman. But such a man was 
 not Shakespeare. He, at fifty years of age, still feels in 
 presence of his heroines like a lover before his first love. 9 
 
 Seriously, then, do I beg you to ponder this fact, 
 that the reverence for woman which too many men 
 affect to lose in their teens, was retained by the " myriad- 
 minded " Shakespeare to the end of his days. 
 
 And the explanation of it ? 
 
 Is it not just this, that Shakespeare, receiving per- 
 haps unconsciously, as his natural heritage, from the
 
 1 42 THE CHRIST OF ENGLISH POETRY 
 
 genius of mediaeval England that conception of woman- 
 hood which came to the poets of the Middle Age you 
 see it perhaps especially in Chaucer through their 
 apotheosis of woman expressed in the worship of the 
 blessed Virgin, trusted to his own strong inspiration, 
 to the fineness of his insight into human character, to 
 the gentle and chivalrous instincts of his own wholesome 
 nature, in his creation of the noble women of his plays. 
 
 It is not possible of course to mark out with absolute 
 precision the chronology of a moral ideal. But there 
 can be little question, I think, that in the history of 
 European civilisation the change of ideal with regard to 
 the personality of woman synchronises with the change 
 from Pagan to Christian influences, and that the senti- 
 ment in regard to her position is ennobled and broadened 
 with ever advance to clearer apprehension as the years 
 go on, of the meaning of the sacramental character 
 of Christian marriage. 
 
 One must not, perhaps, make too much of this point 
 I have already dwelt upon it in a previous lecture ; 
 but at least it is to the honour of Shakespeare's witness 
 to the Christian elements of national character, that in 
 the long history of the English poetic ideals of woman- 
 hood from the Juliana of Cynewulf, the typical heroine 
 of our northern forbears, generous and gentle and 
 winning, but firm of character, resolute of will, royal of 
 bearing, down to Wordsworth's immortal picture of 
 
 " A perfect woman, nobly planned, 
 To warn, to comfort, and command, 
 And yet a spirit still, and bright 
 With something of an angel light,"
 
 SHAKESPEARE 143 
 
 there is no poet in the brilliant roll who has wrought 
 more nobly, more Christianly, than Shakespeare, in 
 fashioning that ideal which I doubt not is enshrined in 
 all our hearts to-day. 
 
 I must hasten to a conclusion. That in doing so 
 I must pass by the great moral lessons of Shakespeare's 
 tragedies " Hamlet," "Othello," "King Lear," "Mac- 
 beth " I the less regret in that I trust that all of 
 you who care for these things will be reading shortly 
 the splendid lectures on "Shakespearean Tragedy" by 
 the Professor of Poetry in the sister University. 10 
 
 One further thought and lesson before I end. You 
 remember the character of Prospero in " The Tempest." 
 Did it ever strike you to identify that great enchanter 
 with Shakespeare himself in the closing years of life ? The 
 thought is surely a fruitful one. For " The Tempest," 
 the latest of all his plays, is an ideal allegory of human 
 life, with parabolic undermeanings, so it seems to me, 
 everywhere, in every line of it, but with all its lessons 
 unforced, unsophisticated, illusive, unperceived indeed 
 by those whose eyes are closed, whose ears are dull of 
 hearing ; the scene of it nowhere, anywhere, for it is 
 in the Fortunate Island of the soul of man, that vexed 
 land of imagination hung between the upper and the 
 nether world ; the characters of it, types, abstractions 
 woman, youth, the people all of them more or less 
 victims of illusion, all of them losing their way in this 
 enchanted realm of life, except only Prospero, the great 
 mage, absolute lord of the island, who could summon to 
 his service at a moment's notice every shape of merriment 
 or of passion, every figure in the great tragi-comedy of
 
 144 THE CHRIST OF ENGLISH POETRY 
 
 life, and who, being none other than Shakespeare himself, 
 "not one but all mankind's epitome," could run easily 
 through the whole scale of human passion and thought 
 from " Nature's woodnotes wild," or the homely com- 
 monplaces of existence, the chimney-corner wisdom 
 of Master Goodman Dull, to the transcendental subtleties 
 of- 
 
 " No, Time, thou shah not boast that I do change ; 
 
 The Pyramids built up with newer light 
 To me are nothing novel, nothing strange, 
 They are but dressings of a former sight." 
 
 It is not only because Prospero was a great enchanter, 
 about to break his magic staff, " to drown his book 
 deeper than ever plummet sounded," to dismiss his "airy 
 spirits," and to return to the practical service of the 
 State that we identify the Philosopher Duke with the 
 Poet Prophet. It is rather because the temper of 
 Prospero is the temper of Shakespeare in those last 
 days, when he came back to the dear old home at 
 Stratford, to its sweetest, simplest, homeliest things, 
 finding the daily life of that little place, the men and 
 women there, the Nature all around, the green fields, 
 the sweet hedgerow flowers, the quiet woods, the softly 
 flowing Avon, good enough for him ; despising nothing 
 as common or unclean ; curious of all things and of 
 all men, but never scornful, never contemptuous ; 
 humorous, sympathetic, tolerant ; his wide-viewing mind 
 at last looking back from the altitudes of thought 
 to which he had attained, on all the pageantry of the 
 lower world which he had abandoned through a strange, 
 pathetic, ideal light.
 
 SHAKESPEARE 145 
 
 " Our revels now are ended : these our actors, 
 As I foretold you, were all spirits, and 
 Are melted into air, into thin air : 
 And, like the baseless fabric of this vision, 
 The cloud-capp'd towers, the gorgeous palaces, 
 The solemn temples, the great globe itself, 
 Yea, all which it inherit, shall dissolve : 
 And like this insubstantial pageant faded, 
 Leave not a rack behind. We are such stuff 
 As dreams are made of, and our little life 
 Is rounded with a sleep. Sir, I am vex'd ; 
 Bear with my weakness : my old brain is troubled. 
 Be not disturbed with my infirmity : 
 If you be pleased, retire into my cell, 
 And there repose : a turn or two I'll walk 
 To still my beating mind." 
 
 And so he ends Prospero or Shakespeare. In the 
 epilogue to the play you have the keynote given of this 
 self-mastered character, this self-possessed grandeur of a 
 completely disciplined will, which is common to both, to 
 Shakespeare as to Prospero forgiveness and freedom. 
 
 "And my ending is despair 
 Unless I be relieved by prayer 
 Which pierces so that it assaults 
 Mercy itself, and frees all faults." 
 
 And so, too, I will end how better? with those 
 lessons of freedom and forgiveness : the true freedom 
 which only comes from service, the true pardon which 
 only comes to those who forgive, because they have been 
 forgiven. 
 
 Have we learnt those lessons ? The root of all true 
 religion, believe me, lies there. What do we know of 
 the true " service which is perfect freedom" ? What is 
 
 K
 
 146 THE CHRIST OF ENGLISH POETRY 
 
 our definition of life ? How do we conceive of it to 
 ourselves ? Is it do we think as Shakespeare has else- 
 where said, " a tale told by an idiot, signifying nothing " ? 
 or is it a mission of service to our fellows for Christ's 
 sake ? God grant that we can answer, " Life means 
 service life means mission." 
 
 " O gentlemen, the time of life is short, 
 To spend that shortness basely were too long 
 If life did ride upon a dial's point 
 Still ending with the arrival of an hour." 
 
 And the lesson of pardon, have we made that, too, 
 ours ? " The tongues of dying men," our poet says, 
 "enforce attention like deep harmony." From the cross 
 of Jesus conies His dying words, " Father, forgive them, 
 for they know not what they do ! " We have all learnt 
 God grant it to recognise the ethical beauty of the 
 spirit of forgiveness. Do we equally acknowledge its 
 moral power, its redeeming power? "Father, forgive 
 us our trespasses, as we forgive them that trespass against 
 us." So daily we pray. But my brothers, my sisters, do 
 we truly realise this power of forgiveness, this social 
 power of remitting or retaining sins, this priestly power 
 of humanity ? May we not learn something of it from 
 Shakespeare ? Who will teach us more unerringly than 
 he of that unstrained quality of mercy, that earthly and 
 yet spiritual power of free forgiveness " which then shows 
 likest God's when mercy seasons justice " ? 
 
 Ah, believe me, just so far as we exercise that ab- 
 solving power lovingly and wisely in our lives, and with 
 our lips we help men away from sin : just so far as we
 
 SHAKESPEARE 147 
 
 do not exercise it, or exercise it wrongly, we drive men 
 into sin. "The Son of Man hath power on earth to 
 forgive sin." So He spake who first consciously used 
 this neglected law of free forgiveness as a new, vivifying, 
 contagious, redemptive power over the souls of men and 
 exalted it as the very key to that temple which is built 
 up no otherwise than out of the souls of men, which we 
 call His Church. But He also, the great Master of all 
 spiritual secrets, bequeathed, we must never forget it, 
 that new power to His Church, yea, to all the members 
 of His royal priesthood who, consciously or unconsciously, 
 were imbued with His spirit. The " angels and ministers 
 of His grace " are many and varied. Can we then deny 
 some portion at least of that mystical faculty to him 
 who saw deeper down than other sons of men to the 
 ultimate springs of human conduct, laying them bare in 
 unexpected ways, who was quick and powerful as any 
 two-edged sword to pierce the very heart and marrow of 
 the human conscience and will, and thus finally out of 
 spiritual discord brought harmony, and out of tragic 
 issues reconciliation, that "word over all beautiful as the 
 sky " ? 
 
 Shakespeare was no priest, it is true, in the eccle- 
 siastical sense. He claimed no absolving power as a 
 technical or professional gift. But just as in regard to 
 that other lesson of freedom, Shakespeare does seem to 
 give to each one of us " courage and energy and strength 
 to dedicate ourselves and our work to that service, to 
 that mission whatever it may be which life has re- 
 vealed to us as best and highest and most real : " so also, 
 with regard to this other lesson of the redemptive power
 
 1 48 THE CHRIST OF ENGLISH POETRY 
 
 of a priestly humanity, this social force of true forgive- 
 ness, I do not hesitate to say that Shakespeare is a noble 
 witness to the redeeming Christ, because in his censer 
 there burns truly and fragrantly and steadily 
 
 " Such incense as of right belongs 
 
 To the true shrine 
 
 Where stands the Healer of all wrongs 
 In light divine."
 
 NOTES AND ILLUSTRATIONS TO 
 LECTURE III 
 
 NOTE i, p. 123. 
 
 " THE historical examination of Shakespeare's plays explains why 
 they were necessarily the product of the English mind, and of a 
 particular period in the life of the English nation. It was the 
 aim of Shakespeare not only ' to hold the mirror up to nature,' 
 but to show * the age and body of the time his form and pres- 
 sure ' ; his poetical design was at once universal and particular. 
 Two causes external to himself made his dramas possible ; the 
 state of English society as contrasted with that of other nations 
 in Europe, and the continuity of tradition on the English stage. 
 England alone presented such social conditions at the close of 
 the sixteenth century as allowed all the great contemporary ten- 
 dencies of human action to be reflected in the drama. She 
 alone, while preserving the catholic and feudal foundations of 
 society, had given full play to the new impulses of life, derived 
 on the one side from the Renaissance in Italy, on the other 
 from the Reformation in Germany. Like France and Spain, 
 she had developed her institutions round the central principle 
 of Monarchy ; but while she had encouraged every form of 
 enterprise both in speculation and action, she had not obliterated 
 the old traditions of honour and chivalry. Nowhere else could 
 the dramatist find such matter for stirring political situations 
 as in the chronicle histories of England since the reign of King 
 John ; nowhere else could he study with equal advantage the 
 effects produced on the lives of men by the contending forces 
 of materialism and religion, or watch so well the struggles of
 
 ISO THE CHRIST OF ENGLISH POETRY 
 
 sensuality and ambition, checked by conscience on the one hand, 
 and the sense of vanity on the other " (Courthope, " History 
 of English Poetry," vol. iv. p. 198). 
 
 NOTE 2, p. 125. 
 
 " Literary Studies," by Walter Bagehot, vol. i. p. 84. To 
 this testimony of Bagehot I should like to add the following 
 passage from Professor Dowden's " Mind and Art of Shake- 
 speare." It occurs towards the close of his book, in a passing 
 criticism of the sonnets, at p. 396. No one has written, I 
 venture to say, with deeper insight than Dr. Dowden of the 
 ethical significance of Shakespearean drama. 
 
 "In the sonnets we recognise three things that Shake- 
 speare was capable of measureless personal devotion ; that he 
 was tenderly sensitive, sensitive above all to every diminu- 
 tion or alteration of that love his heart so eagerly craved ; and 
 that when wronged, although he suffered anguish, he trans- 
 cended his private injury, and learned to forgive. There are 
 lovers of Shakespeare so jealous of his honour that they are 
 unable to suppose that any grave moral flaw could have im- 
 paired the nobility of his life and manhood. Shakespeare, as he 
 is discovered in his poems and his plays, appears rather to have 
 been a man who by strenuous effort, and by the aid of the 
 good powers of the world, was saved, so as by fire. Before 
 Shakespeare zealots demand our attention to ingenious theories, 
 which help us to credit the immaculateness of Shakespeare's life, 
 let them prove to us that his writings never offend. When 
 they have shown that Shakespeare's poetry possesses the proud 
 virginity of Milton's poetry, they may go on to show that 
 Shakespeare's youth was devoted, like the youth of Milton, to 
 an ideal of moral elevation and purity. When we have been 
 convinced that the same moral and spiritual temper which gave 
 rise to the * Comus ' gave rise to the l Venus and Adonis,' we 
 shall think it probable that Shakespeare could have uttered the 
 proud words about his unspotted life that Milton uttered.
 
 NOTES TO LECTURE III 151 
 
 " Assuredly the inference from Shakespeare's writings is not 
 that he held himself with virginal strength and pride remote 
 from the blameful pleasures of the world. What no reader 
 will find anywhere in the plays or poems of Shakespeare is a 
 cold-blooded, hard, or selfish line ; all is warm, sensitive, vital, 
 radiant with delight, or a-thrill with pain. And what we may 
 dare to affirm of Shakespeare's life is that, whatever its sins 
 may have been, they were not hard, selfish, deliberate, cold- 
 blooded sins. The errors of his heart originated in his sensi- 
 tiveness, in his imagination (not at first inured to the hardness 
 of fidelity to the fact), in his quick consciousness of existence, 
 and in the self-abounding devotion of his heart. There are 
 some noble lines by Chapman, in which he pictures to himself 
 the life of great energy, enthusiasms, and passions which for ever 
 stands upon the edge of utmost danger, and yet for ever remains 
 in absolute security. 
 
 * Give me the spirit that on this life's rough sea 
 Loves to have his sails filled with a lusty wind 
 Even till his sail-yards tremble, his masts crack, 
 And his raft ship run on her side so low 
 That she drinks water, and her keel ploughs air ; 
 There is no danger to a man that knows 
 What life and death is there's not any law 
 Exceeds his knowledge ; neither is it lawful 
 That he should stoop to any other law.' 
 
 "Such a master-spirit pressing forward under strained canvas 
 was Shakespeare. If the ship dipped and drank water, she rose 
 again, and at length we behold her within view of her haven, 
 sailing under a large calm wind, not without tokens of stress of 
 weather, but if battered, yet unbroken by the waves. . . . The 
 Shakespeare whom we discern in the sonnets had certainly not 
 attained the broad mastery of life which the Stratford bust asserts 
 to have been Shakespeare's in his closing years. . . . Besides, 
 life was not exhausted. The ship righted itself, and went 
 ploughing forward across a broad sea. Shakespeare found ever
 
 152 THE CHRIST OF ENGLISH POETRY 
 
 more and more in life to afford adequate sustenance for man's 
 highest needs of intellect and of heart. Life became ever more 
 encircled with presences of beauty, of goodness, and of terror ; 
 and Shakespeare's fortitude of heart increased." 
 
 NOTE 3, p. 128. 
 
 " During all the modern period the Western mind in art 
 must be regarded as having less and less religious guidance for 
 its energies. It has had no faith. The old guidance was con- 
 tinually failing, while the new, though often admirably felt, was 
 not yet visible. Having to find pleasant food for an unstable and 
 increasingly revolutionary society, the artist, according to his 
 genius, might amuse, delight, instruct, or even exalt, but the first 
 characteristic of every work was that it was apart from religion 
 a special product. Art was thus degraded from its religious rank, 
 and put among miscellaneous things. Hence it was often trivial 
 in subject and hasty in execution, often addressed to a limited 
 class, not seldom licentious in a word, irreligious. Such spots 
 may sometimes be seen in Shakespeare's sun ; nor is it strange 
 when we remember his occasional purpose and the base surround- 
 ings of his theatre. How wonderful rather that he should have 
 been so good and pure ! This was due to his great and affec- 
 tionate character, but also to his neighbourhood to mediaeval 
 order. His intellectual apprehension of scepticism was extra- 
 ordinary, and scepticism had not got possession of his heart " 
 (Vernon Lushington, " New Calendar of Great Men," p. 428). 
 
 NOTE 4, p. 131. 
 
 " The first phase of the modern Revolution, transmitting the 
 mediaeval influence, produced an impulse which gave rise in the 
 second phase to a truly admirable poetic movement, in which all 
 the nations of the west took part. . . . The general poetic 
 activity derived its source from the profound inspiration which 
 had been imparted to all the West by the poem of Dante
 
 NOTES TO LECTURE III 153 
 
 and even by that of A Kempis, which, by their pictures of the 
 Middle Age, co-operated, each in its own way, in inaugurating 
 modern civilisation. . . . The general tendency of the West 
 towards a rational and pacific mode of life had now become pre- 
 dominant enough to call forth an indirect and preparatory 
 idealisation of it. The art thus evoked naturally found its chief 
 subject in private life : but it succeeded in embracing public life 
 also, by drawing its themes from the past, as the present was too 
 unsettled for such a purpose. In both these fields of poetic 
 activity Protestantism was an obstruction, disturbing the domestic 
 relations, and inspiring dislike to the Middle Age, the memories 
 of which were alone able to stir the popular heart. . . . The 
 profoundly original genius of Shakespeare sought to represent the 
 union of private and public life, assigning its due preponderance 
 to the latter, and breaking free from the trammelling distinction 
 between the epic and dramatic forms, a distinction which is more 
 seeming than real, and will in the end be given up. The 
 Protestantism, however, in the midst of which he lived, made 
 him turn away from the Middle Age, and even hindered his 
 attaining a due appreciation of Antiquity, so that this free thinker 
 was obliged to devote his chief pieces to the illustration of periods 
 that were too near his own time to admit of being satisfactorily 
 handled " (Comte's " Positive Polity," vol. iii. pp. 485-86 ; cf. 
 also vol. ii. ch. v. ; and " Positive Philosophy," vol. ii. pp. 327-33). 
 
 NOTE 5, p. 133. 
 
 Cf. article by W. S. Lilly on "Shakespeare as a Roman 
 Catholic," to which the best answer is this simple paragraph in 
 Mr. Sidney Lee's very fresh and comprehensive " Life of William 
 Shakespeare " : 
 
 "The religious exordium (of Shakespeare's will) is in conven- 
 tional phraseology, and gives no clue to Shakespeare's personal 
 religious opinions. What those opinions were, we have neither 
 the means nor the warrant for discussing. But while it is
 
 154 THE CHRIST OF ENGLISH POETRY 
 
 possible to quote from the plays many contemptuous references 
 to the Puritans and their doctrines, we may dismiss as idle gossip 
 Davies's irresponsible report that he l dyed a Papist ' " (Lee's 
 "Life," p. 273). 
 
 For myself that paragraph is sufficient. If more is asked by 
 any reader, there is no need for me to attempt to expand feebly 
 what I have already said in my lecture, and which, at any rate, 
 is here said, as I think finally and conclusively, by Dr. Dowden. 
 
 " It has been asked whether Shakespeare was a Protestant or a 
 Catholic, and he has been proved to belong to each communion 
 to the satisfaction of contending theological zealots. Shake- 
 speare's poetry, resting upon a purely human basis, is not a 
 rendering into art of the dogmas of either Catholicism or Pro- 
 testantism. Shakespeare himself, a great artistic nature, framed 
 for manifold joy and pain, may, like other artists, have had no 
 faculty for the attainment of certitude upon extra-mundane and 
 superhuman matters ; of concrete moral facts he had the clearest 
 perception, but we do not find that he was interested, at least as 
 an artist, in truths or alleged truths which transcend the limits 
 of human experience. That the world suggests inquiries which 
 cannot be answered, that mysteries confront and baffle us, that 
 around our knowledge lies ignorance, around light darkness this 
 to Shakespeare seemed a fact containing within it a profound 
 significance, which might almost be named religious. But, 
 studiously as Shakespeare abstains from embodying theological 
 dogma in his art, and tolerant as his spirit is, it is certain that the 
 spirit of Protestantism of Protestantism considered as part of a 
 great movement of humanity animates and breathes through 
 his writings. Unless he had stood in antagonism to his time it 
 could not be otherwise. Shakespeare's creed is not a series of 
 abstract statements of truth, but a body of concrete impulses, 
 tendencies, and habits. The spirit of his faith is not to be ascer- 
 tained by bringing together little sentences from the utterances 
 of this one of his dramatis person*? and of that. By such a method 
 he might be proved an atheist. The faith by which Shakespeare
 
 NOTES TO LECTURE III 155 
 
 lived is rather to be discovered by noting the total issue and 
 resultant of his art towards the fostering and maintenance of a 
 certain type of human character. It may be asserted, without 
 hesitation, that the Protestant type of character, and the Pro- 
 testant polity in state and nation, is that which has received 
 impulse and vigour from the mind of the greatest of English 
 poets. Energy, devotion to the fact, self-government, tolerance, 
 a disbelief in minute apparatus for the improvement of human 
 character, an indifference to externals in comparison with that 
 which is of the invisible life, and a resolution to judge all things 
 from a purely human standpoint these grow upon us as habits 
 of thought and feeling as long as Shakespeare remains an 
 influence with us in the building up of character. Such habits 
 of thought and feeling are those which belong more especially to 
 the Protestant ideal of manhood " (" Mind and Art of Shake- 
 speare," p. 37). 
 
 " The same soil that produced Bacon and Hooker produced 
 Shakespeare ; the same environment fostered the growth of all 
 three. Can we discover anything possessed in common by the 
 scientific movement, the ecclesiastical movement, and the drama 
 of the period ? That which appears to be common to all is a 
 rich feeling for positive concrete fact. The facts with which the 
 drama concerns itself are those of human character in its living 
 play. And assuredly, whatever be its imperfection, its crudeness, 
 its extravagance, no other body of literature has amassed in equal 
 fulness and equal variety a store of concrete facts concerning 
 human character and human life ; assuredly not the drama of 
 JEschylus and Sophocles, not the drama of Calderon and Lope 
 de Vega, not the drama of Corneille and Racine. These give 
 us views of human life, and select portions of it for artistic 
 handling. The Elizabethan drama gives us the stuff of life 
 itself, the coarse with the fine, the mean with the heroic, the 
 humorous and grotesque with the tragic and the terrible " 
 (Dowden, " Mind and Art of Shakespeare," p. 23).
 
 156 THE CHRIST OF ENGLISH POETRY 
 
 NOTE 6, p. 134. 
 
 " The Ego is in the dramas of Shakespeare in all the modifica- 
 tions, mysteries, and apparent irregularities of which conscience 
 is susceptible. But it does not reign alone. In his plays, as in 
 the Middle Ages, an unseen power governs the actions of the 
 individual, follows ever on his track, and impels him along the 
 paths himself has chosen to the catastrophe that choice determines. 
 It is no universal law acting upon collective humanity ; no social 
 religious idea. Shakespeare shows neither the consciousness of a 
 law nor of humanity ; the future is mute in his dramas, and 
 enthusiasm for great principles unknown. His genius compre- 
 hends and sums up the past and the present ; it does not initiate 
 the future. He interpreted an epoch ; he announced none. 
 Necessity, which was the soul of the period, stalks invisibly 
 throughout his dramas, magically introduced whether by art or 
 instinct I know not ; I know that its reflex is seen alike on the 
 brow of Othello and Macbeth ; it colours the scepticism of 
 Hamlet and the light irony of Mercutio ; it surrounds with a 
 halo of previsioned love the figures of his women, divine creatures, 
 sacred to love, innocence, and resignation ; and it inspires the 
 generality of his personages with those reflections on the nullity 
 of human things and the worthlessness of life which so constantly 
 recur throughout his plays, and leave a bitter sense of delusion on 
 the youthful soul that approaches the works of genius as a sanc- 
 tuary wherein to seek inspiration and counsel for maturer years. 
 . . . Shakespeare felt the void around the solitary soul ; he felt the 
 worthlessness of human life when not united with other lives by 
 faith in a common progress ; and he revealed it in many passages 
 similar to that in which he bitterly says : 
 
 * Life's but a walking shadow ; a poor player 
 That struts and frets his hour upon the stage, 
 And then is heard no more ; it is a tale 
 Told by an idiot, full of sound and fury, 
 Signifying nothing '
 
 NOTES TO LECTURE III 157 
 
 But man was not sent here to enact the part of an idiot, burthen- 
 some to himself and useless to others ; and if life be but a shadow, 
 when sanctified by a sacrifice it is the shadow of God. . . . 
 With Shakespeare the drama expires. I speak of the drama in 
 its highest form, that organic drama which lays the foundations 
 of an entire school, reflects the lineaments of a whole epoch, and 
 displays upon the scene the ruling characteristics and generative 
 element of a whole period of civilisation. Such a drama as this 
 can only coexist with a religious idea, and after Shakespeare this 
 religious idea continued to languish until it disappeared. The 
 Ego rebelled against Necessity, as it had formerly rebelled 
 against Fate, and recommenced with regard to moral Equality 
 the work accomplished by Greek genius with regard to Liberty " 
 (Mazzini, "Critical and Literary Studies," vol. ii. p. 138). 
 
 NOTE 7, p. 137. 
 
 " 2 Henry VI.," Act iv. sc. 6, 7, and 8. Compare also 
 " Troilus and Cressida," Act i. sc. 3. No more logical and de- 
 cisive condemnation of revolutionary equality was probably ever 
 uttered than in this speech of the wise Ulysses: 
 
 " The heavens themselves, the planets, and this centre, 
 Observe degree, priority and place, 
 Insisture, course, proportion, season, form, 
 Office and custom, in all line of order ; 
 And therefore is the glorious planet, Sol, 
 In noble eminence enthroned and spheral, 
 Amidst the other ; whose medicinable eye 
 Corrects the ill aspects of planets evil, 
 And posts, like the commandment of a king, 
 Sans check, to good and bad : but when the planets, 
 In evil mixture, to disorder wander, 
 What plagues, and what portents, what mutiny, 
 What raging of the sea, shaking of earth, 
 Commotion in the winds, frights, changes, horrors, 
 Divert and crack, rend and deracinate
 
 158 THE CHRIST OF ENGLISH POETRY 
 
 The unity and married calm of states 
 
 Quite from their fixture ! O ! when degree is shak'd 
 
 Which is the ladder to all high designs, 
 
 The enterprise is sick. How could communities, 
 
 Degrees in schools, and brotherhoods in cities, 
 
 Peaceful commerce from dividable shores, 
 
 The primogenitive and due of birth, 
 
 Prerogative of age, crowns, sceptres, laurels, 
 
 But by degree, stand in authentic place ? 
 
 Take but degree away, untune that string, 
 
 And hark, what discord follows ! each thing meets 
 
 In mere oppugnancy : the bounded waters 
 
 Should lift their bosoms higher than the shores, 
 
 And make a sop of all this solid globe : 
 
 Strength should be lord of imbecility, 
 
 And the rude son should strike his father dead : 
 
 Force should be right ; or rather, right and wrong 
 
 (Between whose endless jar justice resides) 
 
 Should lose their names, and so should justice too. 
 
 Then everything includes itself in power, 
 
 Power into will, will into appetite, 
 
 And appetite, an universal wolf, 
 
 So doubly seconded with will and power, 
 
 Must make perforce an universal prey, 
 
 And last eat up himself. Great Agamemnon, 
 
 This chaos, when degree is suffocate, 
 
 Follows the choking. 
 
 And this neglection of degree it is 
 
 That by a pace goes backward, with a purpose 
 
 It hath to climb. The general's disdained 
 
 By him one step below ; he, by the next ; 
 
 That next by him beneath ; so every step, 
 
 Exampled by the first pace that is sick 
 
 Of his superior, grows to an envious fever 
 
 Of pale and bloodless emulation : 
 
 And 'tis this fever that keeps Troy on foot, 
 
 Not her own sinews. To end a tale of length, 
 
 Troy in our weakness stands, not in her strength."
 
 NOTES TO LECTURE III 159 
 
 NOTE 8, p. 139. 
 
 " Note broadly in the outset, Shakespeare has no heroes ; he 
 has only heroines. There is not one entirely heroic figure in all 
 his plays, except the slight sketch of Henry the Fifth, exaggerated 
 for the purposes of the stage ; and the still slighter Valentine in 
 * The Two Gentlemen of Verona.' In his laboured and perfect 
 plays you have no hero. Othello would have been one, if his 
 simplicity had not been so great as to leave him the prey of every 
 base practice round him ; but he is the only example even 
 approximating to the heroic type. Coriolanus Caesar Antony, 
 stand in flawed strength, and fall by their vanities ; Hamlet is 
 indolent and drowsily speculative ; Romeo, an impatient boy ; 
 the Merchant of Venice languidly submissive to adverse fortune ; 
 Kent, in * King Lear,' is entirely noble at heart, but too rough 
 and unpolished to be of true use at the critical time, and he sinks 
 into the office of a servant only. Orlando, no less noble, is yet 
 the despairing toy of chance, followed, comforted, saved, by 
 Rosalind. Whereas there is hardly a play that has not a perfect 
 woman in it, steadfast in grave hope and errorless purpose : 
 Cordelia, Desdemona, Isabella, Hermione, Imogen, Queen 
 Katherine, Perdita, Sylvia, Viola, Rosalind, Helena, and last and 
 perhaps loveliest, Virgilia, are all faultless ; conceived in the 
 highest heroic type of humanity. 
 
 "Then observe, secondly, the catastrophe of every play is 
 caused always by the fault or folly of a man ; the redemption, if 
 there be any, is by the wisdom and virtue of a woman, and fail- 
 ing that there is none. The catastrophe of King Lear is owing 
 to his own want of judgment, his impatient vanity, his misunder- 
 standing of his children ; the virtue of his one true daughter 
 would have saved him from all the injuries of the others unless he 
 had cast her away from him ; as it is, she all but saved him. 
 
 " Of Othello I need not trace the tale ; nor the one weakness 
 of his so mighty love ; nor the inferiority of his perceptive intel- 
 lect to that even of the second woman character in the play, the
 
 160 THE CHRIST OF ENGLISH POETRY 
 
 Emilia who dies in wild testimony against his error : ' Oh mur- 
 derous coxcomb ! what should such a fool do with so good a wife ? ' 
 
 " In ' Romeo and Juliet,' the wise and entirely brave stratagem 
 of the wife is brought to ruinous issue by the reckless impa- 
 tience of her husband. In * Winter's Tale ' and in ' Cymbeline,' 
 the happiness and existence of two princely households, lost 
 through long years, and imperilled to the death by the folly and 
 obstinacy of the husbands, are redeemed at last by the queenly 
 patience and wisdom of the wives. In < Measure for Measure ' 
 the injustice of the judges, and the corrupt cowardice of the 
 brother, are opposed to the victorious truth and adamantine purity 
 of a woman. In * Coriolanus,' the mother's counsel, acted upon 
 in time, would have saved her son from all evil ; his momentary 
 forgetfulness of it is his ruin ; her prayer, at last] granted, saves 
 him not indeed from death, but from the curse of living as the 
 destroyer of his country. 
 
 " And what shall I say of Julia, constant against the fickleness 
 of a lover who is a mere wicked child ? of Helena, against the 
 petulance and insult of a careless youth ? of the patience of 
 Hero, the passion of Beatrice, and the calmly devoted wisdom of 
 the 'unlessoned girl' who appears among the helplessness, the 
 blindness, and the vindictive passions of men, as a gentle angel to 
 save merely by her presence, and defeat the worst intensities of 
 crime by her smile ? 
 
 " Observe, further, among all the principal figures in Shake- 
 speare's plays there is only one weak woman Ophelia ; and it 
 is because she fails Hamlet at the critical moment, and is not, 
 and cannot in her nature be, a guide to him when he needs her 
 most, that all the bitter catastrophe follows. Finally, though 
 there are three wicked women among the principal figures, Lady 
 Macbeth, Regan, and Goneril, they are felt at once to be fright- 
 ful exceptions to the ordinary rules of life ; fatal in their influence 
 also in proportion to the power for good which they have 
 abandoned. 
 
 " Such in broad light is Shakespeare's testimony to the
 
 NOTES TO LECTURE III 161 
 
 position and character of women in human life. He represents 
 them as infallibly faithful and wise counsellors incorruptibly 
 just and pure examples strong always to sanctify, even when 
 they cannot save" (Ruskin, "Sesame and Lilies," pp. 126-131 ; cf. 
 also Mrs. Jamieson's " Characteristics of Women," introduction, 
 and p. 214 ; and Dowden's " Mind and Art," pp. 1 10-13). Dow- 
 den quotes from Rtimelin, " Shakespeare Studien," pp. 288-92, a 
 statement " that in consequence of his position as player, Shake- 
 speare was excluded from the acquaintance of women of fine 
 culture and character, and therefore drew upon his fancy for his 
 female portraits. At the same time Shakespeare shared with 
 Goethe, Petrarch, Raphael, Dante, Rousseau, Jean Paul (a strange 
 assemblage !) a mystical veneration for the feminine element of 
 humanity as the higher and more divine." 
 
 NOTE 9, p. 141. 
 
 In regard to this point, the following criticism from the 
 Spectator of July 29, 1905, is pertinent. It occurs in a review of 
 a book by Mr. J. W. Gray, entitled " Shakespeare's Marriage." 
 The reviewer writes : 
 
 " After stating that Shakespeare ' subordinated his genius to 
 the attainment of objects among which the making of a great 
 name in literature formed an insignificant part,' Mr. Gray goes 
 on to say that 'he shared with Richard Burbage and Edward 
 Alleyn the business ability that enabled them to amass wealth by 
 catering for the amusement of the public,' and adds : * Lyric and 
 Epic poetry were probably neglected for this more profitable 
 occupation, and indulged in merely as a pastime or out of defer- 
 ence to the prevailing fashion of writing sonnets.' Imputations 
 of this sort have been common enough since the days of Pope's 
 famous couplet. Shakespeare, ' for gold, not glory, winged his 
 roving flight ' ; his motives were mercenary ; he took up writing 
 as his profession ; and, as he was a good man of business, he 
 made it pay. From the nature of the case, it is extremely 
 difficult to rebut such charges ; but there is at least one con- 
 
 L
 
 162 THE CHRIST OF ENGLISH POETRY 
 
 sideration which seems to point to a very different conclusion. 
 Every one knows that the dramatic work of the great majority 
 of Shakespeare's contemporaries was habitually marred by gross- 
 nesses which appealed directly and strongly to the bad taste of 
 Elizabethan audiences. On Mr. Gray's theory, we surely ought 
 to find these blemishes scattered as profusely in the plays of 
 Shakespeare as in those of Fletcher or Middleton. But this is 
 precisely what we do not find. Errors of taste there may be, but 
 there is not a trace of that systematic vulgarisation of thought 
 and word which we know was the surest road in those days to 
 popular success. It is difficult to resist the inference that 
 Shakespeare deliberately avoided that sort of applause and that 
 sort of profit which was incompatible with the nobler interests 
 of art." 
 
 NOTE 10, p. 143. 
 
 Especially would I commend Professor Bradley's first lecture 
 on the substance of Tragedy, in which he discusses with fine 
 balance of judgment and keen analytic insight the problem of 
 Shakespeare's ethical attitude towards his " tragic heroes," as to 
 whether the ultimate power in his tragic world was regarded by 
 him as fatalistic or providential, as a fate blind and indifferent to 
 human happiness and goodness, or as a law which can be said to 
 be just or benevolent, as to whether his view of the tragic fact 
 can be thought of as Christian or simply agnostic. Professor 
 Bradley holds the balance very evenly. His final summary of 
 argument is this : 
 
 " Thus we are left at last with an idea showing two sides 
 or aspects which we can neither separate nor reconcile. The 
 whole an order against which the individual part shows itself 
 powerless seems to be animated by a passion for perfection ; we 
 cannot otherwise explain its behaviour towards evil. Yet it 
 appears to engender this evil within itself, and in its effort to 
 overcome and expel it, it is agonised with pain, and driven to 
 mutilate its own substance, and to love not only evil but priceless
 
 NOTES TO LECTURE III 163 
 
 good. That this idea, though very different from the idea of a 
 blank fate, is no solution to the riddle of life is obvious ; but why 
 should we expect it to be such a solution r Shakespeare was 
 not attempting to justify the ways of God to men, or to show the 
 universe as a Divine Comedy. He was writing tragedy, and 
 tragedy would not be tragedy if it were not a painful mystery 
 Nor can he be said to point distinctly, like some writers of 
 tragedy, in any direction where a solution might lie. We find a 
 few references to gods or God, to the influence of the stars, to 
 another life ; some of them certainly, all of them perhaps, merely 
 dramatic appropriate to the person from whose lips they fall. 
 A ghost comes from Purgatory to impart a secret out of the 
 reach of its hearer who presently meditates on the question 
 whether the sleep of death is dreamless. Accidents once or twice 
 remind us strangely of the words ' There's a divinity doth shape 
 our ends.' More important are other impressions. Sometimes 
 from the very furnace of affliction a conviction seems borne to us 
 that somehow, if we could see it, this agony counts as nothing 
 against the heroism and love which appear in it and thrill our 
 hearts. Sometimes we are driven to cry out that these mighty or 
 heavenly spirits who perish are too great for the little space in 
 which they move, and that they vanish, not into nothingness, but 
 into freedom. Sometimes from these sources, and from others, 
 comes a presentiment, formless but haunting, and even profound, 
 that all the fury of conflict, with its waste and woe, is less than 
 half the truth, even an illusion, 'such stuff as dreams are made 
 of.' But these faint and scattered intimations that the tragic 
 world, being but a fragment of a whole beyond our vision, 
 must needs be a contradiction, and no ultimate truth, avail 
 nothing to interpret the mystery. We remain confronted with 
 the inexplicable fact, or the no less inexplicable appearance, of a 
 world travailing for perfection, but bringing to birth, together 
 with glorious good, an evil which it is able to overcome only by 
 self-torture and self-waste, and this fact or appearance is tragedy " 
 
 (PP- 37-39)-
 
 164 
 
 For Professor Bradley's words "self-torture" and "self-waste" 
 read " self-discipline " and " self-sacrifice," and we have here 
 almost the solution of the Christian apostle as to the burden 
 of the universe " The earnest expectation of the creation 
 waiteth for the revealing of the sons of God. For the creation 
 was subjected to vanity, not of its own will, but by reason 
 of him who subjected it, in hope that the creation itself also 
 shall be delivered from the bondage of corruption into the 
 liberty of the glory of the children of God. For we know 
 that the whole creation groaneth and travaileth in pain together 
 until now" (Romans viii. 19-22). And certainly, however 
 much the attitude of Shakespeare towards the tragic world, and 
 the free temper of his work generally, may be that of reverent 
 scepticism, it is never that of the cynic. And in estimating the 
 " ethos " of character, that surely means very much. There may 
 be justly a Christian scepticism, but there never can be a Christian 
 cynicism. And the tragic heroes of Shakespeare, though they 
 may often be wretched and awful, are never small, are never con- 
 temptible. Professor Bradley, indeed, is right when elsewhere 
 he says : " Shakespearean tragedy is never, like some miscalled 
 tragedies, depressing. No one ever closes the book with the feel- 
 ing that man is a poor creature." No ; for whatever else may 
 be true of the ethical ideas of Shakespeare, certainly he had, con- 
 sciously or unconsciously, the Christian idea of the potential 
 greatness of man, of the inherent dignity of human nature. 
 That is plain all through his tragedies. His heroes may fail 
 horribly, may even fall into detestable crime, but they have all a 
 touch of greatness about them. In the worst of them we feel 
 always the potentiality of the good behind the evil ; in the best 
 of them we realise the full power and reach of the human soul ; 
 and in each case because of the potentiality we are stirred not 
 only to admiration and terror and awe, but also to sympathy and 
 pity. 
 
 Consider for a moment, in this connection, such a character 
 as that of Brutus in the play of "Julius Caesar." Could such
 
 NOTES TO LECTURE III 165 
 
 a character conceivably have been painted by a cynic ? Indeed, 
 in " that noblest Roman of them all " is there not also an element 
 of character which is essentially Christian ? 
 
 How else shall we explain those striking lines which Shake- 
 speare places in his hero's mouth just before his death ? 
 
 " Countrymen, 
 
 My heart doth joy that yet, in all my life 
 I found no man but he was true to me ! " 
 
 Why was it, we ask, that Brutus in all his life had never found 
 a man untrue to him ? Was it that his experience of human life was 
 exceptional ; that circumstances had thrown him only among men 
 of warm generosity and transparent truthfulness ? or was the secret 
 to be found in his own character ? Was it that before the child- 
 like trustfulness and simplicity of heart of Brutus even other- 
 wise faithless men were shamed into fidelity ? Was it that before 
 his grand innocence and simpleness of soul even meditated treachery 
 was disarmed ? Did the very frankness of Brutus' trust, the very 
 force of his expectation of " good faith " in others, tend to create 
 that virtue where it did not already exist ? 
 
 I like to think so. And I also like to think that Shakespeare, 
 in emphasising that quality in the character of his noblest hero, 
 was not unconscious that the contagious power of trust, the spirit 
 of charity believing all things, of Love trusting all, of Hope con- 
 fiding in the best side of every man, believing that every man has 
 a good side, was an essential element in the noblest Christian 
 character, as it was the most potent agency of appeal to a sinner's 
 heart in the redemptive method of Jesus Christ. In a material- 
 istic world Brutus the idealist was foredoomed to fail. But to 
 have kept true to himself and his ideal was also to have won 
 victory through his failure. And victory through failure is one 
 of the noblest lessons of the cross of Jesus Christ.
 
 LECTURE IV 
 ROBERT BROWNING
 
 ROBERT BROWNING 
 
 (BURIED WESTMINSTER ABBEY, DEC. 31, 1889) 
 
 High noon : yet shrouded as with funeral pall 
 The city streets. The Abbey bell tolls slow : 
 The organ sounds, and solemn voices low 
 Chant requiem for the dying year, and all 
 His greatness buried with the year: one call 
 For both, the human record ending so ; 
 And dust to kindred dust is laid. And lo ! 
 Once more on good and evil, great and small, 
 Sun shines : old earth swings round and glad New Year 
 Dawns on a larger Day : larger for him 
 Who, when the light of earth was waxing dim, 
 Still cried, " Fight on, fare ever, there as here ! 
 Man's creeds may pass, yet long as days endure 
 Earth changes, but the soul and God stand sure."
 
 LECTURE IV 
 ROBERT BROWNING 
 
 " Giving thanks unto the Father, who made us meet to be partakers 
 of the inheritance of the saints in light, <who delivered us out of the power 
 of darkness, and translated us into the kingdom of the son of his love ; in 
 whom we have our redemption, the forgiveness of our sins : who is the 
 image of the invisible God, the first-born of all creation ; for in him 
 were all things created, in the heavens and upon the earth, things visible 
 and things invisible, whether thrones, or dominions, or principalities, or 
 powers ; all things have been created through him and unto him ; and he 
 is before all things, and in him all things consist ; and he is the head of 
 the body, the Church : who is the beginning, the Jirst-born from the dead, 
 that in all things he might have the pre-eminence." 
 
 COLOSSIANS i. 1 2-1 8. 
 
 IN this majestic and wide-embracing sentence we have 
 not only one of the earliest records of the apostolic teach- 
 ing in regard to the personality of Christ, but also the 
 one authoritative credential for an optimistic faith in 
 regard to Christ's creative and administrative work in the 
 world. 
 
 Thirty years ago, when Dr. Lightfoot was writing 
 here in Cambridge his commentary on this epistle, he 
 lamented that the Church of England had allowed this 
 doctrine of the Incarnation, this idea of Christ as the 
 supreme person in all history the image of the invisible 
 
 God, the perfect manifestation in human form of the 
 
 169
 
 1 70 THE CHRIST OF ENGLISH POETRY 
 
 eternal reason, the logos of Greek thought, "by whose 
 agency the world of matter was created and is sustained, 
 who is at once the beginning and the end of material 
 things," the Head also of His Church, that great spiritual 
 society which was to extend through all Christian ages as 
 the ideal storehouse of redemption for ever, the per- 
 manent home where all human relations were to find 
 their consecration and ennoblement to fall into the 
 background of modern theological thought. 
 
 " The loss," he said, " is most serious. How much 
 our theological conceptions suffer in breadth and ful- 
 ness by the neglect a moment's reflection will show. 
 How much more hearty would be the sympathy of 
 theologians with the revelations of science, and the 
 developments of history, if they habitually connected 
 them with the operation of the same Divine Word who is 
 the centre of all their religious aspirations, it is needless 
 to say. Through the recognition of this idea with all 
 the consequences which flow from it, as a living influ- 
 ence, more than in any other way, may we hope to strike 
 the chords of that ' vaster music ' which results only 
 from the harmony of knowledge and of faith, of reverence 
 and research." 
 
 During the last two decades of the last century we 
 have seen this hope of our great Bishop largely ful- 
 filled. Not only in the theological writings of the two 
 other members of that wonderful Cambridge triumvir- 
 ate, in such brilliant essays as those of Aubrey Moore 2 
 and Dr. Illingworth 3 in Lux Mundi, and in the latter 
 writer's book on the " Divine Immanence," in Dr. Gore's
 
 ROBERT BROWNTNG 171 
 
 " Bampton Lectures," and in his " Dissertations on Sub- 
 jects connected with the Incarnation," in the many learned 
 and philosophical articles on the development of Christian 
 doctrine in Hastings' " Dictionary of the Bible," and 
 in the " Encyclopaedia Biblica," but also in the more 
 popular pulpit teaching of all thoughtful preachers of 
 our day, do we find the doctrine of the Incarnation, in 
 the larger sense indicated by Dr. Lightfoot, given a 
 place and prominence which was certainly quite unusual 
 thirty, or even twenty, years ago. 
 
 Anglican theology in fact seems to be gradually 
 passing behind the somewhat pinched and narrow faith 
 of the Latin theologians to the richer, more large-hearted, 
 more inspiring doctrine of the Incarnation, which is 
 characteristic of the great Greek Christian fathers of the 
 early Church. Our modes of thought, in fact to quote 
 a saying of Aubrey Moore are becoming every day 
 increasingly Greek. Slowly, and under the shock of 
 controversy, we seem to be recovering the buried truths 
 of Christianity, and to be realising the greatness of our 
 heritage. The almost forgotten doctrine of the Divine 
 Immanence, the belief in Christ, the incarnate Word, as 
 " creation's secret force," comes to us with all the power 
 of a new discovery. 
 
 I have observed that of late years it has become 
 rather the fashion to speak of this change of attitude in 
 Anglican theologians as mainly due to the publication of 
 Lux Mundi in the year 1889. Now, I have no wish, of 
 course, to deny that to the publication of that book, and 
 still more perhaps to the subsequent work of its editor
 
 172 THE CHRIST OF ENGLISH POETRY 
 
 and of his group of brilliant Oxford friends, much of 
 the revival of interest in the theological doctrines of 
 Christianity, and especially in their application to the 
 great social problems of modern life, is very largely 
 due. But we at least in Cambridge ought not, I think, 
 to forget that this re-statement or readjustment of 
 Christian doctrine, which has so intimately affected the 
 later character of the Anglican revival, had taken place 
 completely in the teaching of one great Christian Doctor 
 of the nineteenth century, perhaps its greatest, more 
 than sixty years ago I mean in the writings of 
 Frederick Denison Maurice. 
 
 I trust I am not exhibiting the spirit of a false Uni- 
 versity patriotism when I express the opinion that the 
 " Oxford Movement " in the English Church is hardly 
 the full equivalent of the "Anglican Revival" in the 
 nineteenth century, or of the mere partiality of an old 
 pupil in this place of Frederick Maurice, when I say 
 that it sometimes seems to me that the younger genera- 
 tion of Oxford theologians, who " regard themselves as 
 adjusting the High Church theology of Dr. Pusey and 
 his generation to the newer knowledge of our day," do 
 not, at least publicly, sufficiently recognise the debt 
 which they owe to Maurice for the lead which he gave 
 more than sixty years ago. 
 
 I do not mean, of course, to assert that the doctrine 
 of the Incarnation in its modern re-statement originated 
 solely with Maurice. But he was the theologian who 
 first in our time set it forth in the new form which the 
 new age needed. 4 
 
 Maurice himself confessed his obligation especially
 
 ROBERT BROWNING 173 
 
 to Coleridge, and there can be no doubt that that trans- 
 cendental thinker did give a very strong direction to 
 Maurice's thought, as indeed, in conjunction with 
 Wordsworth, he did to most of the early leaders of 
 the Liberal Movement in Theology in the last century. 
 Indeed, I think it is both interesting and curious to 
 observe that the teaching of Coleridge has been claimed 
 by both the Liberal and the Catholic school in the 
 Church of England as a chief source of inspiration. 
 You will all remember, for example, the passage in 
 Newman's " Apologia " in which that great leader claims 
 Coleridge as a philosophical initiator of the High Church 
 school, " laying a basis for Church feelings and opinions, 
 installing a higher philosophy into inquiring minds," 
 and thus " making trial of his age and succeeding in 
 interesting its genius in the cause of Catholic truth." 
 
 And it is true, no doubt, that, just as the literary 
 influence of Sir Walter Scott succeeded in turning back 
 the thoughts of Englishmen from eighteenth-century 
 prose to the glamour and poetry of the Middle Ages, 
 awakened them to the noble traditions of mediaeval 
 chivalry and romance, and thus prepared the way for the 
 Catholic revival in the Church of England, so also did 
 Coleridge help in his transcendental way to summon to 
 life from the Catholic past things which had been dead 
 or sleeping, which have in their turn contributed to the 
 enrichment and the impassionment of the religious imagi- 
 nation of the Anglo-Catholic school. 
 
 Yet it is nevertheless certain that the deeper life of 
 Coleridge's thought the spirit at least of such books as 
 his " Aids to Reflection," with its re-reading and renova-
 
 174 THE CHRIST OF ENGLISH POETRY 
 
 tion of the evangelical doctrines of Sin and Redemp- 
 tion ; his " Confessions of an Enquiring Spirit," with its 
 championship of a broad and yet a devout Biblical 
 criticism ; his essay on the " Constitution of Church and 
 State," with its revival of the historic idea of the Church 
 as an intellectual as well as a spiritual commonwealth- 
 belongs rather by strict legitimate descent to that school 
 of theology whose heredity, so to say, is plainly traceable 
 backwards through Maurice and Coleridge to the Cam- 
 bridge Platonists of the seventeenth century Cudworth, 
 Smith, Henry More, Whichcote ; to the Oxford re- 
 formers of the fifteenth century Colet, Erasmus, and 
 More : finally, behind the Latin set-back of a thousand 
 years, to the great Greek Christian fathers of the Cate- 
 chetical School of Alexandria at the close of the second 
 century. 6 
 
 And the Future can we indeed doubt it ? is with 
 this older Church, which is also the newer. For the 
 same God who has brought us back in our day to the 
 old problems of Christ's Personality, to the old problems 
 as it would almost seem of Athanasius and Irenaeus and 
 Origen, also sets to us to-day the task of solving them. 
 But we must not we cannot try to solve them quite 
 on the old lines. " Since the Fathers fell asleep " all 
 things have not quite remained as they were from the 
 beginning. Latin theology, western orthodoxy, have, 
 I suppose, taught the world their lesson. It is the 
 Church's fault, at least, if it has not learnt the meaning 
 of order and law, of discipline and dogma. But for us 
 to-day, for most of us to-day, the Latin Church is dead,
 
 ROBERT BROWNING 175 
 
 and, unless Christ Himself raise it from the dead, the 
 Future must look elsewhere for its guide. We cannot 
 forget St. Paul's maxim : " When old things are passed 
 away, behold they are become new ... in Christ there 
 is a new creation." It is always so. The old problems 
 are becoming new again to-day in the fuller light of 
 modern knowledge, the fuller light of Scripture and 
 History and Science. 
 
 And that we may assure ourselves that the witness of 
 these things is a witness of Hope, I am proposing to make 
 my appeal to-day not to the students of either Scripture, 
 or of History, or of Science, but to that poet of the last 
 century who was a true child of the new age in Christian 
 theology, and who saw far more clearly than many theo- 
 logians that these three Scripture, History, Science 
 must agree in one if they were to be a true witness to 
 that Incarnate Lord of all, who is the final truth of 
 this world and of all worlds to come. For the new 
 outlook in theology the Neo-Greek outlook, if I may 
 so call it is at the very heart of Browning's poetry. 
 The central doctrine of it, indeed, the Immanence of the 
 Divine in Man, which is the essential truth of the doctrine 
 of the Incarnation, involving, as it does, the reconsecration 
 through Christ of all human life and thought, and with 
 it the constant appeal to the eternal and spiritual issues 
 of human action, was perhaps for the first time with 
 success in English verse used essentially and avowedly as 
 a motive in Browning's poetry. This it is which makes 
 him, and will more and more, if I mistake not, as the 
 days go on, make him, the poetic exponent of the faiths, 
 hopes, and aspirations of our modern time.
 
 176 THE CHRIST OF ENGLISH POETRY 
 
 It finds, perhaps, its first and fullest expression in his 
 "Paracelsus," but it underlies all his subsequent poetry. 
 Paracelsus, the Renaissance scholar, half-genius, half- 
 charlatan, lies dying in the dim and narrow cell of the 
 hospital at Salzburg. All night his faithful friend has 
 watched beside his bed. The mind of the dying man is 
 working as the sea works after a tempest, and strange 
 wrecks of memory float past him in troubled visions. 
 At last calm comes with the dawn, and he knows his 
 friend, and it is laid upon him before he dies to tell the 
 secret of life. His past lies before him its wisdom and 
 sophistry, its success and failure, its great achievement, 
 its sorry farce and he sees at last the errors of his way. 
 " He had been dazzled by knowledge, and the power 
 conferred by knowledge : he had not understood God's 
 plan of gradual evolution through the ages : he had 
 laboured for his race in pride rather than in love : he 
 had been maddened by the intellectual infirmities, the 
 moral imperfections of men, whereas he ought to have 
 recognised even in these the capacities of a creature in 
 progress to a higher development. Now, at length, he 
 can follow in thought the great circle of God's creative 
 energy ever welling forth from Him in vast undulations, 
 ever tending to return to Him again, which return God- 
 wards is already foretold in the nature of man by august 
 anticipations, by strange gleams of splendour, by cares 
 and fears not bounded by this our earth." 
 
 " I knew, I felt, . . . what God is, what we are, 
 What life is, how God tastes an infinite joy 
 In infinite ways one everlasting bliss, 
 From whom all being emanates, all power
 
 ROBERT BROWNING 177 
 
 Proceeds ; in whom is life for evermore, 
 Yet whom existence in its lowest form 
 Includes ; where dwells enjoyment there is He : 
 With still a flying point of bliss remote, 
 A happiness in store afar, a sphere 
 Of distant glory in full view . . . 
 
 . . . God renews 
 
 His ancient rapture. Thus He dwells in all 
 From life's minute beginnings, up at last 
 To man the consummation of this scheme 
 Of being . . . 
 
 In my own heart love had not been made wise 
 To trace love's beginnings in mankind, 
 To know even hate is but a mask of love's ; 
 To see a good in evil, and a hope 
 In ill-success ; to sympathise, be proud 
 Of man's half reasons, faint aspirings, dim 
 Struggles for truth, their poorest fallacies, 
 Their prejudice and fears and cares and doubts : 
 All with a touch of nobleness, despite 
 Their error, upward tending all, though weak, 
 Like plants in mines which never saw the sun, 
 But dream of him and guess where he may be, 
 And do their best to climb and get to him. 
 
 ... If I stoop 
 
 Into a dark tremendous sea of cloud, 
 It is but for a time : I press God's lamp 
 Close to my breast : its splendour soon or late 
 Will pierce the gloom : I shall emerge one day." 7 
 
 Here in Browning's poetry are all the great affirma- 
 tions of Christianity which we find in that great christo- 
 logical sentence from the Epistle to the Colossians, which 
 I read as my text, and which in modern terms may be 
 expressed thus : God, whose Christian name is Love, 
 self-conscious Love, at the heart of all being, the Creator, 
 
 M
 
 178 THE CHRIST OF ENGLISH POETRY 
 
 the Father, the Educator of Humanity Evolution, 
 God's way of making things come to pass, God's way 
 of Order and Progress God and man, brought into 
 a relationship with one another, immediate and direct, 
 by the realisation of the true order of the world, as the 
 kingdom of the Son of His love, a kingdom invisible, 
 spiritual, universal Love, the energy of all life Life, 
 true life meaning Mission, meaning Discipline, meaning 
 Service never one lost good noble failure the way to 
 ultimate success Imperfection, only perfection hid, a 
 soul of goodness in things evil Death only the entrance 
 to fuller life and clearer vision, because Christ "is the 
 first-born from the dead," that in all things He might 
 have the pre-eminence. 
 
 It might seem perhaps most reverent to let the poet 
 speak for himself, and make his own words illustrate these 
 great affirmations. But that is, of course, impossible. 
 Browning's work is the largest body of poetry produced 
 by any one poet in the whole range of English literature. 
 It would be futile therefore to attempt to cover the 
 whole field suggested by these affirmations, even if I 
 could command the rapidity of him who " brought the 
 good news from Ghent." 
 
 Let me take two points only for representative 
 illustration. 
 
 I. Take first the Christian Faith in a good God, as 
 it is affected by that partus temporis, that category of our 
 age, the scientific hypothesis of Evolution. 
 
 " It is hard to believe in God," said Lord Tennyson 
 once, " but it is harder not to believe. I believe in God not 
 from what I see in nature, but from what I find in man.
 
 ROBERT BROWNING 179 
 
 . . . God is Love, transcendent, all-pervading. But we 
 do not get this faith from nature or the world. If we 
 look at nature alone, full of perfection and imperfec- 
 tion, she tells us that God is disease, murder and rapine. 
 We get this faith from ourselves, from what is highest 
 within us, which recognises that there is not one fruit- 
 less pang, just as there is not, as Browning says, * one 
 lost good/ " 
 
 The comparison which this last allusion of Lord 
 Tennyson suggests between his own " In Memoriam," 
 where in Cantos Iv.-lvi. he has written out large in verse 
 this prose expression of his faith, and Browning's splendid 
 lyric, " Abt Vogler," in which he expresses that hunger 
 for eternity and perfection which is at once the sign of 
 his romantic temper and the Christian basis of his ethical 
 theory of life, serves, I think, to remind us that both 
 Tennyson and Browning are children of our modern 
 age of new Science and new Theology. Both poets write 
 with the fullest knowledge of the discoveries of modern 
 science, and of the great problems that occupied the 
 minds of the deepest thinkers of their day. As we read 
 the cantos of "In Memoriam," we cannot help feeling 
 that Tennyson has read his Darwin, and understands the 
 facts of Evolution and of the struggle for existence ; and 
 yet 
 
 " He trusted God was love indeed, 
 And Love creation's final law, 
 Though Nature, red in tooth and claw 
 With ravine, shrieked against his creed." 
 
 We feel that Tennyson has read his Lyell, and knows 
 how the facts of geology show that what is true of
 
 i8o THE CHRIST OF ENGLISH POETRY 
 
 individuals is true of types, and that all creation lives 
 and dies, comes into existence and is transformed by im- 
 mutable laws 
 
 " So careful of the type ? But No ! 
 
 From scarped cliff and quarried stone 
 She cries, A thousand types are gone, 
 I care for nothing, all shall go. 
 
 I stretch lame hands of faith, and grope 
 
 And gather dust and chaff, and call 
 
 To what I feel is Lord of all, 
 And faintly trust the larger Hope." 
 
 We feel also that Tennyson has read his Herbert 
 Spencer, and that at least, like Spencer, he sees that this 
 world is not all, that underlying the known and know- 
 able facts of consciousness there is a great unknown, in 
 presence of which we can only veil our faces and bow 
 in reverent humility, and cry 
 
 " O yet we trust that somehow good 
 Will be the final goal of ill 
 To pangs of nature, sins of will, 
 Defects of doubt and taints of blood. 
 
 That nothing walks with aimless feet, 
 
 That not one life shall be destroyed, 
 
 Or cast as rubbish to the void 
 When God has made the pile complete." 
 
 And Browning knows all this, and feels this too 
 
 knows it perhaps with a more intimate knowledge 
 
 than Tennyson ; feels it assuredly with a deeper, more 
 
 passionate certainty of faith. You have only to read, 
 
 for example, the context of that passage which I quoted
 
 ROBERT BROWNING 181 
 
 from " Paracelsus," to realise how complete is Browning's 
 grasp of the great scientific hypothesis of Evolution ; and 
 this is the more remarkable when we remember that his 
 "Paracelsus" was published in 1835, an ^ Darwin's 
 " Origin of Species " not until twenty years after, in 
 1859. "All that seems proved in Darwin's scheme," 
 he wrote to Dr. Furnival in 1881, "was a conception 
 familiar to me from the beginning." And you certainly 
 will not read " Abt Vogler" without feeling how pas- 
 sionate is the certainty of Browning's faith. 
 
 " Abt Vogler " is only one of several poems dedi- 
 cated by Browning to Music. And there is, I think, 
 deep significance in this for the Christian apologist. I 
 have read somewhere that a poor cripple, shipwrecked in 
 all else save the noble intelligence, hobbled pitiably away 
 from the hearing of a Beethoven symphony in St. James's 
 Hall, exclaiming, "I have heard that music for the 
 fiftieth time. You see what I am. Yet, with this in 
 my soul I go down Regent Street a God ! " Is it 
 wonderful, then, do you think, that Robert Browning 
 conscious of the arid prospect for humanity in a merely 
 materialistic explanation of God's universe, in a theory 
 which possesses the power to see the material in all 
 things spiritual and mental, but fails to see the spiritual 
 and the mental in all things material should take Music 
 as the very mirror of the central universal laws, as " the 
 shadowed lesson of the world " (to use Sir Thomas 
 Browne's fine phrase), and gain from this universal 
 language, from its swift certitudes of intuition, from its 
 quick mysterious action upon the very pulses of the 
 soul of man, a new assurance for the certainty of the
 
 1 82 THE CHRIST OF ENGLISH POETRY 
 
 Christian truth that "in our Father's house there are 
 many mansions . . . not made with hands . . . for 
 the things which are seen are temporal, but the things 
 which are not seen are eternal " ? 
 
 In the poem of " Abt Vogler" Browning has repre- 
 sented the extemporising of the musician as filling the 
 void which he has himself created with the substance of 
 things hoped for, the evidence of things not seen. The 
 ghostly troop of sounds which the composer had sum- 
 moned to life crowd about him, climb and mount and 
 march upwards. As Solomon of old so runs the legend 
 of the Koran when he built a palace for the princess 
 whom he loved, summoned to his aid all armies of 
 angels and demons by the ineffable Name on his magic 
 ring, so now all the keys and stops, submitting to the 
 magic power of the master-hand of the musician, com- 
 bine to aid him the low notes rushing in like demons 
 to give him the bass on which to build his mighty 
 temple of sound, the high notes like angels crowding to 
 their many ministries of art and form and order and 
 proportion ; and, as the mystic building rises, the 
 musician's soul seems to be upborne on the wings of his 
 own mood into a realm where the limits of time and 
 space had gone " there was no more near nor far " 
 and, in that strange fusion of heaven and earth, the 
 spirits of the noble Dead " the wonderful Dead who 
 have passed through the body and gone " gather about 
 him and whisper to him ; and out of the music seems to 
 come a mystic message, a something which is far apart 
 from and above the sound not indeed a sound but a 
 star, " a star of the eternal sky," a flash of God's will,
 
 ROBERT BROWNING 183 
 
 which in that moment of vision opens the eternal world 
 to his very soul. He has slipped with sudden surprise 
 into a strain which is less his than God's. For a moment 
 he lives with it, passes to heaven with it, and then loses 
 it, and yet not altogether. Can any good be so transitory 
 as this music seems to have been ? It cannot be. The 
 great palace of Music, the magic temple, the phantom 
 worshippers, vanish away, it is true. The vision passes ; 
 but the sense of a mystery of Divine suggestion abides 
 in the heart; "the partial beauty" which is left remains 
 " a pledge of beauty in its plenitude." The memory of 
 the vision, even when he returns once more to the sober 
 uninteresting key of C major, to common everyday life, 
 the humdrum routine of hard duty and dull drudgery, 
 will never cease to be a ground of aspiration, a motive 
 for a faith wide as human life, deep as human need, 
 reaching on to heaven and eternity. 
 
 " Therefore to whom turn I but to Thee, the ineffable Name ? 
 Builder and Maker Thou of houses not made with hands ! 
 What ! have fear of change from Thee who art ever the same ? 
 Doubt that Thy power can fill the heart that Thy power expands ? 
 There shall never be one lost good ! what was, shall live as before ; 
 The evil is null, is nought, is silence implying sound ; 
 What was good, shall be good, with, for evil, so much good more ; 
 On the earth the broken aics ; in the heaven a perfect round. 
 All we have willed or hoped or dreamed of good, shall exist : 
 Not its semblance, but itself; no beauty, nor good, nor power, 
 Whose voice has gone forth, but each survives for the melodist 
 When eternity affirms the conception of an hour. 
 The high that proved too high, the heroic for earth too hard, 
 The passion that left the ground to lose itself in the sky, 
 Are music sent up to God by the lover and the bard ; 
 Enough that he heard it once : we shall hear it by and by.
 
 184 THE CHRIST OF ENGLISH POETRY 
 
 Sorrow is hard to bear, and doubt is slow to clear. 
 Each sufferer says his say, his scheme of the weal and woe : 
 But God has a few of us whom He whispers in the ear. 
 The rest may reason and welcome : 'tis we musicians know." 
 
 And perhaps the musicians are right. At any rate 
 Browning in this poem, and in many another with the 
 same matter of thought " The Grammarian's Funeral," 
 "Rabbi ben Ezra," "Andrea del Sarto," "Prospice" 
 has his lesson for the Christian apologist ay, for the 
 Christian believer that without sin and evil and failure 
 in the world, that without the Fall in the Garden of 
 Eden, men might have been angels, but they never could 
 have been men ; that without defect of Nature, without 
 Imperfection, God's kindest gift, they could never have 
 had God's noblest gift, the desire for Perfection ; they 
 never could have had the charm of discovery, of pursuit, 
 of conquest, the slow upbuilding of moral character ; they 
 never could have had the great and loving lives which 
 throughout the history of Christendom have suffered and 
 sacrificed and saved, from Christ Himself to the humblest 
 of His martyrs starving for their children's sake in a 
 London slum. True, with Browning as a teacher, the 
 apologist and the theologian may have to welcome with 
 admiration and thankfulness all the verified conclusions 
 of evolutionary science, as so many revelations of the 
 creative methods of the Divine Father of Humanity, 
 may find it even necessary, in deference to the just claims 
 of science and of history, and to the new terms of modern 
 thought, to restate for the present age the dogmas of his 
 faith, to readjust its doctrines, to refocus its truth. But 
 one thing the Christian apologist, if he is a true follower
 
 ROBERT BROWNING 185 
 
 of Browning, will not do. He will not give up his faith 
 in the Divine Fatherhood of God, and the filial relation- 
 ship of man to God as the true basis of social order, or 
 his optimistic faith in a good God controlling all the 
 forces of evolution as the true source of social and moral 
 progress. 
 
 Whatever Nature, therefore, may appear to be to the 
 scientific evolutionist, to the Christian evolutionist it must 
 ever remain precious as the sphere in which a Divine Life 
 is manifested, as the object on which a Divine Love is 
 lavished. If Huxley was right when he taught us that 
 " cosmic force has no sort of relation to moral ends," 
 then we must remember that Browning has taught us to 
 call in ethical force to redress the balance, and to say that 
 that theory of evolution is incomplete which claims to 
 estimate the influence of the cosmic process on men in 
 society, and fails to give its due weight to the ethical. 
 As Christians, indeed, we shall demand a wider and a 
 nobler conception of evolution as the way in which God 
 makes things come to pass, as, in fact, to use a phrase of 
 Herbert Spencer, "a transfigured realism,*' a conception 
 in which, though the prehistoric triumph of cosmic 
 nature, the fierce struggle for existence " Nature red in 
 tooth and claw with ravine " cannot be forgotten (shall 
 we ever forget the mystery of Pain until perhaps " behind 
 the veil '* we learn its secret ?), yet also a conception in 
 which what we shall most care to remember will be the 
 greater and still more marvellous triumphs of the ethical 
 process of evolution, not the miracles by which out of 
 fierce despotism has come forth liberty ; out of slavery, 
 freedom ; out of selfishness, self-sacrifice ; out of might
 
 1 86 THE CHRIST OF ENGLISH POETRY 
 
 right ; out of fear, reverence ; out of lust, love ; out of 
 the conflicts of self-interest, morality and virtue ; ah, 
 no ! but rather the marvellous triumphs of the grace of 
 God in the human heart, by which out of suffering has 
 come moral strength and nobility of character; out 
 of the mystery of pain have grown the marvels of 
 spiritual victory ; out of the fires of trial have been 
 won the purity of the soul ; out of failure borne nobly 
 in the present has been gained for us hereafter a far 
 more exceeding weight of glory ; out of martyrdom has 
 grown moral supremacy. 
 
 " Then welcome each rebuff 
 
 That turns earth's smoothness rough, 
 Each sting that bids nor sit nor stand but go ! 
 
 Be our joys three parts pain ! 
 
 Strive to hold cheap the strain ; 
 Learn, nor account the pang : dare, never grudge the throe. 
 
 For thence a paradox 
 
 Which comforts while it mocks 
 Shall life succeed in that it seems to fail : 
 
 What I aspired to be, 
 
 And was not, comforts me ; 
 A brute I might have been, but would not sink in the scale." 
 
 Such a faith as this of Browning, believe me, is, as Mr. 
 Balfour once said, " no ray of metaphysics floating in the 
 sunshine of sentimentalism," for it rests on a positive 
 basis, which only becomes broader and firmer with the 
 widening of human experience. 
 
 II. I have only time left for one other consideration. 
 "How," it may be asked, "does this poet of our
 
 ROBERT BROWNING 187 
 
 modern time, who undeniably exhibits such keen spiritual 
 insight, interpret for us the personality of the Christ 
 Himself in its influence on the spiritual nature of man ? " 
 To answer that question, we turn in the first instance 
 naturally, I think, to the two related poems of " Christmas 
 Eve " and " Easter Day." The former has for its subject 
 the spiritual life corporate, the latter the spiritual life 
 individual. The former is a noble commentary on the 
 text, " Where two or three are gathered together in My 
 name, there am I in the midst of them," there am I 
 present in infinite compassion and love ; not only with 
 the refined, or the cultivated, or the aesthetic, or the 
 orthodox disciples, but with the vulgar, and the ugly, 
 and the ignorant, and the narrow. The latter is an 
 equally fine commentary on the text, " Apart from Me 
 ye can do nothing," forcing each of us to face our 
 complacent religious selves, and to know whether we 
 really feel what we profess to feel, the utter desola- 
 tion of a character in which the root of love is cut ofF 
 from all that can feed its true life. 
 
 The poem of " Christmas Eve " is written on the 
 motive which is central to so much of Browning's 
 poetry, that love is the supreme transfiguring power of 
 life, and that therefore love is the one thing needful 
 to true worship, the "good part" which, for those 
 who choose it, Christ will not suffer any diversity of 
 creed or development of doctrine ever to take from any 
 one of us. 
 
 The poet tells how one Christmas Eve he was 
 driven by stress of weather to take refuge in a little 
 chapel a poor place, standing disconsolate, with a few
 
 1 88 THE CHRIST OF ENGLISH POETRY 
 
 houses near it, on the edge of a desolate common. The 
 unsavoury atmosphere, " the hot smell and the human 
 noises," the unattractive in some cases repulsive- 
 worshippers ; above all, 
 
 " The preaching man's immense stupidity 
 As he poured his doctrine forth full measure 
 To meet his audience's avidity : 
 
 as in fine irreverence he pulled the Book of books to 
 pieces, and proved to demonstration how the Egyptian 
 
 " Baker's dream of baskets three 
 Proved doctrine of the Trinity," 
 
 all these are too much for the fine sensibilities of the 
 poet, and he " flings out of the little chapel " into the 
 wind and rain, in utter disgust at the paltry and narrow 
 faith of these professed worshippers of Christ. He will 
 worship God in the fresh, free air. The open heaven 
 shall be his temple : 
 
 " When lo ! what think you ? suddenly 
 The rain and the wind ceased, and the sky 
 Received at once the full fruition 
 Of the moon's consummate apparition. 
 The black cloud-barricade was riven, 
 Ruined beneath her feet, and driven 
 Deep in the west ; while bare and breathless 
 North and south and east lay ready 
 For a glorious thing, that dauntless, deathless 
 Sprang across them and stood steady. 
 'Twas a moon rainbow, vast and perfect, 
 From heaven to heaven extending, perfect 
 As the mother-moon's self, full in face,
 
 ROBERT BROWNING 189 
 
 It rose distinctly at the base, 
 
 With its seven proper colours chorded, 
 
 Which still in the rising were compressed, 
 
 Until at last they coalesced, 
 
 And supreme the spectral creature lorded 
 
 In a triumph of whitest white 
 
 Above which intervened the night. 
 
 But above night too like only the next, 
 
 The second of a wondrous sequence, 
 
 Reaching in rare and rarer frequence 
 
 Till the heaven of heavens was circumflext, 
 
 Another rainbow rose, a mightier, 
 
 Fainter, flushier, and flightier 
 
 Rapture dying along its verge ! 
 
 Oh, whose foot shall I see emerge, 
 
 WHOSE, from the straining topmost dark 
 
 On to the keystone of that arc ?" 
 
 Then follows the vision of the Christ, at once more 
 supernatural and more unquestionably real, as it would 
 seem, because of the sublimity of the scene, springing out 
 of the grotesquerie " He, Himself with His human 
 air," who had been in the chapel too, and had left it 
 apparently with the poet. The disciple tries to justify 
 himself in some sort for despising Christ's friends. 
 
 " I thought it best that Thou, the Spirit 
 Be worshipped in spirit and in truth, 
 And in beauty as even we require it 
 Not in the forms burlesque, uncouth, 
 I Irft but now, as scarcely fitted 
 For Thee . . . Then 
 
 The whole Face turned upon me full 
 And I spread myself beneath it, 
 As when the bleacher spreads, to seethe it,
 
 i 9 o THE CHRIST OF ENGLISH POETRY 
 
 In the cleansing sun, his wool 
 Steeps in the flood of noontide whiteness 
 Some defiled, discoloured web 
 So lay I saturate with brightness." 
 
 And the Master accepts the love, mistaken and im- 
 perfect though it is. He gathers the suppliant, as it 
 were, in the folds of His long sweeping garment, carries 
 him across the world, and in vision " whether in the body 
 or out of the body he cannot tell," shows him other sights 
 of other worshippers at the high Festival on Christmas 
 Eve in S. Peter's at Rome, in the Lecture Room of the 
 sceptical Professor at Gottingen sheep of the good 
 Shepherd who are not of this fold and teaches him ail 
 the lesson of His Love, until at last the disciple, at the 
 bidding of Love 
 
 " From the gift looking to the Giver, 
 And from the cistern to the River, 
 And from the finite to infinity, 
 And from man's dust to God's divinity," 
 
 learns that although there needs must be one best 
 way of worship, if indeed it is God's design to bring 
 all wanderers to the true fold at last, yet for each 
 disciple the best way of worship is that which is required 
 by his own highest thought, his own purest passion, 
 because Love, and no other word, is written on the 
 forehead of all true worshippers of the Incarnate Christ 
 in whose eyes love with defective knowledge is of infi- 
 nitely more spiritual worth than knowledge with defective 
 
 love 
 
 " For the loving worm within its clod 
 Were diviner than a loveless God 
 Amid his worlds, I will dare to say."
 
 ROBERT BROWNING 191 
 
 In the companion poem of " Easter Day " it is still 
 this thought of the supremacy of Love which is at the 
 heart of the poem. The poet pictures himself once 
 again by night on the desolate common, musing upon 
 the secret of life and wondering how it would be with 
 him if he were to die and find himself in a moment 
 in the presence of his Divine Judge. Suddenly the doom 
 is upon him. A fierce and vindictive scribble of red 
 quick flame runs across the blackness of night : and a 
 Voice beside him proclaims that 
 
 " Life is done, 
 Time ends, eternity's begun." 
 
 And in the probation of life he knows that his choice 
 has been not for heaven, but for earth, for the world 
 of sense, with all its joy, its beauty, its art, its success, 
 its knowledge. And again the Voice proclaims, " Eternity 
 is here and thou art judged ; thou hast chosen, the joys 
 of earth be thine." But again all looks as it did before. 
 He could not make it out. The world gone, yet here. 
 Judgment past and eternity begun, and yet all things 
 as in other days. It must be a horrid dream. He tries 
 to shake it off. But in vain. Gradually, to his despair, 
 he finds that what he had chosen brings him no 
 happiness, no content. The plenitude of beauty, the 
 glory of art, the joy of knowledge, all these fail him. 
 Earth is no longer earth to the doomed man. In the 
 horror of its blank and passionless uniformity, he cowers 
 at the Judge's feet, and knows at last that Love is the 
 essence and the worth of all things, and he cries for 
 that, for Love only
 
 192 THE CHRIST OF ENGLISH POETRY 
 
 " Is this thy final choice? 
 Love is the best? 'Tis somewhat late ! 
 And all thou dost enumerate 
 Of power and beauty in the world, 
 The righteousness of love was curled 
 Inextricably round about. 
 Love lay within it and without, 
 To clasp thee but in vain ! Thy soul 
 Still shrunk from Him who made thee whole, 
 Still set deliberate aside 
 His love ! Now take love ! Well betide 
 Thy tardy conscience ! " 
 
 So at last to the heart of the poet, driven to his last 
 fortress, contrite, broken, Christ the Doomsman becomes 
 in a moment Christ the Saviour : 
 
 " Then did the Form expand, expand 
 I knew Him through the dread disguise 
 As the whole God within His eyes 
 Embraced me. . . . 
 
 . . . But Easter-Day breaks ! But 
 Christ rises ! Mercy every way 
 Is infinite, and who can say ? " 
 
 And " who can say ? " So he ends on the same note 
 with which he began. " How very hard it is to be a 
 Christian ! " Was this indeed his last word ? or would 
 perhaps Browning have said in similar words to those of 
 his great compeer, Tennyson, " How very hard it is to 
 be a Christian, but how very much harder not to be " ? 
 I cannot say. But this surely I may say of him and of 
 many another in these days, who owe to Christianity 
 their whole philosophy, their whole view of life, their 
 supreme ideal for the conduct of life, who look to 
 Christianity also for the only answer they can find to
 
 ROBERT BROWNING 193 
 
 those eternal problems which face and perplex us all, who 
 still like the captive exiles of old worship " towards the 
 Temple," though for the present they may be outside 
 its visible walls ; " they cannot, indeed, be excluded 
 from membership at least in the mystical body of 
 Christ, which is * the blessed company of all faithful 
 people,' for by the only test which Christ Himself 
 suggested for membership, they do belong to His 
 Church, to the soul of His Church, for they 'bring 
 forth the fruits of the Spirit,' they are not yet deserters to 
 the world, they are not fleshly, or cruel, or malicious, but 
 loving and joyful, and kind and gentle and good." 
 Whether Browning was a good churchman or not I 
 cannot say. But I will say that he was a good Christian, 
 he belonged to the " soul of the Church " ; he was one 
 of those men who ever serve to remind the Church of 
 that which she is always in danger of forgetting, that 
 no dogma and no fact of history has any true religious 
 life at all, if it is divorced from its spiritual or moral 
 significance. For though the soul the soul of the 
 Church may live without the body, the body cannot 
 live without the soul. 
 
 I have no time to say more. One final word only 
 of Browning himself. The lessons which he taught 
 us in " Christmas Eve " and " Easter Day " he repeated 
 in other poems over and over again. 9 It is always 
 the same lesson the moral significance of the Chris- 
 tian ideas always the lesson which shines out from 
 that Life, which though it was the typical tragedy of 
 mankind, yet was the life of One, of whose sublime 
 optimism, of whose radiant view of human nature, and 
 
 N
 
 194 THE CHRIST OF ENGLISH POETRY 
 
 its potential goodness, no word of recantation could be 
 drawn, either by the moral agony of which in the Garden 
 of Gethsemane the bloody sweat was the symbol, or by 
 the physical agony of which on the Hill of Calvary the 
 death on the Cross was the reality ; the lesson, namely, 
 that the divine love to be found in the heart of Humanity 
 is the witness for a Diviner Love which we can trust for 
 ever and ever, for it is the witness of that "Light which 
 shineth ever out of darkness," " the Light of the know- 
 ledge of the glory of God in the face of Jesus Christ." 
 
 This, my friends, I dare to say, is the witness which 
 has enabled the poet-seers of all the ages, and not least 
 the poet of whom I have tried to speak to you to-day, 
 to sing aloud above the storm waves of this life their 
 " Gloria in Excelsis." 
 
 " The best is yet to be, 
 The last of life for which the first was made : 
 
 Our times are in His hand 
 
 Who saith a whole I planned, 
 Youth shows but half: trust God, see all, nor be afraid." 
 
 And it was because our poet had this optimism, because 
 he had sunshine and love in his heart, because he had 
 grasped so strongly the great Christian idea the idea of 
 the spiritual ascent and evolution of man because he 
 was " at one with humanity, and therefore loving, aspir- 
 ing to God and believing in God, and therefore steeped 
 to the lips in radiant Hope, at one with the past, 
 passionate with the present, and possessing by faith an 
 endless and glorious future," because, too to quote his 
 own death-words he was
 
 ROBERT BROWNING 195 
 
 " One who never turned his back, but marched breast forward, 
 Never doubted clouds would break, 
 
 Never dreamed, though right were worsted, wrong would triumph. 
 Held we fall to rise, are baffled to fight better, 
 Sleep to wake " 
 
 that his poetry must ever remain for his countrymen a 
 well-spring of spiritual strength, prompting them to 
 abundant moods of worship and reverence, of deep-seated 
 gratitude and sovereign love. 
 
 10
 
 NOTES AND ILLUSTRATIONS TO 
 LECTURE IV 
 
 NOTE i, p. 170. 
 
 THE two great Christological passages in S. Paul are Coloss. i. 
 15-20 and Ephes. i. 10-23. They will be found to justify 
 the statement of my lecture, as they do the following passage in 
 Bishop Lightfoot's " Commentary " : 
 
 "S. Paul represents the mediatorial function of Christ as 
 twofold : it is exercised in the natural creation, and it is exercised 
 in the spiritual creation. In both these spheres His initiative is 
 absolute, His control is universal, His action is complete. By His 
 agency the world of nature was created and is sustained. He is 
 at once the beginning and the end of the natural universe. ' All 
 things have been created through Him and unto Him.' Nor 
 is His office in the spiritual world less complete. In the Church, 
 as in the universe, He is sole, absolute, supreme ; the primary 
 source from which all life proceeds, and the ultimate arbiter in 
 whom all feuds are reconciled. 
 
 " On the one hand, in relation to Deity, He is the visible image 
 of the invisible God. He is not only the chief manifestation 
 of the Divine nature : He exhausts the Godhead manifested. 
 In Him resides the totality of the Divine powers and attributes. 
 For this totality Gnostic teachers had a technical term the 
 pleroma, or plenitude. . . . S. Paul asserts, and repeats the 
 assertion, that the pleroma abides absolutely and wholly in Christ 
 as the Word of God. The entire light is concentrated in Him. 
 
 " Hence it follows, as regards created things, His supre- 
 macy must be absolute. In heaven as in earth, over things 
 
 196
 
 NOTES TO LECTURE IV 197 
 
 immaterial, as over things material, He is King. Speculations 
 on the nature of intermediate spiritual agencies their names, 
 their ranks, their offices were rife in the schools of Judzeo- 
 Gnostic thought. < Thrones, dominations, princedoms, virtues, 
 powers ' these formed part of the spiritual nomenclature which 
 they have invented to describe different grades of angelic media- 
 tors. Without entering into these speculations, the Apostle 
 asserts that Christ is Lord of all, the highest and the lowest, 
 whatever rank they may hold, and by whatever name they are 
 called (cf. Coloss. i. 1 6 and Eph. i. 21), for they are parts of 
 creation, and He is the source of creation. Through Him they 
 became, and unto Him they tend. ... It follows from the true 
 conception of Christ's Person, that He, and He alone, can bridge 
 over the chasm between earth and heaven ; for He is at once 
 the lowest and the highest. He raises up man to God, for He 
 brings down God to man. Thus the chain is reduced to a single 
 link, this link being the Word made flesh. As the pleroma resides 
 in Him, so is it communicated to us through Him. To substitute 
 allegiance to any other spiritual mediator, is to scorn the connection 
 of the limbs with the Head, which is the centre of life and the 
 mainspring of all energy throughout the body " (Bishop Light- 
 foot on "The Epistle to the Colossians," pp. 102-5). Following 
 the passage which I have quoted in my lecture, this frank state- 
 ment of the Bishop (on page 117) may be noted : "It will be 
 said, indeed, that this conception leaves untouched the philo- 
 sophical difficulties which beset the subject ; that creation still 
 remains as much a mystery as before. This may be allowed. 
 But is there' any reason to think that with our present limited 
 capacities the veil which shrouds it ever will or can be removed ? 
 The metaphysical speculations of twenty-five centuries have 
 done nothing to raise it. The physical investigations of our own 
 age, from their very nature, can do nothing ; for buried with the 
 evolution of phenomena, they lie wholly outside this question, 
 and do not even touch the fringe of the difficulty. But mean- 
 while revelation has interposed and thrown out the idea, which,
 
 198 
 
 if it leaves many questions unsolved, gives a breadth and unity 
 to our conceptions, at once satisfying |our religious needs and 
 linking our scientific instincts with our theological beliefs." 
 
 NOTE 2, p. 170. 
 
 " The one absolutely impossible conception of God, in the 
 present day, is that which represents Him as an occasional 
 Visitor. Science had pushed the Deist's God farther and farther 
 away, and at the moment when it seemed as if He would be 
 thrust out altogether, Darwinism appeared, and under the guise 
 of a foe did the work of a friend. It has conferred upon philo- 
 sophy and religion an inestimable benefit, by showing us that 
 we must choose between two alternatives. Either God is 
 everywhere present in Nature, or He is nowhere. He cannot 
 be here and not there ; He cannot delegate His power to 
 demigods called * second causes.' In Nature everything must 
 be His work or nothing. We must frankly return to the 
 Christian view of direct Divine agency, the immanence of Divine 
 power in Nature from end to end, the belief in a God in whom 
 not only we, but all things have their being, or we must banish 
 Him altogether. It seems as if in the providence of God the 
 mission of modern science was to bring home to our unmeta- 
 physical ways of thinking the great truth of the Divine im- 
 manence in creation, which is not less essential to the Christian 
 idea of God than to a philosophical view of Nature. And it 
 comes to us almost like a new truth, which we cannot at once 
 fit in with the old. 
 
 " Yet the conviction that the Divine immanence must be for 
 our age, as for the Athanasian age, the meeting-point of the reli- 
 gious and the philosophic view of God, is showing itself in the 
 most thoughtful minds on both sides. Our modes of thought 
 are becoming increasingly Greek, and the flood which in our day 
 is surging up against the traditional Christian view of God is 
 prevailingly pantheistic in tone. The pantheism is not less
 
 NOTES TO LECTURE IV 199 
 
 pronounced because it comes as the last word of a science of 
 Nature, for the wall which once separated physics from meta- 
 physics has given way, and positivism, when it is not the paralysis 
 of reason, is but a temporary resting-place preparatory to a new 
 departure. We are not surprised, then, that one who, like 
 Professor Fiske, holds that * the infinite and eternal power that 
 is manifested in every pulsation of the universe is none other 
 than the living God,' and who vindicates the belief in a final cause 
 because he cannot believe that * the sustainer of the universe will 
 put us to permanent intellectual confusion,' should instinctively 
 feel his kinship with Athanasianism and vigorously contend 
 against the view that any part of the universe is * godless ' ! " 
 (Aubrey Moore, on "The Christian Doctrine of God," in Lux 
 Mundly ist edition, pp. 99, 100 ; " Idea of God," cf. sec. v. and 
 pp. 105-110). 
 
 NOTE 3, p. 170. 
 
 " These are a few broad results of our comparative survey 
 of religions. That religion, however humble the mode of its first 
 appearing, is yet universal to man. That it progresses through 
 the agency of the great individual, the unique personality, the 
 spiritual genius, while popular influence is a counter-agent and 
 makes for its decay. That its various developments have all 
 been partial, and therefore needed completion, if the cravings of 
 the human spirit were ever to be set at rest. 
 
 " And all this is in perfect harmony with our Christian belief 
 in a God who, from the day of man's first appearance in the dim 
 twilight of the world, left not Himself without witness in sun 
 and moon and rain and storm-cloud, and the courses of the stars, 
 and the promptings of the conscience and the love of kin ; and 
 who the while was lighting every man that cometh into the 
 world the primaeval hunter, the shepherd chieftain, the poets of 
 the Vedas and the Gathas, the Chaldaean astronomer, the Egyptian 
 priest, each, at least in a measure, to spell that witness out aright ; 
 ever and anon when a heart was ready revealing Himself with
 
 200 THE CHRIST OF ENGLISH POETRY 
 
 greater clearness, to one or another chosen spirit, and by their 
 means to other men ; till, at length in the fulness of time, when 
 Jews were yearning for one in whom righteousness should 
 triumph visibly ; and Greeks sighing over the divorce between 
 truth and power, and wondering whether the wise man ever 
 would indeed be king ; and artists and ascetics wandering equally 
 astray, in vain attempt to solve the problem of the spirit and the 
 flesh ; the Word was made flesh and dwelt among us, full of 
 grace and truth. The pre-Christian religions were the age-long 
 prayer. The Incarnation was the answer. 
 
 "But when all this has been said, there is a lingering sus- 
 picion in many minds, that even if the details of the doctrine of 
 development are not inconsistent with Christianity, its whole 
 drift is incompatible with any system of opinion which claims 
 to possess finality. And if Christianity were only a system of 
 opinion, the objection might be plausible enough. But its claim 
 to possess finality rests upon its further claim to be much more 
 than a system of opinion. The doctrine of development or 
 evolution, we must remember, is not a doctrine of limitless 
 change, like the old Greek notion of perpetual flux. Species 
 once developed are seen to be persistent in proportion to their 
 versatility, their power, i.e. of adapting themselves to the changes 
 of the world around them. And because man through his mental 
 capacity possesses this power to an almost unlimited extent, the 
 human species is virtually permanent. Now, in scientific language, 
 the Incarnation may be said to have introduced a new species 
 into the world a Divine man transcending past humanity, as 
 humanity transcended the rest of the animal creation, and com- 
 municating His vital energy by a spiritual process to subsequent 
 generations of men. And thus viewed there is nothing unreason- 
 able in the claim of Christianity to be at least as permanent as 
 the race which it has raised to a higher power, and endued with 
 a novel strength.
 
 2OI 
 
 "The Incarnation opened heaven, for it was the revelation 
 of the Word ; but it also reconsecrates earth, for the Word was 
 made flesh and dwelt among us. And it is impossible to read 
 history without feeling how profoundly the religion of the In- 
 carnation has been a religion of humanity. The human body 
 itself, which heathendom has so degraded, that noble minds 
 could only view it as the enemy and prison of the soul, acquired 
 a new meaning, exhibited new graces, shone with a new lustre 
 in the light of the Word made flesh ; and thence, in widening 
 circles, the family, the society, the state, feel in their turn the 
 impulse of the Christian spirit, with its * touches of things 
 common, till they rose to touch the spheres.' Literature revived; 
 art flamed into fuller life ; even science in its early days owed 
 more than men often think to the Christian temper and the 
 Christian reverence for things once called common or unclean. 
 While the optimism, the belief in the future, the atmosphere of 
 hopefulness, which has made our progress and achievements 
 possible, and which when all counter currents have been allowed 
 for, so deeply differentiates the modern from the ancient world, 
 dates, as a fact of history, from those buoyant days of the early 
 Church, when the creed of suicide was vanquished before the 
 creed of martyrdom, Seneca before St. Paul. It is true that 
 secular civilisation is, as we have seen, in the Christian view, 
 nothing less than the providential civilisation and counterpart of 
 the Incarnation. For the Word did not desert the rest of His 
 creation to become Incarnate. Natural religion and natural 
 morality and the natural play of intellect have their function in 
 the Christian as they had in the pre-Christian ages ; and are still 
 kindled by the light that lighteth every man coming into the 
 world. And hence it is that secular thought has so often 
 corrected and counteracted the evil of a Christianity grown 
 professional, and false, and foul" (J. R. Illingworth on the 
 Incarnation and Development, in Lux Mundi y pp. 205, 207, 
 and 212).
 
 202 THE CHRIST OF ENGLISH POETRY 
 
 NOTE 4, p. 172. 
 
 There are those who think, and not without reason as it seems 
 to me, that it would not be too much to say that it was the 
 doctrine of Maurice, rather than that of Pusey and Newman, 
 which for forty years Maurice began his work in 1835, he died 
 in 1872 "kept the whole forward movement in the social and 
 political life of the English people in union with God and iden- 
 tified with religion." It is his doctrine, moreover, which, idealised 
 and transfigured by the two great poets of the century, Tenny- 
 son and Browning, dominant in the teaching of the Cambridge 
 schools of Lightfoot and Westcott and Hort, assimilated, as it 
 would seem, almost unconsciously by the younger Oxford theo- 
 logians of the Lux Mundi school, has during the last twenty 
 years turned so wisely the current of our English Christianity 
 to the consideration of the great social problems of the age, and 
 is at this moment so profoundly affecting, moulding, inspiring, 
 transfiguring the social ideals of the present. 
 
 NOTE 5, p. 173. 
 
 " Coleridge was to England, both in theology and literature, 
 what Schleiermacher and Goethe were to Germany. The same 
 antecedent influences had entered into his being. Growing up 
 under the traditions of the eighteenth century, he had undergone 
 a revolution in his spirit as he yielded to the magic power 
 which was transforming the age. He read Plato in the light 
 of his Alexandrian commentators ; he studied Kant, and more 
 especially Schelling ; he also was thrilled by the prospect of a 
 great future for humanity, of which the French Revolution had 
 seemed to him a foretaste ; he bent before Spinoza, receiving 
 the full significance of his thought, and yet discerning more 
 clearly than Schleiermacher had done wherein lay the deficiency 
 of the doctrine of ' the one substance.' It has been said of him 
 that, taking up a volume of Spinoza, he kissed the portrait of
 
 NOTES TO LECTURE IV 203 
 
 his face, and said, l This book is a gospel to me ' ; but he imme- 
 diately added, * his philosophy is nevertheless false.' The 
 weakness of Spinoza's teaching, he went on to affirm, lay in 
 his beginning with an 'it is ' instead of the * I am.' In his 
 desultory poems, where the truth of the Divine Immanence is 
 seen inspiring his thought, he reveals also the process in his mind 
 accompanying its reception, as though such a belief were better 
 suited to humanity in its present stage of existence. There are 
 passages, however, in Coleridge's poetry which assert this con- 
 viction in language so unqualified that, if we did not know how 
 deep and unshaken was his adherence to the personality of God, 
 we might think them the utterances of undisguised pantheism 
 confounding God with His creation : 
 
 ' 'Tis the sublime of man, 
 Our noontide majesty, to know ourselves 
 Part and proportions of one wondrous whole. 
 This fraternises man, this constitutes 
 Our charities and bearings. But 'tis God 
 Diffused through all that doth make all one whole ; 
 This the worst superstition, him except 
 Aught to desire, supreme Reality.' 
 
 Or again, speaking of nature in its relation to God : 
 
 * And what if all animated nature 
 Be but organic harps diversely framed 
 That tremble into thought, as o'er them sweeps 
 Plastic and vast one intellectual breeze 
 At once the soul of each, and God of all ? ' 
 
 " So, too, the spirit of Wordsworth's poetry bears witness to his 
 consciousness of the larger revelation which God was vouchsafing 
 to his age. In his light he saw humanity clothed with a new 
 dignity : even the lowliest and most common things were in- 
 vested with a sacred charm, because all things were viewed as if 
 in God :
 
 204 THE CHRIST OF ENGLISH POETRY 
 
 " I have felt 
 
 A presence that disturbs me with the joy 
 Of elevated thoughts ; a sense sublime 
 Of something far more deeply interfused, 
 Whose dwelling is the light of setting suns, 
 And the round ocean and the living air, 
 And the blue sky and the mind of man ; 
 A motion and a spirit that impress 
 All thinking things, all objects of all thought, 
 And rolls through all things." 
 
 " Even Shelley, who has been set down as an atheist for reject- 
 ing, in somewhat contemptuous language, the decision which the 
 popular religious mind had not outgrown, illustrates the working 
 of some deeper, more comprehensive idea of God at the basis of 
 the aspirations, the struggles, the confusions, and the discontent 
 which marked his inner life. ' His subtle intellect,' says his 
 biographer, 'delighted in the thought that behind the universal 
 mind, behind even the life of its life, which he calls spirit, there 
 was some more recondite principle, some more essential substance, 
 the nature of which we cannot imagine or find a name for.' 
 
 " The same influence which was remoulding religious thought, 
 and inspiring a fresh literature, appears also in art, whose affiliation 
 with theology is of no accidental kind. The founder of a new 
 school arose in Turner, whose greatness lay in his power to 
 represent nature as it appeared after passing through the medium 
 of the human spirit. The principle of the spiritual interpretation 
 of nature in art, through the power of the human imagination in 
 reading its hidden meaning, was seen by William Blake, to whom 
 religion and artistic insight were identical, though his statement 
 of the principle may seem exaggerated or fanciful : 
 
 " < I assert for myself that I do not behold the outward creation, 
 and that to me it is hindrance, and not action. What ! it will 
 be questioned, when the sun rises, do you not see a round disc 
 of fire, somewhat like a guinea ? Oh, no ! no ! I see an 
 innumerable company of the heavenly host, crying, Holy, Holy,
 
 NOTES TO LECTURE IV 205 
 
 Holy is the Lord God Almighty ! I question not my corporal 
 eye any more than I would question a window concerning a 
 sight. I look through it and not with it.' 
 
 "It has been a fortunate coincidence that modern science 
 should have been attended by such a companion as modern art, 
 to prevent it from degenerating to a merely physical basis, apart 
 from God and from its inner relations to the human spirit. But 
 science also has contributed to illustrate and enforce the belief 
 that God indwells in His creation. The acknowledgment of its 
 indebtedness to science for the consummation of this truth is a 
 duty which theology has been slow in rendering. The mystics 
 of the last century were hovering in thought about a mystery 
 contained in nature which had some close connection with the 
 religious life. The mystery was no other than the Divine 
 Immanence in nature as revealed in the forces whose activity is 
 everywhere governed by eternal immutable law. Hitherto in 
 the popular conception of the Middle Ages, as well as under the 
 influence of Calvin's theology, the great processes of nature were 
 believed to be carried on from without by angelic mediators, to 
 each of whom was assigned his especial office. It would have 
 been a poor substitute for so beautiful and poetic a belief, if the 
 laws of nature had been shown to be necessary forces apart from 
 God. But when Deity is revealed as immanent in the life of 
 nature, it implies a sense of nearer and closer relationship to God 
 than the angelic host in all its beauty and splendour could ever 
 convey. To have God Himself is the highest reach and aspira- 
 tion of the soul " (Professor A. V. G. Allen, " The Continuity 
 of Christian Thought," pp. 402-407). 
 
 NOTE 6, p. 174. 
 
 " It may seem paradoxical, yet it is hardly hazardous to say 
 that the Maurice Theology owes its power not less to its in- 
 dulgence than to its correction of the pantheistic tendency of the 
 age. It answers the demand of every ideal philosophy and every
 
 206 THE CHRIST OF ENGLISH POETRY 
 
 poetic soul for an indwelling Divine Presence, living and 
 acting in all the beauty of the world and the good of human 
 hearts. Its ' Incarnation ' is not, as in other schemes, an historical 
 prodigy, setting its period apart as an Annus Mirabilis in vehement 
 contrast with the darkness of an otherwise unvisited world ; but 
 is rather a revelation, by a supreme instance, of the everlast- 
 ing Immanence of God, and His consecrating union with our 
 humanity. . . . The new theologians (i.e. Maurice and his 
 schools) translated Christianity out of time into eternity ; they 
 read in the life and death of Christ no scheme, no plot with 
 astonishing catastrophe ; but the symbol and sample of constant 
 Divine life with men, and of human sonship to God, disclosing 
 relations which had for ever been and would for ever be ; only 
 adding now the glad surprise that the sigh for better life, 
 the response of conscience to high appeals, the inward sym- 
 pathy with all righteousness are no lovely visions, but the 
 personal communion of the perfect with the imperfect mind " 
 (Dr. Martineau : Introduction to Tayler's " Religious Life of 
 England," p. 9). This section of Dr. Martineau's chapter, 
 and an article in the Spectator, November 2O, 1869, entitled 
 " Maurice, Theologian or Humanist," give the most faithful 
 interpretation of Maurice's teaching which is known to me. 
 
 NOTE 7, p. 177. 
 
 "In Browning's 'Paracelsus' a great aspirer after the absolute 
 the absolute of knowledge fails in his quest, and yet does not 
 wholly fail. He fails because he has tried to compel what is 
 infinite to enter into the limits of this finite life ; he does not 
 fail because from the low room in which he lies dying he passes 
 forth to follow the fountains of light and of love up toward God 
 Himself. Two particulars in his work assign to Browning his 
 place in the literary history of our country. First, he attempts 
 to establish a harmony between what is infinite and what is 
 finite in man's nature. . . . Hence infinite desire, infinite
 
 NOTES TO LECTURE IV 207 
 
 aspiration, is the glory and virtue of our manhood ; and through 
 art, and through science, through human love, we ascend un- 
 satisfied to God. If, on the other hand, we rest in any attain- 
 ment of knowledge, or love, or creation of beauty by art, accepting 
 it for its own sake and as final, we have forfeited our high 
 distinction as men, we have become beasts which graze in the 
 paddock and do not look up. 
 
 "Secondly, what determines Browning's place in the history 
 of our literature is that he represents militant transcendentalism, 
 the transcendental movement at odds with the scientific. His 
 acceptance of the Christian revolution, say rather his acceptance 
 of the Man Christ Jesus, lies at the very heart of Browning's 
 poetry ; and in the mode of his accepting the Christ of history he 
 approaches close to the spirit of Maurice's theology. With an energy of 
 intellect such as few poets have possessed, he unites a spiritual ardour 
 which if not associated on the one hand with an eager and com- 
 bative intellect, on the other with strong human passions and affec- 
 tions, might have made Browning a religious mystic ; and he sets 
 his intellect to defend the suggestions or intuitions of the spirit. 
 In his 'Caliban upon Setebos,' the poet has with singular and almost 
 terrible force represented what must be the natural theology of 
 one who is merely an intellectual animal, devoid of spiritual crav- 
 ings, sensibilities, and checks. It is these which discover to us 
 not only the power of God, but the love of God everywhere 
 around us, and which enable us to perceive that there is a supreme 
 instance or manifestation of God's love, which is very Christ. 
 
 " But what of the historical Jesus of Nazareth ? Is He not 
 disappearing from the world, criticised away and dissolved into 
 a Christ-myth ? 
 
 We gazed our fill 
 
 With upturned faces on as real a face 
 
 That, stooping from grave music and mild fire, 
 
 Took in our homage, made a visible place, 
 Through many a depth of glory, gyre on gyre, 
 
 For the dim human tribute. Was this true ? '
 
 And is that Divine force receding out of reach of our prayers 
 and praise into the darkness, until at last we shall lose it 
 altogether ? Browning's answer implies some such creed as, if 
 we were required to seek a label for it, we should name 
 1 Christian Pantheism.' He looks at the spectacle of the world 
 and life as it plays, ocean-like, around each of us, and shows 
 itself all alive and spiritual. The fishermen of Galilee told of a 
 Son of God who eighteen hundred years ago became flesh and 
 dwelt with men ; and this becomes credible because here and 
 now we behold the miracle of an omnipresent and eternal love 
 of God : 
 
 ' Why, where's the need of Temple when the walls 
 Of the world are that ? what use of swells and falls 
 From Levites' choir, priests' cries, and trumpet calls ? 
 
 That one Face, far from vanish rather grows, 
 
 Or decomposes but to recompose, 
 
 Becomes my universe that feels and knows.' " 
 
 (Professor Edward Dowden : " Studies in Literature," pp. 80- 
 S3-) 
 
 NOTE 8, p. 187. 
 
 Browning in " ' A Death in the Desert ' continued his apology 
 for the Christian faith. The apologetics are, however, in the 
 first instance, poems, and they remain poems at the last. The 
 imaginary scene of the death of the Evangelist John is rendered 
 with the finest art ; its dignity is that of a certain noble bareness ; 
 in the dim-lighted grotto are the aged disciple and the little group 
 of witnesses, to whom he utters his legacy of words ; at the cave's 
 edge is the Bactrian crying from time to time his bird-like cry of 
 assurance : ' Outside was all noon and the burning blue.' The 
 slow return of the dying man to consciousness of his surroundings 
 is as true as if it were studied from a death- bed ; his sudden 
 awakening at the words, ' I am the Resurrection and the Life,' 
 arrives not as a dramatic surprise, but as the simplest surprise of
 
 NOTES TO LECTURE IV 209 
 
 nature light breaking forth before sunset. The chief speaker 
 of the poem is chosen because the argument is one concerning 
 faith that comes through love, and S. John was the disciple who 
 had learnt love's deepest secrets. The dialectic proceeds along 
 large lines, which have only the subtilty of simplicity. The 
 verse moves gravely, tenderly, often weighted with monosyllables ; 
 a pondering dwelling verse ; and great single lines arise so 
 naturally that while they fill the mind with a peculiar power, 
 they are felt to be of one texture with the whole. Thus, for 
 example : 
 
 ' We would not lose 
 The last of what might happen on his face ; ' 
 
 And this : 
 
 * When there was mid sea and the mighty things ; ' 
 And this : 
 
 ' Lie bare to the universal prick of light ; ' 
 And these : 
 
 * The Bactrian was but a wild childish man, 
 And could not write nor speak but only loved.' 
 
 " The faith of these later days is the same as|that of the first 
 century, and is not the same. The story and the teaching of 
 Christ had alike one end to plant in the human consciousness 
 the utterance of Divine Love, and to make us in our degree 
 conscious partakers of that Love. Where love is there is Christ. 
 Our conceptions of God are relative to our own understanding j 
 but God as power, God as a communicating intelligence, God 
 as love Father, Son, and Spirit is the utmost that we can con- 
 ceive of things above us. Let us now put that knowledge, 
 imperfect though it may be, to use. Power, intelligence, love 
 these around us everywhere : they are not mere projections from 
 our own brain or hand or heart ; and by us they are inconceivable 
 otherwise than as personal attributes. The historical story of 
 
 o
 
 210 THE CHRIST OF ENGLISH POETRY 
 
 Christ is not lost, for it has grown into a larger assurance of faith. 
 We are not concerned with the linen clothes and napkins of 
 the empty sepulchre ; Christ is arisen. Why revert to discuss 
 miracles ? The work of miracles whatever they may have 
 been was long ago accomplished. The knowledge of the 
 Divine Love, its appropriation by our own hearts, and the putting 
 forth of that love in our lives such for us is the Christian faith. 
 Such is the work of Christ accomplishing itself in humanity at 
 the present time. And the Christian story is no myth, but a 
 reality. Not because we can prove true the beliefs of the first 
 century, but because those beliefs contained within them a larger 
 and more enduring belief. The acorn has not perished because 
 it has expanded into an oak. 
 
 " This, reduced here to the baldest statement, is the substance 
 of the dying testimony of Browning's S. John. It is thrown 
 into lyrical form as the poet's own testimony in the * Epilogue ' 
 to the volume of 1864, and in the great poem of 1868-69, 'The 
 Ring and the Book,' the Venerable Pope expresses Browning's 
 highest thought. And the Pope's exposition of the Christianity 
 of our age is identical with that of S. John. . . . The 
 acknowledgment of God in Christ, the divine self-sacrifice of 
 love, for the Pope as for S. John solves all questions in the earth 
 and out of it. . . . Let us give over the endless task of un prov- 
 ing and reproving the already proved ; rather let us straightway 
 put our truth to its proper uses " (Professor Dowden, " Robert 
 Browning," pp. 241-43). 
 
 NOTE 9, p. 193. 
 
 " What is the sum of the poet's thoughts about it (' a future 
 life ' ) ? What has he added to the criticism of belief in this 
 matter ? By the method of his art, as by the temper and breadth 
 of his statement, he has put the question on its proper basis, and 
 given it its true scope. He has taken the matter in a large way, 
 implying the slight and uncertain value of single arguments, 
 the cumulative force of the whole case. It is no question of
 
 NOTES TO LECTURE IV 211 
 
 evidences and logic. It is a question of man's true natural 
 power ; and a question not simply of the inadequacy and unsatis- 
 factoriness of life, but of life's drift and 'promise.' And so he has 
 dwelt on the energy and reach of man ; for the argument depends 
 on what man is capable of and worth. And he is very frank 
 about the unsatisfactoriness of life as we see it, whether tested 
 by conscience or by judgment ; its inadequacy to man's affections, 
 aims, and powers. The world is intelligible and tolerable, though 
 with difficulties then, if there be ' a life beyond.' And the 
 order and method of life seem rational on that basis ; its expe- 
 rience and discipline seem, then, to have a purpose. But the 
 * heart ' and personal claims perplex the question. It is not 
 what men wish, but what they are fit for that must count. 
 Man's continued power to serve the ends of the universe must 
 be the ground of hope. That is the principle and the test of the 
 true immortality. The endurance of whatever is essential of the 
 true and the Divine is assured the completion of the value, the 
 solution of the problems, and the realisation of the ideals of the 
 Spirit. Does that imply personality in the after-life ? that is 
 the question eagerly pressed. We do not know. Our poet 
 has nowhere evolved an answer. He wisely leaves it ; though 
 the whole principle of his art conveys that impression of the 
 value of personality that you may well hold his drift to be on 
 the side of that idea, not as a matter of sentiment, but of science. 
 " Then he has other ideas that may seem more practical. No 
 one has so forcibly put the folly of l losing ' this life in any way 
 in the name of another. It is life that matters, not existence. 
 Life here and everywhere belongs to those who live. The great 
 question is not about a * future life,' but about realising the true 
 idea of this life, and so leading up with energy to the life that 
 may be when this no longer serves . . . life to come ... is not 
 a ' heaven,' a stage of finality and fulfilment. It is the life of 
 the soul rising and expanding through what may be an ' infinite 
 series ' of lives * unhasting yet unresting,' because it serves no 
 { taskmaster,' but in love and power fulfils the very spirit of life.
 
 212 THE CHRIST OF ENGLISH POETRY 
 
 " And here the poet approves his grasp of that principle of which 
 I said he is so true an interpreter, the great Christian idea, the 
 idea of spiritual ascent and evolution as the chief law of life. 
 That is the meaning of this life. It is the ground and law of 
 all life to come. If that principle hold good of man, life to come 
 is possible and desirable : if it hold good, life and duty here, and 
 hereafter, are great are in truth spiritually infinite and of eter- 
 nal value" (James Fotheringham, "Studies in the Poetry of 
 Robert Browning," p. 282). 
 
 The following interesting letter was written by Mr. Browning 
 in 1876 to a friend who, believing herself to be dying, wrote 
 to thank him for the help she had derived from his poems, men- 
 tioning particularly " Rabbi ben Ezra " and " Abt Vogler " : 
 
 " It is a great thing the greatest that a human being should 
 have passed the probation of life, and sum up its experience in a 
 witness to the power and love of God. I dare congratulate you. 
 All the help I can offer, in my poor degree, is the assurance that 
 I see ever more reason to hold by the same hope, and that by no 
 means in ignorance of what has been advanced to the contrary ; 
 and for your sake I would wish it to be true that I had so much 
 of * genius ' as to permit the testimony of an especially privileged 
 insight to come in aid of the ordinary argument. For I know 
 I myself have been aware of the communication of something 
 more subtle than a ratiocinative process, when the convictions 
 of * genius ' have thrilled my soul to its depths : as when Napo- 
 leon, shutting up the New Testament, said of Christ * Do you 
 know that I am an understander of men ? Well, He was no 
 man ! ' (* Savez-vous que je me connais en hommes ? Eh bien, 
 celui-la ne fut pas un homme.') Or as when Charles Lamb, in 
 a gay fancy with some friends as to how he and they would feel 
 if the greatest of the dead were to appear suddenly in flesh and 
 blood once more, on the final suggestion, * And if Christ entered 
 this room ? ' changed his manner at once, and stuttered out, as 
 his manner was when moved, * You see if Shakespeare entered, 
 we should all rise ; if He appeared, we must kneel.' Or, not
 
 NOTES TO LECTURE IV 213 
 
 to multiply instances, as when Dante wrote what I will transcribe 
 from my wife's Testament wherein I recorded it fourteen years 
 ago * Thus I believe, thus I affirm, thus I am certain it is, and 
 that from this life I shall pass to another better, there, where that 
 Lady lives of whom my soul was enamoured.' Dear friend, I 
 may have wearied you in spite of your goodwill. God bless 
 you, sustain and receive you ! Reciprocate this blessing with 
 yours affectionately, ROBERT BROWNING." 
 
 NOTE 10, p. 195. 
 
 Beside Browning's restatement of the great moral affirma- 
 tions of Humanity, I should like to place this quotation from a 
 paper entitled " Ecce Deus," by Sir Oliver Lodge, in which that 
 distinguished man of science refocuses for us, in the light of the 
 great scientific hypothesis of evolution, the Christian doctrine of 
 the Immanence of the Divine in Man. "The Divinity of Jesus 
 is the truth which now requires to be re-perceived, to be 
 illumined afresh by new knowledge ; to be cleansed and re- 
 vivified by the wholesome flood of scepticism which has poured 
 over it ; it can be freed now from all trace of grovelling super- 
 stition, and can be recognised freely and enthusiastically : the 
 Divinity of Jesus, and of all other noble and saintly souls, in so 
 far as they too have been inflamed by a spark of Deity in so far 
 as they too can be recognised as manifestations of the Divine. 
 Nor is it even through man alone that the revelation comes, 
 though through man and the highest man it comes chiefly ; the 
 revelation can be glimpsed in all the processes of Nature, so far 
 as human vision, in the person of its seers and poets and men of 
 science, has been as yet sufficiently cleared and strengthened to 
 perceive it. 
 
 " For consider what is involved in the astounding idea of 
 Evolution and Progress as applied to the whole Universe. 
 Either it is a fact or it is a dream. If it be a fact, what an 
 illuminating fact it is! God is one ; the Universe is an aspect
 
 2i 4 THE CHRIST OF ENGLISH POETRY 
 
 and a revelation of God. The Universe is struggling upward to 
 a perfection not yet attained. I see in the mighty process of 
 Evolution an eternal struggle towards more and more self-per- 
 ception, and fuller and more all-embracing existence, of the 
 Deity. In some parts of the Universe perhaps already the ideal 
 conception has been attained ; and the region of such attainment 
 the full blaze of self-conscious Deity is too bright for mortal 
 eyes, is utterly beyond our highest thoughts ; but in part the 
 attainment is as yet very imperfect ; in what we know as the 
 material part, which is our present home, it is nascent, or only 
 just beginning ; and our own struggles and efforts and disap- 
 pointments and aspirations the felt groaning and travailing of 
 Creation these are evidence of the effort, indeed they them- 
 selves are part of the effort, towards fuller and completer and 
 more conscious existence. On this planet man is the highest 
 outcome of the process so far, and is therefore the highest repre- 
 sentation of Deity that here exists. Terribly imperfect as yet, 
 because so recently evolved, he is nevertheless a being which has 
 at length attained to consciousness and free-will, a being unable 
 to be coerced by the whole force of the Universe, against his 
 will ; a spark of the Divine Spirit, therefore, never more to be 
 quenched. Open still to awful horrors, to agonies of remorse, 
 but to iloods of joy also, he persists, and his destiny is largely in 
 his own hands ; he may proceed up or down, he may advance 
 towards a magnificent ascendency, he may recede towards 
 depths of infamy. He is not coerced : he is guided and influ- 
 enced, but he is free to choose. The evil and the good are 
 necessary correlatives : freedom to choose the one involves 
 freedom to choose the other. 
 
 " Such ideas, the ideas of development and progress, extend 
 even up to God himself, according to the Christian conception. 
 So we return to that with which we started : The Christian 
 idea of God is not that of a being outside the Universe, above 
 its struggles and advances, looking on and taking no part in the
 
 NOTES TO LECTURE IV 215 
 
 process, solely exalted, beneficent, self-determined and complete ; 
 no, it is also that of a God which loves, which yearns, which 
 suffers, which keenly laments the rebellious and misguided 
 activity of the free agents whom he has brought into being as 
 part of himself, which enters into the storm and conflict, and is 
 subject to conditions as a part of it all ; conditions not artificial 
 and transitory, but inherent in the process of producing free and 
 conscious beings, and essential to the full self-development even 
 of Deity. 
 
 "It is a marvellous and bewildering thought, but whatever 
 its value, and whether it be an ultimate revelation or not, it is 
 the revelation of Christ. Whether it be considered blasphemous 
 or not, and in his own day it was certainly considered blas- 
 phemous, this was the idea he grasped during those forty days 
 of solitary communion, and never subsequently let go. 
 
 " This is the truth which has been reverberating down the 
 ages ever since, and has been the hidden inspiration of saint, 
 apostle, prophet, martyr, and, in however dim and vague a form, 
 has given hope and consolation to the unlettered and poverty- 
 stricken millions. 
 
 " A God that could understand, that could suffer, that could 
 sympathise, that had felt the extremity of human anguish, the 
 agony of bereavement, had submitted even to the brutal hope- 
 less torture of the innocent, and had become acquainted with the 
 pangs of death, this has been the chief consolation of terrestrial 
 religion, whether Western or Eastern, whether Christian or 
 Buddhist. This is the extraordinary conception of Godhead to 
 which we have at this stage risen. ' This is my beloved Son.' 
 The Christian God is revealed as the incarnate spirit of humanity, 
 or rather the incarnate spirit of humanity is recognised as a real 
 intrinsic part of God. * The Kingdom of Heaven is within you.' 
 
 " Infinitely patient the Universe has been while man has 
 groped his way to this truth : so simple and consoling in one of 
 its aspects, so inconceivable and incredible in another. Dimly 
 and partially it has been seen by all the prophets, and doubtless
 
 216 THE CHRIST OF ENGLISH POETRY 
 
 by many of the Pagan saints. Dimly and partially we see it 
 now ; but in so far as Christianity has any vitality this is its 
 vital element It is not likely to be the attribute of any one 
 religion alone ; it may be the essence of truth in all terrestrial 
 religions, but it is conspicuously Christian. Its boldest state- 
 ment was when a child was placed in the midst and was regarded 
 as a symbol of the Deity ; but it was foreshadowed even in the 
 childish conceptions of Olympus, whose gods and goddesses 
 were affected with the passions of men ; it is the root fact 
 underlying the superstitions of idolatry and all varieties of 
 anthropomorphism. Thou shalt have none other Gods but me : 
 and with dim eyes and dull ears and misunderstanding hearts men 
 have sought to obey the commandment, seeking after God if 
 haply they might find Him ; while all the time their God was 
 very nigh unto them, in their midst and of their fellowship, 
 sympathising with their struggles, and recognising even in their 
 own poor nature some dim and broken fragments of Himself." 
 
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 Mr. R. C. LEHMANN, in The Daily Paper, says : " The beautiful work which we 
 owe to the combined industry, poetical insight, and artistic skill of Dean Stubbs and 
 Mr. Herbert Railtpn. ... It is impossible, indeed, to give too much praise to 
 Mr. Railton's drawings." 
 
 The Athenaeum says : " Both writer and artist are possessed of a light touch, the 
 Dean being possessed of an easy and pleasant literary style, and Mr. Railton being 
 very happy in his power of reproducing the architectural beauties of old-world spots. ' 
 
 The Examiner says : ' ' This is a most beautiful book. Author, printer, and 
 artist have vied with each other in the making of it, and the result is one of which 
 they all may be proud. . . . Dr. Stubbs has done his work con amore. He has 
 handled his superabundant materials with rare skill and discrimination, so that his 
 narrative, in spite of its load of antiquarian lore, is no mere dry-as-dust compilation, 
 but a story full of life and fascination. . . . Cambridge men all over the world will 
 be grateful to him for the fine picture he has drawn of their Alma Mater, and for the 
 love and care which he has expended on the task." 
 
 JT 
 
 HISTORICAL MEMORIALS OF 
 
 ELY CATHEDRAL 
 
 BY THE DEAN OF ELY 
 
 Illustrated by HELEN JAMES, and from Photographs. 
 Small fcap. 410, 43. 6d. net. 
 
 The Liverpool Mercury says : ' ' Anything more delightful to a lover of our stately 
 and beautiful Cathedrals can scarcely be imagined. . . . We have nothing but praise 
 for the whole volume." 
 
 The Leeds Mercury says : ' ' Dean Stubbs writes at once with scholarly care and 
 charm, and his book is as satisfactory in the artistic as in the literary sense, for its 
 illustrations are full of the poetry of suggestion, and do justice to the august work- 
 manship of those who surely builded well." 
 
 The Speaker says: " A scholarly volume. . . . The poetry of association is inter- 
 woven in its pages with ecclesiastical history and archaeological lore." 
 
 The Pall Mall Gazette says : ' ' The illustrations are numerous and really illustrate 
 the text ; and we may commend this charming little volume with its careful chrono- 
 logical table to all admirers of Ely." 
 
 Church Bells says : " A great Cathedral is a great poem, and it needs a poet quite 
 to understand it. Those who know ' The Conscience ' and the ' Mytbe of Life ' 
 will know why the present Dean is able to write of Ely as he has done." 
 
 P
 
 A New Volume in the MEDIAEVAL TOWNS Series 
 
 CAMBRIDGE 
 
 BY C. W. STUBBS, D.D., DEAN OF ELY 
 
 With Illustrations by HERBERT RAILTON. Cloth, 45. 6d. ; leather, 55. 6d. 
 
 The Spectator says: " Dean Stubbs treats his subject, in itself one of singular 
 interest to all Englishmen, with equal knowledge and sympathy. . . . Always the 
 description is illustrated by Mr. Herbert Railton's magic pencil, which never has 
 had a more suitable subject, and never showed itself more absolutely equal to a 
 great opportunity." 
 
 JT 
 
 CASTLES IN THE AIR 
 
 A BOOK OF POEMS 
 BY C. W. STUBBS 
 
 With Photogravure Portrait Frontispiece. 35. 6d. net. 
 
 The Daily News says : " Graceful, thoughtful, suggestive in phrase and diction." 
 
 The Dublin Express says: "The poetry of the Dean of Ely is scholarly and 
 tender." 
 
 The St. James's Gazette says: "A volume of verse which is always sincere 
 and thoughtful, and often distinguished and melodious." 
 
 JT 
 
 A Volume of the TEMPLE CLASSICS 
 
 VERB A CHRISTI 
 
 THE SAYINGS OF JESUS CHRIST 
 EDITED BY C. W. STUBBS, D.D., DEAN OF ELY 
 
 Cloth, is. 6d. net ; leather, 2s. net. 
 
 The Spectator says: "A very pleasing addition to the Temple Classics. . . . 
 The ' Sayings ' have been arranged by the Dean of Ely, who explains that he has 
 followed for the most part the order of Tischendorf s ' Synopsis Evangelica,' and 
 used the Westcott and Hort text. Each saying has a Latin heading, and the English 
 (Authorised Version) is on the opposite page." 
 
 LONDON: J. M. DENT &" CO., 29 BEDFORD STREET
 
 BY THE SAME AUTHOR 
 
 CHRIST AND ECONOMICS. 35. 6d. 
 CHRIST AND DEMOCRACY. 35. 6d. 
 VILLAGE POLITICS. 35. 6d. 
 
 'PRO PATRIA!' (ENGLISH AND AMERICAN 
 SERMONS.) 35. 6d. 
 
 CHRISTUS IMPERATOR. 45. 6d. 
 CHARLES KINGSLEY. 2s. 6d. 
 
 SOCIAL TEACHING OF THE LORD'S 
 PRAYER. (OXFORD UNIVERSITY SERMONS.) 
 2s. 6d. 
 
 FOR CHRIST AND CITY ! 45. 6d. 
 
 IN A MINSTER GARDEN. 6s. 
 
 VERBA CHRISTI. (TEMPLE CLASSICS.) 2s.
 
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