The Higher Ministries 
 
 of 
 
 Recent English Poetry
 
 By FRANK W. GUNSAULUS, D.D. 
 
 The Higher Ministries of 
 Recent English Poetry 
 
 i2mo, Cloth, ^1.25 net 
 
 The Transfiguration of Christ 
 
 i2mo, Cloth, ^i.oo net 
 
 Paths to the City of God 
 and Other Sermons 
 
 i2mo. Cloth, ^1.25 net 
 
 Paths to Power 
 
 ji/i edition, i2mo, Cloth, ^1.25 net
 
 The Higher Ministries 
 Recent English Poetry 
 
 FRJNK W. G UNSJUL US, D. £>., LL. D. 
 
 "A neiv commandment,^^ said tie smiling Muse, 
 " I gi-ve my darling son, Thou shalt not preachy " — 
 Luther, Fox, Behmen, Sivedenborg, greiv pale. 
 And, on the instant, rosier clouds upbore 
 Hafiz and Shakespeare -with their shining choirs. 
 
 — Emerson. 
 
 I 
 
 New York Chicago Toronto 
 
 Fleming H. Revel I Company 
 
 London and Edinburgh
 
 Copyright, 1907, by 
 FLEMING H. REVELL COMPANY 
 
 New York: 158 Fifth Avenue 
 Chicago: 80 Wabash Avenue 
 Toronto: 25 Richmond Street, W. 
 London: 21 Paternoster Square 
 Edinburgh: 100 Princes Street
 
 f /, LIBRARY 
 
 ■7^3 UNIVERPITi' OF CALIFORNIA 
 
 r,^ SANTA BARBARA 
 
 To the class of igoy 
 
 Just graduated from the 
 
 Chicago Theological Seminary 
 
 before whose members these lectures 
 
 were delivered, 
 
 I now dedicate them with every prayer 
 
 and hope which happy recollection 
 
 and sincere love may inspire. 
 
 Frank W. Gunsaulus. 
 
 TJie Lecture Room for HomeleticSf 
 May lo, igoi.
 
 CONTENTS 
 I 
 
 The Literary Phases of the Re- 
 ligious Problem ... 9 
 
 II 
 
 Matthew Arnold . . • .52 
 
 III 
 
 Alfred Tennyson . • . .107 
 
 IV 
 Robert Browning , . , .178
 
 The letter herewith reproduced in facsimile 
 marks one of the moments in Browning's spirit- 
 ual history in which he realized the comfort 
 and strength of a faith in the Life Immortal. 
 The letter was generously given to the author 
 of this book by his friend, Mr. A. C. Bartlett.
 
 /i , ft^tirUt<4^ ^^u*i^f 
 
 %Jif\4^ 
 
 ltruf^t-y2^4i<c%'^''^^'^ 
 
 Ai^^ ^. ^4 
 
 W. 
 
 llk^uT 'iiTM^c. tC ^Uu4 
 
 r 
 
 
 
 At^ /^ ^4^ Ci!<44. ^/hc 
 
 i 
 
 /^ 
 
 /^^ irmJJ U ^.rrY fu^^t<J /z-i: 
 
 h 
 
 /Hu /^y^i 
 
 j/^^ ^ 
 
 
 A^
 
 The Higher Ministries of 
 Recent English Poetry 
 
 INTRODUCTORY LECTURE 
 
 THE LITERARY PHASES OF THE RELIG- 
 IOUS PROBLEM 
 
 Next to religion, poetry is the most 
 vital, and, at the same time, the most far- 
 reaching of those movements of the hu- 
 man soul by which it declares its deeps 
 of feeling and its heights of aspiration. 
 Verse is the innocent manifestation of the 
 primal music of humanity, as the seer, the 
 Vates, stands with man and the mysteries 
 which surround him. Along with the 
 smoking altar comes the ballad of the re- 
 motest savage ; and the latest child of 
 culture begins to see that if the word 
 minister is to go out of his vocabulary, 
 that other word minstrel, joined with it in 
 the same ancient root, will perhaps depart 
 also. The Psalmist, if he be truly such, 
 is as much a poet as he is a religionist. 
 9
 
 10 The Higher Ministries 
 
 These relationships of poetry and rehg- 
 ion exist because of the part which im- 
 agination and feeHng play in both. In 
 these days, when it is hoped that devotion 
 may a litttle supplant both our rationalistic 
 scepticism and our over-intellectual dog- 
 matism, we hear much of the " religious 
 feeling" ; and we are able the more cer- 
 tainly to see that there can be no religion 
 without imagination to give an atmos- 
 phere to our aspiration and to furnish 
 visions under which hope and fear may 
 grow. And it is another of the results of 
 the critical and constructive thinking of 
 our time that poetry appears to be the art 
 by which things are felt, seen and ex- 
 pressed in the atmosphere of imagination. 
 
 Nowhere has the loftiest ground which 
 the human spirit knows in its religion 
 lifted more surely into sight as the field 
 for true poetry, than in modern England. 
 Indeed, the choicest garlands which have 
 been hung about the rich sacrifices and 
 holy fanes, and the most exquisite of the 
 flowers which have been plucked by 
 genius to deck the poet's lyre, have 
 grown upon a common territory and ex- 
 tracted their fragrance and beauty from a
 
 Of Recent English Poetry 11 
 
 common earth and atmosphere. " The 
 more I reflect on the conformation of the 
 EngHsh mind, and on the preeminence 
 of the moral being, and the necessity for 
 regarding nature through the eyes of the 
 moral being, from first to last," says Taine, 
 ** the more clearly do I arrive at an under- 
 standing of the strong and innumerable 
 roots of that serious poem which is here 
 called religion." 
 
 Nothing is more sure to reward the 
 minister's study than his becoming ac- 
 quainted with these " strong and in- 
 numerable roots of that serious poem 
 which is called religion," as those roots 
 are to be discovered and rightly ap- 
 preciated in the blossoms of poetical 
 literature which have done so much to 
 glorify and make fragrant the air which 
 we breathe ; his studying the great poems 
 of contemporary English bards, with ref- 
 erence solely to what of light and leading 
 they may offer to our interesting age and 
 finding, if possible, the special messages 
 that they may bring, which infuse the 
 spirit of religion, teach the beauty of holi- 
 ness, impel the utterance of that goodness 
 from within us — the speech of what has
 
 12 The Higher Ministries 
 
 too often gone dumb hitherto. In short, 
 we ought to acquire what riches may lie 
 in the words of those who perhaps only 
 delight us, when, but for our lack of rev- 
 erent appreciation, they might inspire and 
 lead us, and, having handled some of these 
 treasures, to make them our own. Of 
 course, it will be seen at once that this 
 task will not include the labours of the 
 critic, so called, nor will it demand the 
 more pleasing efforts of a biographer, save 
 in the mention of certain personal facts 
 which have given character to the poetry 
 which is treated. It is not ours to discuss 
 the question, which the presence and 
 writings of such differing and powerful 
 men as Swinburne and Browning have 
 made interesting, as to whether a poet is 
 to be expected to have a moral aim and 
 to teach the truth by which men are to 
 form their lives ; sufficient it is for us to 
 seek to learn what we may of those, who, 
 like Tennyson, never soar so high as when 
 they utter the notes of faith ; of those who, 
 like Arnold, are quite as Grecian as Swin- 
 burne, and who yet feel that the greatest 
 music has to do with the inner life of the 
 spirit, or of those who, like Browning,
 
 Of Recent English Poetry 13 
 
 have seen most surely into both the flesh 
 and the soul, and who, in many ways, 
 have helped us to utter hope. 
 
 " Let us not always say, 
 * Spite of this flesh to-day, 
 I strove, made head, gained ground upon the 
 whole ! ' 
 
 As the bird wings and sings ; 
 Let us cry : ' All good things 
 Are ours, nor soul helps flesh more now, than flesh 
 helps soul.' " 
 
 First of all, then, in order that we may 
 discover and value aright the real contri- 
 bution which poetry has made to the spir- 
 itual powers and religious knowledge of 
 our day, let us notice the forces which 
 dominated and worked within the relig- 
 ious atmosphere more than a generation 
 since, and those which have given char- 
 acter to the thoughts and feelings and 
 purposes of the last forty years ; let us 
 note the needs which then lay voiceless, 
 and soon began and have continued to 
 utter their cry to those who would have 
 man realize the ideal in Christianity, which 
 has been called " looking up and lifting 
 up." Surely, we shall thus be able the 
 more successfully to appreciate the lofty
 
 14 The Higher Ministries 
 
 priesthood of those who speak — "true 
 thoughts, good thoughts, thoughts fit to 
 treasure up." 
 
 Perhaps the most suggestive fact in the 
 spiritual Hfe of Englishmen of eighty years 
 ago, so far as that life was taught or in- 
 spired by poetry, was the evident begin- 
 ning of the dominance of the influence of 
 Wordsworth over that of Byron. Lord 
 Jeffrey had long before angrily said of 
 Wordsworth's poetry : " This will never 
 do" ; Shelley had avowed that his imagi- 
 nation was as capacious as a pint cup ; 
 and many a lesser critic had announced 
 how impossible it is to extract large mean- 
 ings out of small things ; yet the steady 
 flame of Wordsworth's genius lived its 
 quiet life, burning amidst much which yet 
 seems prosaic enough and much which 
 even yet must needs wait for appreciation 
 until the complete triumph of the greater 
 spiritual and intellectual forces of which 
 Byron knew so little and Wordsworth so 
 much ; and at the death of the Laureate, 
 his pure light was already beginning to 
 illumine a larger area than that which had 
 been alternately charmed and bewildered 
 by the brilliant Lord Gordon. Byron's
 
 Of Recent English Poetry 15 
 
 genius had no power of generation ; and 
 quite as soon as the mind of England had 
 exhausted the treasures which were stored 
 so luxuriantly and carelessly in his verses, 
 it was found that there were no sons to 
 continue his throne, and that even his 
 imitators had mistaken the unhealthful 
 sentimentalities with which they toyed 
 for evidences of a noble pedigree. To 
 the age preceding a John Stuart Mill, a 
 Charles Darwin, or an Ernest Renan, the 
 fiery glow of Byron's genius had come 
 with overwhelming visions of splendour, 
 but upon his often prolix rhymes and 
 brilliant powerlessness, it was sure the 
 dawn would come to walk to noonday, 
 and then they would be found to have 
 been greater in the dim but spectral even- 
 ing, than in the all-consuming morning- 
 tide. For Byron's poetry was of the set- 
 ting, while Wordsworth's was of the rising 
 sun. 
 
 Byron and Wordsworth both stood in 
 the remaining eddy of that revolution, 
 wherein went whirling to final destruction, 
 as it seemed, the faiths, political, social 
 and religious, upon which men had been 
 leaning for so long. The French Revo-
 
 l6 The Higher Ministries 
 
 lution had cast them both loose from 
 these revered traditions. Byron's joy 
 often seems to shriek with laughter ; be- 
 neath the rapture of Wordsworth's lies a 
 solemn calm. With their political preju- 
 dices we have nothing to do, but, let it be 
 noted, that after the Revolution had be- 
 come unjustifiable to Wordsworth, as it 
 was politically a failure to Byron, Byron's 
 eyes beheld, in its massive manifestations 
 of the strength of humanity, a sphere for 
 the exercise of that fearful individualism 
 of which he was such an incarnation ; 
 while Wordsworth, after a spiritual ex- 
 perience deep as his soul, though taking 
 a strange route, wrote the noble lines of 
 "The Prelude." Here is a witness of 
 that spiritual vision which sent its glory 
 throughout his entire intellectual life. It 
 is the record of a faith which reaches far 
 into the doubts of to-day, with a gift of 
 power — a faith in the spiritual, eternal, 
 and true, which rescues at once and au- 
 thenticates all the truths of both individu- 
 alism and socialism, by its consciousness 
 of God. 
 
 " And I have felt 
 A presence that disturbs me with the joy
 
 Of Recent English Poetry 17 
 
 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 in the mind of man ; 
 A motion and a spirit, that impels 
 All thinking things, all objects of all thought, 
 And rolls through all things." 
 
 Shelley has sent into the veins of our 
 deepest religious life a far more fructify- 
 ing impulse than Byron, though perhaps 
 Byron died believing, to his soul's infinite 
 harm, that the orthodoxy which he had 
 been taught was really true, and, on the 
 other hand, Shelley was an unbeliever 
 who wrote upon Mont Blanc : " P. B. 
 Shelley, Atheist." Certainly there is 
 something very impressive in the fact 
 that he who has written most profoundly 
 in the spirit of the gospel, Robert Brown- 
 ing, has said that he thought if Shelley 
 had lived, he would have come to accept 
 the Christian faith. It requires but a 
 reading of the words of Browning on 
 Shelley to find how far into the richest 
 poetical nature of our day this man's in- 
 fluence goes. It is not the Shelley of 
 " Queen Mab," however, but the Shelley
 
 l8 The Higher Ministries 
 
 of "Adonais" and ''The Skylark." It 
 was certain that if Wordsworth should 
 prove stronger than Byron, to the most 
 thoughtful men of a generation ago, 
 Shelley would live more powerfully also 
 in their life and thought. Shelley would 
 have occupied this relative place, even 
 though he had not possessed that instinct 
 which enabled him easily to dream and 
 sing with the largeness and lightness of 
 the classic bards, or that pure spirituality 
 which is never tarnished as it touches 
 earth nor ever more splendid when it 
 soars to heaven, or that genius in the 
 rhythmic possibilities of a language which 
 is as sure-footed as it is swift and as deli- 
 cate as it is strong, or that devotion to 
 the ideal which makes him the psalmist, 
 who, at the shrine of beauty, makes his 
 worship lyrical with song. Indeed, even 
 if he had not possessed these, Shelley 
 would stand in the generation of our 
 fathers, just where Byron's genius began 
 to lose its grasp upon the human soul, 
 and, like a prophet uttering his truth 
 amidst much blasting error, though with 
 infinite music, he would look forward to 
 a time with its Browning to write "A
 
 Of Recent English Poetry 19 
 
 Christmas Day " and " Paracelsus " ; and 
 to say of Shelley that when he read his 
 words he seemed to have found " an 
 eagle's feather." 
 
 For Shelley is the poet of the unsatis- 
 fied. No twentieth century, however 
 weary she may be of doubt and analysis, 
 can ever go back to the eighteenth, and 
 avoid the protest of this clear-eyed soul, 
 — a soul who abides at the gateway, the 
 type of the yearning spirit pouring forth 
 his lofty expectations in exquisite rhythm, 
 uttering his pathetic scorn with sweetest 
 music, the very incarnation of the restless 
 heart and thirsty soul which, with heated 
 forehead, utters the cry of the human. 
 No one for the satisfaction of the soul 
 would go back into the years which he 
 tasted, as he sings : 
 
 "I vowed that I would dedicate my powers 
 To thee and thine ; have I not kept the vow ! 
 With beating heart and streaming eyes even now 
 I call the phantom of a thousand hours 
 Each from his voiceless grave ; they have, in 
 
 visioned bowers, 
 Of studious zeal or love's delight, 
 But watched with me the anxious night : 
 They know that never joy illumined my brow
 
 20 The Higher Ministries 
 
 Unlinked with hope that thou would 'st free 
 This world from its dark slavery, 
 That thou, O awful Loveliness, 
 Would' St give whate'er these words cannot ex- 
 press." 
 
 The French Revolution had touched 
 his world, as it had touched that of 
 Wordsworth and Byron ; it had destroyed 
 many things ; it had left man. 
 
 "The loathsome mask has fallen, the man re- 
 mains 
 Sceptreless, free, uncircumscribed, but man 
 Equal, unclassed, tribeless, and nationless. 
 Exempt from awe, worship, degree, the King 
 Over himself, just, gentle, wise." 
 
 And for man Shelley would aspire, though 
 perchance there were no God ; if there 
 were, he would still pray. But from this 
 atheism, the unsatisfied gets no hope : 
 
 " Sweet Heaven, forgive weak thoughts ! If 
 
 there should be 
 No God, no Heaven, no Earth, in the void 
 
 world, — 
 The wide, gray, lampless, deep, unpeopled 
 
 world — !" 
 
 So the restless spirit sang.
 
 Of Recent English Poetry 21 
 
 "The only wonderful man I ever knew," 
 says Wordsworth, " was Coleridge." 
 Passing now to this other name, the 
 name of a profoundly differing person- 
 ality, we are not yet far from Shelley, in 
 the attitude which the eighteenth century 
 offered for the great problems of life. 
 They were almost as little satisfactory to 
 Coleridge as they could be to Shelley. It 
 is with Coleridge that we pass from the 
 influence of poetry, at the beginning of 
 this century, to that of religious thought. 
 For the reason that in Coleridge, the poet 
 was easily metamorphosed into the re- 
 ligious thinker, he affords us less difficult 
 passage. Indeed, his poetry was never 
 so deeply influential as his prose, in creat- 
 ing the intellectual and spiritual life upon 
 which Tennyson's artistic lines were to 
 fall, or in enabling the singers of to-day 
 to lead with tuneful harmony the doubt- 
 ing or stumbling feet which had been 
 taught by the minds of that yesterday. 
 Coleridge felt only slightly the throes of 
 the great Revolution. He could not, 
 however, resist his vision of Pantisocracy. 
 "Strange fancies," he afterwards said, 
 " and as vain as strange ! Yet to the in-
 
 22 The Higher Ministries 
 
 tense interest and impassioned zeal, which 
 called forth and strained every faculty of 
 my intellect, for the organization and de- 
 fense of this scheme, I owe much of what 
 I, at present, possess — my clearest insight 
 into the nature of individual man, and my 
 most comprehensive views of his social 
 relations, of the true uses of trade and 
 commerce, and how far wealth and rel- 
 ative power of nations promote and im- 
 pede their welfare and inherent strength." 
 But something else and something more 
 precious our fathers were able to obtain 
 from Samuel Taylor Coleridge, without 
 some understanding of which we can never 
 value justly the voices of our English 
 bards. Coleridge was to bring into 
 English thought, as it would concern itself 
 with the great topics, a force from Ger- 
 many, which, under the management of 
 his strong spirit, was to create a new 
 epoch in Christian England. Of course, 
 with the metaphysics and technical phil- 
 osophy of religion, we have no present 
 concern, but it would be quite impossible 
 either to estimate the forces with which 
 any modern leader of humanity has to do, 
 or to see aright the ruling ideas with
 
 of Recent English Poetry 23 
 
 which most of our truest singers inspire 
 us, without noting how, not only as the 
 •rreator of England's modern criticism, 
 but as a student of religious truth, Cole- 
 ridge influenced the age. As Browning's 
 essay on Shelley shows how that fine soul 
 influences a spirit so unlike his, so Car- 
 lyle's life of John Sterling will indicate 
 how very living was the power of Cole- 
 ridge's genius upon a totally dissimilar 
 man. Tennyson's purest song in " In Me- 
 moriam " or in " The Idylls of the King" 
 cannot be fully heard, until we have 
 learned enough of Coleridge's spirit to 
 feel the earnestness of that invitation 
 which the late poet once gave to one of 
 the finest spirits whom Coleridge had in- 
 fluenced, Frederick Denison Maurice. 
 
 The truth is that the time had come for 
 men to obtain a deeper and surer hold 
 upon what were called the facts of religion 
 than that which they had, or to let them 
 go entirely. The very heterodoxy of the 
 past dissatisfied Shelley ; the orthodoxy 
 of the past which claimed the present, 
 was too weak for Coleridge. By the help 
 of the genetic men in Germany, this 
 English thinker was able in that hour to
 
 14 The Higher Ministries 
 
 do great service. Take, for example, the 
 ideas each of which was given, as the 
 sine qua non of every religious person, on 
 the inspiration of the sacred writings. 
 Thoughtful and wide-minded men, like 
 this man, felt that the blind devotion 
 which staked its life upon verbal infal- 
 libility and literal inspiration was sure to 
 suffer defeat, if not to invite the wreck of 
 faith. Religion was seen to be independ- 
 ent of certain traditions of the past as to 
 the proper reasons for believing in a book 
 which contained the precious story of the 
 Christ. Coleridge would not depend for 
 evidence of the divine inspiration of the 
 Bible only upon the tradition which, in 
 many instances, modern inquiry had al- 
 ready begun to tear to pieces. He said 
 of the Bible : " I take up this work with 
 the purpose to read it for the first time as I 
 should read any other work, — as far, at 
 least, as I can or dare. For I neither can 
 nor dare throw off a strong and awful 
 prepossession in its favour — certain as I 
 am that a large part of the light and 
 life, in and by which I see, love, and 
 embrace the truths and the strengths 
 coorganized into a living body of faith,
 
 Of Recent English Poetry 25 
 
 and knowledge has been derived to me 
 from the sacred volume." " If between 
 this Word — The Word that was in the 
 beginning — the light that lighteth every 
 man that cometh into the world — if 
 between this Word and the written 
 letter, I shall anywhere seem to myself to 
 find a discrepancy, I will not conclude 
 that such there actually is ; nor, on the 
 other hand, will I fall under the condem- 
 nation of them that would lie for God, but, 
 seek as I may, be thankful for what I have, 
 — and wait." — " In the Bible, there is more 
 that finds me than I have experienced in 
 all other books put together ; the words 
 of the Bible find me at greater depths of 
 my being, and whatever finds me brings 
 with it an irresistible evidence of having 
 proceeded from the Holy Spirit." 
 
 Many a soul has had his Bible saved 
 to him and has seen the great facts of 
 the religious life entirely secure in the 
 midst of much that was perishable, by 
 thus being the remote recipient of these 
 ideas. He has dared to be inspired by 
 the Bible — to be found by its teaching ; 
 and he confesses proofs of its inspiration. 
 But Coleridge's genius carried its stirring
 
 26 The Higher Ministries 
 
 influence into many other departments 
 of religious thought. He contended 
 earnestly for the self-evidencing nature 
 of revealed religion. To historical and 
 miraculous truth, he may be said to have 
 assigned a secondary place. Grasping 
 the idea of the Incarnation, he held that 
 miracles were the needful outcome of the 
 great fact ; and he taught that the adap- 
 tation of truth to the moral nature con- 
 stituted its strongest evidence. " He 
 who begins by loving Christianity better 
 than truth will proceed by loving his own 
 sect and church better than Christianity, 
 and end in loving himself better than all." 
 The air men breathed seemed freer and 
 more healthful. The faith of the ages 
 did not falter as fearfully in the presence 
 of rationalism, though the rationalistic 
 spirit was confessed. Fantastic assump- 
 tions faded out of sight. The church as- 
 sumed a broader function and was seen 
 to have more lasting foundations. The 
 day of reverent criticism for every page 
 of scripture and of open discussion of 
 every topic of theology was welcomed. 
 A new atmosphere had come. 
 
 Let us stop here with Shelley, Cole-
 
 Of Recent English Poetry 27 
 
 ridge, and Wordsworth, and note these 
 facts : — that each was influenced by the 
 revolution in France ; that each had 
 dreams of that perfect humanity of which 
 visions came over the storm and wreck ; 
 that each had broken in some way with 
 the prevalent modes of thought and the 
 opinions of the age preceding ; to each, 
 neither the views which scepticism nor 
 those which the church held of the truths 
 of religion were entirely satisfactory ; 
 and, especially, that in each of these men 
 there is a distinct revolt from the cold 
 and formal ideas which scepticism, on 
 the one hand, and the church, on the 
 other hand, had of Almighty God. 
 
 Shelley, for instance, would not rest 
 content with the atheism which he him- 
 self had written ; and from the un- 
 churchly and churchly Deism of his time, 
 which conceived of God afar off, unre- 
 lated in any vital or living way to earth 
 or man, he stood at an equal distance. 
 He was not long in finding the unsatis- 
 factoriness of the doctrine of " Queen 
 Mab," and in the fragment which he left 
 of his intended treatise on Christianity 
 occurs this strong passage : ** There is
 
 28 The Higher Ministries 
 
 a power by which we are surrounded, 
 like the atmosphere in which some mo- 
 tionless lyre is suspended, which visits 
 with its breath our silent chords at will. 
 Our most imperial and stupendous qual- 
 ities — those on which the majesty and 
 the power of humanity is erected — are, 
 relatively to the inferior portion of its 
 mechanism, active and imperial, but they 
 are the passive slaves of some higher 
 and more omnipotent power. This 
 power is God ; and those who have seen 
 God have, in the period of their purer 
 and more perfect nature, been harmon- 
 ized by their own will to so exquisite a 
 consentaneity of power as to give di- 
 vinest melody, when the breath of uni- 
 versal being sweeps over their frames." 
 He was, in truth, never more sure to 
 go astray than in his accounts of his own 
 belief on religious matters, except per- 
 haps when he mistook his perfectly char- 
 acteristic idealism for Plato's, and thought 
 himself a Platonist. Shelley was, at 
 times, in desperate earnestness bent on 
 being an atheist, but the great truth of 
 the immanence of God kept bursting forth 
 from within his soul ; it was blazing out
 
 Of Recent English Poetry 29 
 
 before him from the fiery heart of earth 
 and uttering its presence to him in the 
 richness and warmth of quiet days and 
 nights ; and that truth, when it was 
 caught up alone, without the other truth 
 of the Supreme one, namely, the tran- 
 scetidence of God, made him a Pantheist. 
 God transcends the world — that idea had 
 been preached and poeticized so long 
 that the world of nature and man seemed 
 thoroughly disassociated from its Creator 
 and Lord. It is hardly to be wondered 
 at that so protesting a soul, and so truly 
 a mystic as he was, should thus fall back 
 upon Pantheism — that faith which in all 
 times has had such an attraction for rare 
 souls such as Scotus Erigena and 
 Spinoza. The age was dominated by a 
 practical Deism which made God, not 
 the Supreme Creative Vitality whose im- 
 pulse and powers are felt everywhere, 
 but a Deus ex Machina — a far-away be- 
 ing which had sometime created and now 
 looked on to see how the universe, wheels, 
 cogs, and all would run. The sympa- 
 thetic imagination of Shelley had no 
 faith in or for such a barren spectre. 
 He turned to nature and saw at least
 
 30 The Higher Ministries 
 
 the "Spirit of Beauty"; he even de- 
 tected at times an " awful loveliness " in 
 man, and along 
 
 ** the beaten road 
 Which these poor slaves with weary footsteps 
 
 tread, 
 Who travel to their home among the dead 
 By the broad highway of the world." 
 
 This, impersonal as it was, was more 
 to him than that huge fiction which much 
 of the poor Theism and all of the con- 
 fessed Deism of his day held in awe. He 
 embraced it under different names, and 
 wrote a subtle Pantheism. 
 
 Coleridge, however, appeared to be yet 
 more annoyingly pantheistic, because he 
 wrote theology ; and the theologians of 
 his day, with many good people of our 
 own who do not see the truth which much 
 of our Theism has shut out and which 
 Pantheism takes in, join in this quite ig- 
 norant indictment. It is asked : did he 
 not become a mystic, as perplexing as 
 Jacob Boehme, and question : 
 
 " What if all animated natures 
 Be but organic harps diversely framed,
 
 Of Recent English Poetry 31 
 
 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 — " ? 
 
 The answer is : Coleridge did shake 
 from his sensitive spirit the mechanical 
 ways which the eighteenth century had 
 consecrated as the only methods of truth- 
 finding. But did not this seer of High- 
 gate, unpleasantly distinguishing, as Car- 
 lyle tells us, "Om-mject" from **Sum- 
 mject," with nasal twang, so repeat the 
 thought of Schelling to Englishmen and 
 so reprint Neoplatonism and reissue the 
 idealism of Germany, that even he became 
 the apostle of doctrines dear to Spinoza ? 
 The reply must be that this man, into 
 whose English soul had come, through 
 German avenues, the ideas of the unity of 
 all realities, the primacy of spirit, the ab- 
 soluteness of God, did escape the conceits 
 of the Evangelicals, as they were called, 
 and the vicious realism of the sceptics, by 
 insisting, oftentimes to the exclusion of the 
 corresponding truth, upon the oneness of 
 the Reason which we call God with the 
 Reason which was within him, and is the 
 " Light which lighteth every man coming
 
 02 The Higher Ministries 
 
 into the world." If this is Pantheism, or if 
 it leads to Pantheism, one has still to say 
 with Carlyle : " And what if it be pot-the- 
 ism, if it is true." 
 
 But of Wordsworth I have already 
 quoted part of the famous passage from 
 the " Prelude," which has often brought 
 the charge of Pantheism to his door, and 
 I aver to any one who accepts the dictum 
 of Aristotle : " Poetry is a thing more 
 philosophical and mightier than history " ; 
 and who would see the difTerence between 
 Christian Theism and any sort of Panthe- 
 ism, no poet will so richly reward studi- 
 ous attention as does he. Christian The- 
 ism includes the truth in all Pantheism, 
 just as Wordsworth did in his thought of 
 life and nature. He added idealism to 
 the realism of the hour. He tells us : "I 
 was often unable to think of external 
 things as having external existence, and 
 I communed with all I saw as something 
 not apart from, but inherent in, my own 
 immaterial nature. Many times, while 
 going to school, have I grasped at a wall 
 or tree to recall myself from the abyss of 
 Idealism to reality. At that time I was 
 afraid of such processes. In later periods
 
 Of Recent English Poetry 33 
 
 of life I have deplored, as we all have 
 reason to do, a subjugation of an oppo- 
 site character, and have rejoiced over 
 these remembrances." 
 
 Whether the " Ode " is or is not what 
 it has been called — a " clear reminiscence 
 of Platonism," a comprehensive Theism, 
 which postulates the immanence of God, 
 as Deism does not, which also clings to 
 the transcendence of God, as Pantheism 
 cannot, desires no loftier strain. If the 
 Transcendentalists of New England loved 
 it, not less do those of the Wordsworthian 
 school love it. If it is to Emerson " the 
 best modern essay on the subject," and 
 " the high- water mark of English poe- 
 try," so was this poem to Newman or 
 Phillips Brooks. If this passage suggests 
 Fichte — 
 
 " This is the genuine course, the aim, the end 
 Of prescient reason ; all conclusions else 
 Are abject, vain, presumptuous, and perverse. 
 The faith partaking of these holy times." 
 
 " Life, I repeat, is energy of Love, 
 
 Divine or human ; exercised in pain. 
 
 In strife, or tribulation, and ordained, 
 
 If so approved and satisfied, to pass 
 
 Through shades and silent rest, to endless joy "—
 
 34 The Higher Ministries 
 
 it also suggests one who said : " In Him 
 we Hve, and move, and have our being," 
 as also his Master, preaching, ** God is 
 Love," " The kingdom of God is within 
 you." If this passage is Hke the Panthe- 
 ism of Scheliing — 
 
 "Thou, who didst wrap the cloud 
 Of infancy around us, that Thyself 
 Therein, with our simplicity, awhile 
 Might'sthold, on earth, communion undisturbed; 
 Who, from the anarchy of dreaming sleep, 
 Or from the death-like void, with punctual care. 
 And touch as gentle as the morning light, 
 Restorest us, daily, to the powers of sense 
 And reason's steadfast rule. Thou, Thou alone 
 Art everlasting, and the blessed Spirits, 
 Which Thou includest, as the sea her waves, 
 For adoration Thou endurest ; endure 
 For consciousness the motion of Thy will ; 
 For apprehension those transcendant truths 
 Of the pure Intellect that stand as laws ; 
 Submission, constituting strength and power, 
 Even to Thy Being's infinite majesty " — 
 
 is like the Theism of John. The first two 
 lines are as far from Pantheism as they 
 could be, and the rest of the passage is 
 only the poetic glow he has given to the
 
 Of Recent English Poetry 3'5. 
 
 fact that God is not only over all but in 
 all. There is no fatalism here. All is 
 balanced with the idea of personality, 
 and, so far from saying that the ** Spirits " 
 of men are God, as waves are the sea, he 
 only says that God includes them thus. 
 It is a vision of a universe filled with life 
 and it has no strain in which Christian 
 Theism does not join ; but that Christian 
 Theism has included the truth which is in 
 Pantheism. 
 
 Wordsworth's influence has gone into 
 the literature of description. Nature has 
 seemed to have a gospel for our un- 
 naturalness which we may well heed. 
 These ideas of man, and of nature, it is 
 useless to say, have been an occult but 
 pervasive force operating in men's minds 
 with gracious influence, and have con- 
 tributed in places where they are likely 
 least to be reverenced and confessed to- 
 ward the strength and sanity of that great 
 current of inquiry and philosophizing of 
 which we are so conscious in our day, 
 the scientific movement. It has been a 
 lofty view of nature, whether openly 
 Christian or not, which has been at the 
 bottom of the matchless research of our
 
 36 The Higher Ministries 
 
 great scientific minds. It has been a 
 very poetic view of nature, indeed, which 
 has governed the thought and led the 
 philosophizing of the first thinkers of the 
 time ; Tyndall, Huxley, Darwin, Russell 
 Wallace — each shows the touch upon his 
 soul of that nobler conception of nature, 
 which, without the seeming of cant, works 
 in the poetry of him who stands at the 
 opening of our epoch, uttering " nothing 
 base." These ideas have as largely in- 
 structed the religious consciousness of 
 our day. Nature had been too much 
 conceived as a " manufactured article " ; 
 she was to become fresh and vital with 
 creative power in every movement, as 
 under the eye of Wordsworth. Had the- 
 ology and religion thoroughly entered 
 into communion with the God which 
 Wordsworth saw in the movement of a 
 seed and heard in its pain, that shameful 
 ignorance which has stood up with pious 
 curses and laborious refutation to oppose 
 the development of our current philosophy 
 of nature would never have confessed it- 
 self ; and there is as little of it as there is, 
 because of that higher conception of nature 
 and of God, which for those pregnant
 
 Of Recent English Poetry 37 
 
 years, his genius breathed into English 
 thought. 
 
 I have thus held before you these three 
 spiritual forces, because they, most of all 
 the singers and thinkers of the generation 
 which has influenced the leaders of ours, 
 represent the thoughts and impulses 
 which made the problem in the spiritual 
 life which every worthy poet read to-day 
 has sought to solve. Christian living, so 
 far as it was under the influence of ideas 
 at all, emerged from the eighteenth cen- 
 tury, with its shallow scepticism, its easy 
 manners, and its political storm, sure to 
 meet the necessity of a thorough restate- 
 ment of faith. Burns, in Calvinistic Scot- 
 land, was but the prophet of MacLeod 
 Campbell, Norman Macleod and John 
 TuUoch ; and Byron and Shelley in Eng- 
 land were the undeniable evidence that, 
 in the souls of thoughtful people, ques- 
 tions as to the authority of the sacred 
 books, the reality and character of the 
 incarnation, the nature and extent of 
 atonement, the place of reason, and the 
 province of faith, the mysterious future, 
 were rising to honest lips, and that the 
 next generation should search for answers
 
 38 The Higher Ministries 
 
 to them in its highest Hterature. The 
 poets have been the prophets of all time. 
 All these questions, too, were to be 
 asked in an age when there should occur 
 such an outward and upward movement 
 in the march of the physical sciences as 
 would bewilder those who were onlookers, 
 with the number of overturned traditions 
 and exploded theories as to the relations 
 of mind and matter, the power of the 
 human will and the fact of human respon- 
 sibility, and the history of creation and of 
 mankind on the earth. At the same time, 
 when these questions were to be pressed 
 in the midst of others which science was 
 to present, there was to open around all 
 humanity an atmosphere of most engross- 
 ing practicalism, wherein invention work- 
 ing along with science should astonish 
 man with the wonders of hand and brain, 
 saving labour and stimulating desire ; 
 new worlds of fact and idea discovered 
 and developed ; vast fortunes accumu- 
 lated ; great changes in the political fea- 
 tures of the globe ; slaves freed and wars 
 avoided or carried on with unprecedented 
 activity and tact; democracy steadily 
 gaining upon the earth ; and the practical
 
 Of Recent English Poetry 39 
 
 man at the front asking the philosophers 
 and rehgionists what a Concord Summer 
 School of Philosophy or a Church Con- 
 gress is worth in dollars and cents. 
 
 Now, when thus the religious man came 
 eighty years ago in England to do his 
 own thinking, the men, who most of all 
 had represented those forces which were to 
 both make his spiritual problem and help 
 to solve it, were Shelley, Wordsworth and 
 Coleridge. Their kind of spiritual leader- 
 ship only might lead men out of the 
 difficulties which they had done much to 
 create. Not Walter Scott, who had added 
 to modern days the atmosphere of medi- 
 aeval romance, could safely transport the 
 human soul to the day of George Eliot ; 
 John Keats, in his worship of beauty, 
 could not with honeyed sweetness and 
 melodious rhyme, lift the newly-stirred 
 spirit from his fresh woodlands and ardent 
 loves to the hours when a man of faith 
 would solemnly ask the question : " Is 
 life worth living?" The tender senti- 
 mentalities of Thomas Moore seem very 
 tremulous indeed in the mind of a youth 
 who is to face the abysses through which 
 a Arthur Hugh Clough was compelled to
 
 40 The Higher Ministries 
 
 thread his way ere the Hght came, and 
 even the associate of Coleridge and 
 Wordsworth in that interest called " Lake 
 Poetry " and in a common hope growing 
 up out of the Revolution, — I mean 
 Southey — either as the biographer of 
 Nelson or of Wesley, could do little to 
 prepare a mind for those questionings 
 and delays of light which beset a Fred- 
 erick W. Robertson or a John Stuart Mill. 
 As philosophical speculation and 
 thoughtful questioning in Germany has 
 rolled its tide over England, and the shout 
 of the dissenter or the protest of the 
 Evangelical churchman, or the predesti- 
 nated insensibility of the Calvinist, has 
 sought in vain to beat it back, Coleridge's 
 unique teaching, which had been in- 
 fluenced by Schelling and yet had been 
 faithful to the Church of God, has been 
 appreciated ; and it has also been valued 
 when a verdant statesmanship and an 
 ambitious churchmanship have filled the 
 air with their cries. As venerable dog- 
 matism has insisted on a Maurice or a 
 Thomas Arnold or a MacLeod Campbell 
 or an Arthur Stanley being wise above 
 that which was written, or subscribing to
 
 Of Recent English Poetry 41 
 
 and defending dogmas as to the nature 
 of God and the work of Christ and the 
 destiny of man which repulse the moral 
 sense and exile reason, the effect of this 
 one voice which spoke to our fathers has 
 been like that of the awakening hand 
 which comes in the moment of some 
 awful nightmare. As science has come 
 in lately with precious burdens of rocks 
 and shells, protoplasm and alkalis, and 
 has dumped the new physical universe 
 down upon the human soul, the yearning 
 of Shelley only as informed by the spirit- 
 ual philosophy of Coleridge has rescued 
 the soul ; and the vision of what nature 
 is, which Wordsworth left, has remained 
 so unshattered that the God who is above 
 all and yet in all has never ceased to 
 speak to listening and eager souls. In a 
 noisy, self-asserting age, Wordsworth's 
 calm has been felt like a benediction. In 
 a time when liberty has meant license 
 oftentimes, and when social discontent 
 has sent its flame of hate and rage far up 
 into the sky, the sturdy soul, who, at the 
 beginning of our era breathed into the 
 drops of our blood, has again sung his 
 paean of duty and his psalm of peace.
 
 42 The Higher Ministries 
 
 First, an admirer, then a condemner of 
 the French Revolution, Wordsworth, like 
 Burke, like all lovers of law, in his view 
 of man, of nature and of the Divine, be- 
 comes the bridge over which the mind of 
 England has gone from a Byronic alliance 
 with revolution to a faith in evolution — in 
 thought and civilization, as in nature so 
 in progress — that dominance of law and 
 truth of which Tennyson was our sweetest 
 singer. So truly does God continue the 
 education of the race ; so fitly does 
 Wordsworth stand as the great religious 
 poet-teacher of an age preceding us and 
 deeply influencing our own. 
 
 We thus find how much these poets have 
 done to create that atmosphere in which 
 Browning should write the words which 
 so much worry outworn theories and yet 
 so completely answer our most serious 
 questions. Tennyson offers his " Flower 
 in the Crannied Wall," and Matthew Ar- 
 nold his exposition of the word of Saint 
 Bernard, at this juncture. These men, 
 each after his kind, were idealists. They 
 stood in contrast with that earthy and 
 mechanical realism which had not a 
 dream or a reverie, and which had even
 
 Of Recent English Poetry 43 
 
 fought its way into the orthodoxy of the 
 day. Shelley was carried into Pantheism ; 
 that idealism delivered Coleridge from a 
 hard and cold view of God which left 
 nature and the human soul godless ; it 
 made all of them, especially Wordsworth, 
 Christian theists. He really believed in 
 God and in His omnipresence. Their be- 
 lief in Him did not, as Coleridge's think- 
 ing went to prove, allow the notion that 
 He had expressed His will and love, is- 
 sued His laws and worked by His holy 
 spirit in Jewish days, or at any other 
 time, to the exclusion of His mighty 
 working in the hearts of all men. This 
 conception prepared men's thought for 
 the study of history in that fresh spirit 
 and with that large illumination which 
 Schliermacher has shown and Neander 
 has illustrated. It is the same spirit 
 which Niebuhr and Bunsen incarnated in 
 Germany. Of its methods Milman and 
 Arnold in England, and even Carlyle, 
 have been examples. Since their day a 
 new race of historians has come, but Cole- 
 ridge's influence has remained supreme 
 even with them. After Coleridge's in- 
 fluence had begun to spread, the whole
 
 44 The Higher Ministries 
 
 history of man became sacred history, in 
 a sense which took nothing from the 
 great books of the Bible, but which has 
 aided the freedom and fostered the imag- 
 ination of every student of history in the 
 nineteenth century. God was in hu- 
 manity and that made humanity, its Ht- 
 erature, its civiUzation, its philosophy, 
 everywhere interesting. 
 
 But God was also in the human soul as 
 the revelation of truth. " The light which 
 lighteth every man coming into the 
 world " was illumining to the soul and its 
 pathways, if man would but trust it with 
 more confidence. Here were, then, the 
 beginnings of a Christian rationalism. Of 
 course, theologians protested. They 
 said : If it be thought that there is a di- 
 vinity within the reason, if God be said 
 to be within the soul answering to God 
 without, then external revelation-— the 
 revelation of atonement and future re- 
 wards and punishments — will be ques- 
 tioned. They did not over-estimate the 
 consequences of such an admission. 
 They did not dwell too strongly upon the 
 fact that if once reason could be conse- 
 crated by Christianity, reason would
 
 Of Recent English Poetry 45 
 
 surely make sad work with many a tradi- 
 tion and theory which was often said to 
 be true because of the fact that some man 
 dared to say it is unreasonable. But this 
 influence prevailed. Christianity was not 
 only to be a message of glad tidings, but 
 the truest philosophy. These ideas, of 
 course, did their work of preparation, in- 
 vitation, inspiration ; and they created 
 and welcomed a very diverse race of 
 English thinkers. John Henry, Cardinal 
 Newman, claims Coleridge as the begin- 
 ner of that High Church movement 
 which landed him in Rome ; the Broad 
 Churchman^ Frederick Denison Maurice, 
 and so stern a Calvinist as Dr. William 
 G. Shedd, walk together to strew rose- 
 mary on his grave. Edward Irving, 
 with his splendid oratory, and Charles 
 Kingsley, with his humane spirit — one 
 an apostate, the other a devoted Church- 
 man — owe their voices and messages 
 largely to the author of the " Aids To 
 Reflection." 
 
 Yet the lofty gifts of these men thus 
 led and inspired did not reflect the 
 supreme light of those who had led 
 and inspired them. While Shelley made
 
 46 The Higher Ministries 
 
 nature leap and flower with sacred ener- 
 gies, Coleridge and Wordsworth taught 
 that this God in humanity, in reason and 
 in conscience, is also in nature. Na- 
 ture's movement, her whole range of ex- 
 perience, the thundering sea and the 
 breathing flower, — all partake with man 
 in the life of God. To either of these, 
 as we survey their poetry, 
 
 " The meanest flower that blows can give 
 Thoughts that do often lie too deep for tears." 
 
 Nay, so surely was God in nature that 
 with Wordsworth, she has even a higher 
 ministry than this. 
 
 "For, the man 
 Who, in this spirit, communes with the forms 
 Of nature, who, with understanding heart, 
 Both knows and loves such objects as excite 
 No morbid passions, no disquietude, 
 No vengeance, and no hatred — needs must feel 
 The joy of that pure principle of love 
 So deeply that, unsatisfied with aught 
 Less pure and exquisite, he cannot choose 
 But seek for objects of a kindred love 
 In fellow natures, and a kindred joy." 
 
 Thus the imagination of England — a
 
 Of Recent English Poetry 47 
 
 power which, by the confession of Mr. 
 Tyndall, has had so much to do with the 
 courage, insight and achievements of 
 modern science — has been by this Words- 
 worthian influence so alHed to the mys- 
 terious soul of nature, that a distinctly po- 
 etic as well as awe-inspiring conception of 
 what nature is, has come in some meas- 
 ure to all thoughtful persons. The rigid 
 manufacturer's ideas of what a blade of 
 grass is and what man is — these have 
 gone, and we behold a theology and a 
 science which have been accused, the one 
 of bringing God so near and the other of 
 making nature so vital, as to submerge 
 Him within the physical universe. 
 
 The poetry of our age could not be true 
 to the soul of man without having a deep 
 sense of the value of contemporary science 
 which has so long influenced our religion. 
 Mr. Stedman has called attention to 
 Wordsworth's remarkable words on the 
 future relations of science and poetry — 
 " a prophecy," says this critic, " which, 
 half a century ago, could only have been 
 uttered by a man of lofty intellect and ex- 
 traordinary premonition of changes even 
 now at hand."
 
 48 The Higher Ministries 
 
 " The objects of the poet's thoughts," 
 says Wordsworth, " are everywhere ; 
 though eyes and senses of man are, it is 
 true, his favourite guides, yet he will fol- 
 low wheresoever he can find an atmos- 
 phere of sensation in which to move his 
 wings. Poetry is the first and last of all 
 knowledge, — it is as immortal as the 
 heart of man. If the labours of men of 
 science should ever create any material 
 revolution, direct or indirect, in our con- 
 dition, and in the impressions which we 
 habitually receive, the poet will sleep then 
 no more at present ; he will be ready to 
 follow the steps of the man of science, not 
 only in those general indirect effects, but 
 he will be at his side, carrying sensation 
 into the midst of the objects of the science 
 itself. The remotest discoveries of the 
 chemist, the botanist, or the mineralogist 
 will be as proper objects of the poet's art 
 as any upon which it can be employed. 
 If the time should ever come when these 
 things shall be familiar to us, another re- 
 lation under which they are contemplated 
 by the followers of the respective sciences, 
 shall be manifestly and palpably material 
 to us as enjoying and suffering beings.
 
 Of Recent English Poetry 49 
 
 If the time should ever come when what 
 is now called science, thus familiarized to 
 men, shall be ready to put on, as it were, 
 a form of flesh and blood, the poet will 
 lend his divine spirit to aid the transfig- 
 uration, and will welcome the Being thus 
 produced as a clear and genuine inmate 
 of its household of man." 
 
 The hour which Wordsworth foresaw 
 is here. The same science which has 
 seemed to uproot religion has created 
 new problems for the poet as well as 
 the preacher, and the next century will 
 declare, in its criticism, that it is one of 
 the evidences of true poetry which issued 
 from the human soul in an age which has 
 been complained of as unpoetic, unro- 
 mantic, realistic, that its song has incor- 
 porated into its somewhat involved mel- 
 ody the discoveries which would have 
 broken down the slight philosophy of a 
 simply romantic day, and that its music 
 has gone on enriching and being en- 
 riched by the glad discoveries it has found 
 in the enlarged knowledge of our time. 
 So, also, the historian of religion, looking 
 back upon an age when the scientific 
 spirit had so thoroughly compelled men
 
 ^o The Higher Ministries 
 
 to review their faiths, will see that in every 
 torn but victorious spirit like Robertson, 
 in every chivalrous soul like Maurice, 
 there lay the fresh impulses of a high and 
 personal leadership for the spiritual life of 
 English-speaking peoples. Unquestion- 
 ably this perfect understanding which 
 Arnold, Browning and Tennyson have of 
 the new relations which science has made 
 to exist amongst old truths, and that per- 
 ception which they give us of the signifi- 
 cance of the newly-found truths to re- 
 ligious thought and to the spiritual life, 
 have made them supremely helpful to our 
 feverish and startled age. Singing on, as 
 for the most part they do, with a sweet- 
 ness and a power unsurpassed, we, who 
 are perplexed with the discords between 
 our faith and our knowledge, so that we 
 are discordant too, at last take their 
 hands, and the confidence which we 
 have as to the sureness of the hold which 
 they help men still to keep upon the 
 primal realities of faith or the new hopes 
 of man is rendered much more living by 
 the discovery which we make in their 
 song, that, at least as well as we, do they 
 feel the pressure of the things which
 
 Of Recent English Poetry 51 
 
 have so distracted us. This knowledge 
 of the subtle currents and evident waves 
 in what Mr. Arnold calls "the sea of 
 faith," which currents and waves have 
 been set going not only by the advances 
 of modern science and philosophy, but 
 also by the poets and their songs, is, to 
 the heart's great assurance, associated 
 in the minds and songs of these poets 
 with a reverence which invites into its awe 
 the trembling souls which are songless ; 
 and it is also associated with a profound 
 knowledge of human nature, a delicate 
 and thoroughgoing understanding of the 
 history of man, his griefs and aspirations ; 
 and this fact binds the mind of our time 
 to the poet's message. 
 
 Poetry and religion have had much the 
 same cause to stand for in their attitude 
 towards science. When the ignorance of 
 a daring unbelief has proclaimed " no 
 God 1 " the muse has had a broken lyre 
 and the priest a ruined altar. For poetry 
 is as much an impossibility in a godless 
 and spiritless universe as is religion. 
 When the folly of a superficial student 
 has announced the death of faith, the 
 singer and the devotee, the minstrel and
 
 52 The Higher Ministries 
 
 the minister have felt a common fataUty 
 possible and impending. For the poet's 
 imagination dies in the air of doubt, as 
 truly as the religionist's prayer perishes 
 in agnosticism — his imagination having 
 the loftiest flight in an act of faith. How 
 truly contemporary English verse in Ar- 
 nold, Tennyson and Browning has shared 
 the peril and the victory of faith, we will 
 seek to discover in the succeeding lec- 
 tures.
 
 LECTURE II 
 
 MATTHEW ARNOLD 
 
 The value of such a man as Matthew 
 Arnold to those of us who have been less 
 generously endowed and less thoroughly 
 trained, who nevertheless have many of his 
 spiritual interests, lies in his representa- 
 tive quality and function. In spite of his 
 greater scholarship, finer vision, severer 
 classicalism and less emotional religious- 
 ness, he shows us what we would experi- 
 ence with certain ideas and ideals if we 
 could. He is so little a man of self-iso- 
 lating genius and so much one of us all, 
 albeit of intenser glow of radiation be- 
 cause of rarer purity and higher energy, 
 that when he returns to us, after having 
 encountered insuperable difficulties in his 
 own effort to proceed far with certain 
 ideas, and brings back to us a well-de- 
 fined spiritual map and an account of 
 those intimations which now he assures 
 us are facts of the soul and its life, we 
 may be entirely sure that he is express- 
 53
 
 5'4 The Higher Ministries 
 
 ing what we will see and feel and finally 
 say when our powers and patience and 
 duty make the journey and the return our 
 own. Arnold's austere sincerity of mind 
 works in genial harmony with an almost 
 passionate devotion to the true scholar's 
 function — the duty and privilege of stating 
 the truths of which he is sure and point- 
 ing out the directions he deems most 
 promising for men of like temper and re- 
 straint to take, if they will find more 
 truths. 
 
 We must not grow weary of his itera- 
 tion. He is always a teacher. Some 
 things have needed repetition to our 
 changeful minds and they are the things 
 with which Arnold is most concerned. 
 We cannot well spare the movement of 
 the strings in the melodious utterance of 
 current thought — a movement which was 
 initiated by certain restless convictions 
 which took up so often the phrase of 
 Dean Swift and proved to us that " sweet- 
 ness and light " mean " lucidity of mind 
 and largeness of temper." We cannot 
 too often reflect that religion is at least 
 " morality touched by emotion." What 
 he enforces so repeatedly as his praise of
 
 Of Recent English Poetry ^5 
 
 the sense, splendour and speed of Homer, 
 is always worth enforcing. What we 
 miss may be something deep and lumi- 
 nous as to the substance of Homer ; but 
 we must be content that Arnold has set- 
 tled it that no translation of Homer will 
 be approved which is not penetrated by 
 a sense of Homer's four qualities : " he is 
 eminently rapid ; he is eminently plain 
 and direct in his syntax and in his words ; 
 he is eminently plain and direct in his 
 matter and ideas and finally that he is 
 eminently noble." His recommendation 
 of culture appears less valuable, now that 
 it is in the blood of us all, and as some- 
 thing more than a recommendation. It 
 was worth while saying it over and again, 
 that the culture of the last quarter of the 
 nineteenth century in England as he un- 
 derstood it, and religion as the orthodoxy 
 of that day had misunderstood it, were 
 likely and advantageously to change 
 places as to their importance in men's 
 thoughts. " As a harmonious expansion 
 of all the powers which make the beauty 
 and worth of human nature," he averred, 
 *' culture goes beyond religion, as religion 
 is generally conceived among us." Here
 
 56 The Higher Ministries 
 
 then we see, and we perceive that he sees 
 his function. This was not so much an 
 overestimate of culture as Arnold con- 
 ceived it as a just exposure of some con- 
 ceptions of religion. He is a Greek totally 
 out of sympathy with a certain popular re- 
 ligious philosophy of God, man, and life. 
 He will help us to see the Greek's failure. 
 But we must see more if we shall rightly 
 value him. We shall see what a true man, 
 even though he be a Greek stoic, has the 
 right to demand of any religion whatso- 
 ever. As a Greek, he had an inadequate 
 view of what man must obtain from a true 
 religion; but, on the other hand some who 
 have what he fails to ask for in religion 
 fail to ask for what this Greek has. No 
 one knows better than he to what con- 
 fusion this leads. He would honestly 
 help the sick human soul. Yet even 
 more descriptive of his own spirit, than of 
 Goethe, are Arnold's well-known words : 
 
 " He took the suflfering human race ; 
 
 He read each wound, each weakness clear ; 
 He struck his finger on the place, 
 
 And said * Thou ailest here, and here. * " 
 
 The failure to find a remedy means
 
 Of Recent English Poetry 5*7 
 
 much, when such an able and sympathetic 
 hand is searching for it. Some may 
 jauntily conclude that the ailment "here 
 and here " has been overstated and that 
 nothing but an alleviation is necessary — it 
 is very human to do this to foil our despair. 
 The sheer mental force with which Ar- 
 nold does this at times is warning enough 
 to us who are weak. The greater man- 
 liness of mind, the totality of his moral 
 and mental energies with which he oftener 
 refuses to deny the malady and get on 
 with a pleasant palliative is, on the other 
 hand, an encouragement to us to be en- 
 tire and true. More than this, also, we 
 shall see, as we study his poems. The 
 Greek's problem as to life is less serious 
 than man's problem, but, assuredly, even 
 the Greek's problem could find no ade- 
 quate solution in religion as stated by 
 the constituted authorities of English or- 
 thodoxy. It can find none to-day in any 
 American iteration of it. And so, we 
 may study in Arnold's poetry, with even 
 more advantage than in his prose, these 
 two phenomena — an inadequate statement 
 of human need and an inadequate state- 
 ment of Divine supply. Each reveals the
 
 ^8 The Higher Ministries 
 
 other. It required a man of extraordi- 
 nary parts, highest culture and exquisite 
 poise of mind, to stand between these, 
 indeed to take them into his two hands, 
 and, apparently unaware that the Greek 
 idea and ideal of life only partially utters 
 life's deepest cries, to balance them, to 
 show off each in the presence of the other 
 with a dexterity and irony so fine and a 
 love for truth so urgent, that, at length 
 this man became one of the most lumi- 
 nous teachers of a single truth with double 
 phase whom any age has known. With 
 his father's distinguished powers devoted 
 to his training, he added to inherited gifts 
 from Thomas Arnold himself, his own 
 Greek spirit expressing itself in a flawless 
 style now exemplified in literary monu- 
 ments as faultlessly chiselled as Phidian 
 sculpture. Admirably uniting in himself 
 those qualities of the poet's personality 
 which are greatest and whose union for- 
 bids any eccentricity of energy or even 
 the display of one isolating note or mark, 
 he gave what he himself called a distinc- 
 tion and style to forty years of thinking 
 and feeling in both poetry and prose. 
 He was so true a man, and yet he treated
 
 Of Recent English Poetry ^^ 
 
 the Greek idea and ideal of life so wisely 
 and sincerely that, before his life had 
 closed, his own soul and its progress had 
 broken down the Greek equation of life 
 as he proved the inadequacy of popular 
 theology as a philosophy of life and des- 
 tiny. Thus he left the field clear for Chris- 
 tianity of the sort Jesus preached. If his 
 poetry and life teach anything, they teach 
 the probability that Jesus as the reve- 
 lation of God in man alone adequately 
 meets and answers man's problem. This 
 result came to Arnold at an awful cost. 
 His latest vision came from a disaster to 
 his early philosophy. What though, 
 amid all the changes, 
 
 " Across his sea of mind, 
 The thought comes streaming like a blazing ship 
 Upon a mighty wind." 
 
 What though the ship goes shoreward 
 burning as she runs aground ; our sky has 
 been illumined ; we know the sea better 
 and we may steer more wisely. The 
 beached ship is Greek stoicism ; but the 
 mariner is safe. 
 
 Before we examine Matthew Arnold's
 
 6o The Higher Ministries 
 
 Greek cry for calm or goodness, beauty 
 or culture, let us note that whatever we 
 obtain from him is to be gained, not with- 
 out some understanding between us that 
 his views of God, nature and religion at 
 productive moments had no alliance with 
 those of the past which we have looked 
 into, — that he is Wordsworth's disciple, 
 that he thinks with the truth which lies 
 in Pantheism ; he is often perplexing as 
 to the personality of God ; he regards 
 nature as something more than a manu- 
 factured article, and he views the whole 
 life of man as a revelation of God. 
 These things he believes deeply, perhaps 
 no more deeply than did Plato, but not in 
 Plato's manner. Arnold believes with an 
 almost Puritanic strenuousness. He will 
 have no mere connoisseur's relationship 
 unto the face or heart of any truth. He 
 sings : 
 
 ** Man is blind because of sin, 
 Revelation makes him sure ; 
 Without that, who looks within, 
 Looks in vain, for all's obscure." 
 
 Nay, look closer into man ! 
 Tell me, can you find indeed
 
 Of Recent English Poetry 6l 
 
 Nothing sure, no moral plan 
 
 Clear prescribed, without your creed ? 
 
 "No, I nothing can perceive ! 
 
 Without that, all's dark for men. 
 That, or nothing, I believe." — 
 For God's sake, believe it then ! 
 
 As a poet he embodies what he praises, 
 and the white-souled Milton had no finer 
 mental integrity. The muse of Arnold 
 wore the sackcloth beneath the radiance. 
 
 That son of Italy who tried to blow, 
 Ere Dante came, the trump of sacred song. 
 In his light youth amid a festal throng 
 Sate with his bride to see a public show. 
 
 Fair was the bride, and on her front did glow 
 Youth like a star ; and what to youth belong — 
 Gay raiment, sparkling gauds, elation strong. 
 A prop gave way ! crash fell a platform ! lo, 
 
 'Mid struggling sufferers, hurt to death, she lay ! 
 Shuddering, they drew her garments off — and 
 
 found 
 A robe of sackcloth next the smooth, white skin. 
 
 Such, poets, is your bride, the Muse ! young, gay, 
 Radiant, adorn'd outside ; a hidden ground 
 Of thought and of austerity within.
 
 62 The Higher Ministries 
 
 This amply endowed critic, a lyric bard 
 with true Attic accent, and a most sug- 
 gestive teacher of reverence for things re- 
 ligious has nevertheless a didactic use for 
 the ideas just mentioned which often 
 warms him to exhortation. For example, 
 here he may appear to deny personality 
 to God ; but he inculcates a message : 
 
 "Yes, write it in the rock," Saint Bernard said, 
 " Grave it on brass with adamantine pen ! 
 'Tis God Himself becomes apparent, when 
 God's wisdom and God's goodness are display'd, 
 
 "For God of these His attributes is made." — 
 Well spake the impetuous saint, and bore of men 
 The suffrage captive ; now, not one in ten 
 Recalls the obscure opposer he outweighed. 
 
 God's wisdom and God's goodness ! — Ay, but 
 
 fools 
 Mis-define these till God knows them no more. 
 Wisdom and goodness, they are God ! — what 
 
 schools 
 
 Have yet so much as heard this simpler lore ? 
 This no saint preaches, and this no Church rules ; 
 'Tis in the desert, now and heretofore. 
 
 This sonnet is, certainly, not a denial of
 
 Of Recent English Poetry 63 
 
 anything. It is new and strange to an 
 anthropomorphic orthodoxy. But has not 
 this a deeper faith in the Divine Omni- 
 presence? Practically, we know that to 
 obey Goodness or Truth is to obey God j 
 and Arnold puts everything of a meta- 
 physical or theological look into the 
 alembic of practice. If it stands that 
 heat, all is well ; for " Conduct," he is 
 always saying, " is three-fourths of life." 
 Here is the larger, if also the higher, 
 Pantheism which is hymned by Tenny- 
 son. Let one, if he must, insist that 
 goodness is rather the fragrance than the 
 flower, and truth is the sunlight but not 
 the sun ; then will Matthew Arnold spurn 
 our metaphysics and its distinctions. He 
 will say what is very cheering, in spite of 
 his pervasive melancholy : 
 
 Enough, we live ! — and if a life. 
 With large results so little rife, 
 Though bearable, seem hardly worth 
 This pomp of worlds, this pain of birth ; 
 Yet, Fausta, the mute turf we tread, 
 The solemn hills around us spread, 
 This stream which falls incessantly. 
 The strange-scrawl' d rocks, the lonely sky, 
 If I might lend their life a voice,
 
 64 The Higher Ministries 
 
 Seem to bear rather than rejoice. 
 And even could the intemperate prayer 
 Man iterates, while these forbear, 
 For movement, for an ampler sphere, 
 Pierce Fate's impenetrable ear ; 
 Not milder is the general lot 
 Because our spirits have forgot, 
 In action's dizzying eddy whirl'd. 
 That something that ififects the world. 
 
 Now that Something is God. If we are 
 to take that Something into the realm of 
 Conduct to which he always appeals to 
 determine what is true — that realm where 
 alone we may live a truth and find its 
 truthfulness — we find not a mere doctrinal 
 but a moral reason for identifying Good- 
 ness with God. Our idea of the All-Good 
 is livable. God's idea of Himself is infi- 
 nitely true in Eternal Being. His good- 
 ness is His glory. How does God con- 
 duct Himself ? The answer must be in 
 this : 
 
 " 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." —
 
 Of Recent English Poetry 65 
 
 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 eyes 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 shoulders, not a lamb, a kid. 
 
 There is no duo-verse or multi-verse in 
 his eye, as Arnold discerns the presence 
 of God. This is a universe because God 
 is all and in all. This exposition may not 
 be quite satisfactory to metaphysical the- 
 ology, but it fixes the thought: "The 
 Kingdom of God is within you," and it 
 provides a mighty leverage for that con- 
 duct where faith in God must live. Per- 
 haps it is more Greek than Hebrew, and 
 it may turn out to be one of the richest 
 of Greek contributions completing the 
 sphere of Christian thinking as it appeared 
 when Paul, that *' Hebrew of Hebrews " 
 quoted from the Greek poet, " For in Him 
 we live and move and have our being " or 
 when the Greek Christian fathers, Origen 
 and Clement spake. It is a faith which
 
 66 The Higher Ministries 
 
 surely does not forbid us trusting and 
 obeying the Personal God, though He be 
 no anthropomorphic being such as Arnold 
 had too often troubled himself about, in 
 his " God and the Bible." 
 
 It is this large faith in God which 
 makes such minds stand with awe and 
 prayer in the presence of other religions. 
 " God hath not left Himself without a 
 witness" — they are finding this every- 
 where. 
 
 " Children of men ! the unseen Power, whose eye 
 Forever doth accompany mankind, 
 Hath look'd on no religion scornfully 
 That men did find. 
 
 "Which has not taught weak wills how much 
 
 they can ? 
 Which has not fall'n on the dry heart like rain? 
 Which has not cried to sunk, self-weary man : 
 Thou must be born again ! 
 
 «* Children of men ! not that your age excel 
 In pride of life the ages of your sires. 
 But that ye think clear, feel deep, bear fruit well, 
 The Friend of man desires." 
 
 Such culture as comprehends a sym- 
 pathetic insight into all religions, from
 
 Of Recent English Poetry 67 
 
 this point of view, throughout the prose 
 and poetry of Matthew Arnold, has made 
 an appeal entirely Christian to both min- 
 strels and ministers. Yet Arnold's ex- 
 perience as a thinker on religion and as a 
 teacher of morals — most evidently as a 
 builder of character — makes us pause here, 
 to take our soundings, before we go 
 further in adopting his reckonings and a 
 course. We have left our old world with 
 a certain churchly and narrow conception 
 of God's self-revelation in one religion, 
 namely, in Christianity. And where we 
 now are, Matthew Arnold must tell us in 
 familiar lines. The true minister will find 
 many a sincere man saying even yet : 
 
 Wandering between two worlds, one dead, 
 
 The other powerless to be bom, 
 With nowhere yet to rest my head, 
 
 Like these, on earth I wait forlorn. 
 Their faith, my tears, the world deride — 
 I come to shed them at their side. 
 
 That path of tears was only an intel- 
 lectual retreat, and it was but half dis- 
 covered springing from tired feet towards 
 darkness, when Arnold began to protest. 
 
 Here let the minister take full account of
 
 68 The Higher Ministries 
 
 himself before he flees where no minstrel, 
 however ascetic and austere, may get rid 
 of his brain, his heart and his will. 
 Wherever a man is, with Obermann or the 
 monks at Grande Chartreuse, he will have 
 himself on his hands and " he is incurably 
 religious." No scepticism of Francis W. 
 Newman, no monasticism of John Henry, 
 his brother, has been sufficiently capacious 
 for " the soul and its aspirations " or a 
 mind whose " Apologia Pro Vita Sua " is 
 valuable only as a warning. Yet our 
 minstrel stands painfully concerned with 
 man's spiritual distress looking first one 
 way to the haunt of Obermann and then 
 the other way to ascetic placidity at 
 Grande Chartreuse. It will be a long 
 time before men will leave off looking 
 from Rationalism to Romanism. Arnold's 
 unhasting strength, his love for the heal- 
 ing in nature of which none have found 
 more of the leaves, his fearless inward 
 looking, his haunting fear that he may 
 miss the unrealized as a stimulating 
 dream, his soul's welcome to the pain of 
 progress — these will not harmonize with 
 incessant doubting, nor will they be se- 
 questered from mankind. He may be
 
 Of Recent English Poetry 69 
 
 baffled ; he may have to learn that in 
 many men's crises " their strength is to 
 sit still " ; he may be so long learning it 
 that he shall grow tired and fall upon the 
 breast of God, as a child not meaning to 
 go to sleep just there, but nevertheless 
 finds rest on the mother's breast " found in 
 darkness as in light " — still he must wake, 
 and then he will again sing : 
 
 ** Achilles ponders in his tent, 
 The kings of modern thought are dumb ; 
 Silent they are, though not content, 
 And wait to see the future come. 
 They have the grief men had of yore, 
 But they contend and cry no more. 
 
 " Our fathers water' d with their tears 
 This sea of time whereon we sail. 
 Their voices were in all men's ears 
 Who pass'd within their puissant hail. 
 Still the same ocean round us raves, 
 But we stand mute, and watch the waves." 
 
 There is a pathos in his cry which no 
 other age than our own could have stim- 
 ulated, and the minister who does not 
 apprehend this will not reach the heart of 
 our great spiritual needs. More than 
 Tennyson or Browning does Matthew
 
 70 The Higher Ministries 
 
 Arnold illustrate this. Our age turns this 
 way and that in its search for conclusions, 
 largely from the force of habit. Trying 
 has proven so conquering in our day. 
 It has found so much in unsuspected 
 quarters to fill its purse ; it has worked 
 over the dump of its ancient but forsaken 
 mines, and lo, new methods and processes 
 have amazingly enriched us and the dump 
 has been made more precious than the 
 original diggings ; it has entertained lofty 
 aims and left them for unnamed achieve- 
 ments ; its fear to fail at what it ever set 
 forth to find or to do has issued in find- 
 ing or doing something more grand than 
 any dream ; its yearnings have been too 
 intense, crude, and hasty to live through 
 the mist of dreamy paganism to which 
 they have appealed from a Christianity 
 partial enough to generate them and too 
 fragmentary to train and to crown them — 
 all these colours and tones the soul's cry 
 has caught from the age. Matthew Ar- 
 nold has uttered it. He cannot quite give 
 up his old world. He will not yield essen- 
 tial Christianity even in his revolt against 
 what passes as the authorized statement. 
 From the inadequate dogmatism which
 
 Of Recent English Poetry 71 
 
 he too often seems to confound with Chris- 
 tianity itself, he hastens to a rationalism 
 often Christian in its vocabulary and as 
 often pagan in its account of the soul and 
 its precious furnishings. Then back 
 again he leads us, all the while deepening 
 the necessity within us for a faith which 
 is not quite his own. This begets an al- 
 most diseased self-consciousness or a shad- 
 owy self. Thus, even at best, he is pro- 
 jecting himself upon nature and history. 
 This is illustrated more in his experiences 
 with nature. He almost blasts nature 
 with the hot breath with which he loves 
 her. The urgent shadow of himself gets 
 ahead of him. And yet when he is free from 
 this shadowy self in front of him, there is no 
 more inspired revealer of nature's secret 
 beauty and meaning. He sings by the 
 seaside : 
 
 The sea is calm to-night. 
 
 The tide is full, the moon lies fair 
 
 Upon the straits ; — on the French coast the light 
 
 Gleams and is gone ; the cliffs of England stand, 
 
 Glimmering and vast, out in the tranquil bay. 
 
 Come to the window, sweet is the night-air ! 
 
 Only, from the long line of spray 
 
 Where the sea meets the moon-blanch'd land,
 
 "jl The Higher Ministries 
 
 Listen ! you hear the grating roar 
 
 Of pebbles which the waves draw back, and fling, 
 
 At their return, up the high strand. 
 
 Begin, and cease, and then again begin, 
 
 With tremulous cadence slow, and bring 
 
 The eternal note of sadness in. 
 
 Sophocles long ago 
 
 Heard it on the ^gean, and it brought 
 
 Into his mind the turbid ebb and flow 
 
 Of human misery; we 
 
 Find also in the sound a thought, 
 
 Hearing it by this distant northern sea. 
 
 The Sea of Faith 
 
 Was once, too, at the full, and round earth's shore 
 
 Lay like the folds of a bright girdle furl'd. 
 
 But now I only hear 
 
 Its melancholy, long, withdrawing roar, 
 
 Retreating, to the breath 
 
 Of the night- wind, down the vast edges drear 
 
 And naked shingles of the world. 
 
 But now, what else has Arnold heard 
 and seen, save himself ? It is not Dover 
 Beach, but Matthew Arnold. If this 
 strain of music, so often prolonged, 
 wearies, it is because the human soul 
 never gives continuous sympathy to the 
 scepticism which infects the heart's blood.
 
 Of Recent English Poetry 73 
 
 ** Tell me not of your doubts," our age 
 of questioning and achievement says 
 with Goethe, " I have doubts enough of 
 my own." Arnold has taught us that 
 our doubts have been so honest and per- 
 sonal that they have made one feared as- 
 sumption impossible. When one begins 
 to fear the issue of his doubts, he makes 
 one see the impossibility of dark atheism. 
 He is on his way to deeper faith, and his 
 negatives imply positives ; yet he can 
 never add enough minuses together to 
 produce a plus. Artistic to the last de- 
 gree, he instinctively turns from this bad 
 art. Perhaps no one poem so fully sets 
 forth these apparently antagonistic tend- 
 encies and his keen impatience as " Em- 
 pedocles." 
 
 It is here that we discover fine spiritual 
 qualities, or the want of them, account- 
 ing for his incomplete statement of what 
 Christianity is, in its facts, hopes and 
 motive power. And we must think that 
 he who wrote so well on " the secret of 
 Jesus," who has rescued our Bible for 
 many of us by that larger faith of his 
 which masqueraded in the doubts of 
 " Literature and Dogma," — that he who
 
 74 The Higher Ministries 
 
 has taught us the way to so many 
 streams of moral power, ought not to 
 have been so serious with dull-eyed 
 British Christianity, in fact or form, and 
 that assuredly he might have found for 
 us the fountain itself. Even so, the 
 Christianity of Arnold is not that of the 
 Bible which he has lifted out of malari- 
 ous mists of dogma. The following lines 
 furnish a brilliantly stated truth with 
 strange lapses towards error ; his silences 
 are as misleading as his dogmatic ac- 
 counts of the facts. He is telling us of 
 the effect of early Christianity on the 
 world to which it came : 
 
 " On that hard Pagan world disgust 
 And secret loathing fell. 
 Deep weariness and sated lust 
 Made human life a hell. 
 
 " In his cool hall, with haggard eyes, 
 The Roman noble lay ; 
 He drove abroad, in furious guise, 
 Along the Appian way. 
 
 " He made a feast, drank fierce and fast, 
 And crown' d his hair with flowers — 
 No easier nor no quicker pass'd 
 The impracticable hours.
 
 Of Recent English Poetry 75* 
 
 "The brooding East with awe beheld 
 Her impious younger world. 
 The Roman tempest swell'd and swell'd, 
 And on her head was hurl'd. 
 
 " The East bow'd low before the blast 
 In patient, deep disdain ; 
 She let the legions thunder past, 
 And plunged in thought again. 
 
 " So well she mused, a morning broke 
 Across her spirit gray ; 
 A conquering, new-bom joy awoke, 
 And fill'd her hfe with day. 
 
 ** ' Poor world,' she cried, 'so deep accurst, 
 That runn'st from pole to pole 
 To seek a draught to slake thy thirst — 
 Go, seek it in thy soul ! ' " 
 
 His account is a page of nobly written 
 history, and we see the West veiling her 
 eagles, snapping her sword, abhorring 
 her purple and the imperial crown. The 
 flutes are stopped with brutal sports, her 
 palaces are vacant because lust of eye and 
 pride of life are left behind. 
 
 ** Mid weeds and wrecks she stood — a place 
 Of ruin — but she smiled ! "
 
 76 The Higher Ministries 
 
 His Obermann is Arnold, and he smiles 
 while he says to his heart : 
 
 ♦* No lonely life had pass'd too slow, 
 When I could hourly scan 
 Upon his Cross, with head sunk low, 
 That nail'd, thorn-crowned Man ! 
 
 «* Could see the Mother with her Child 
 Whose tender winning arts 
 Have to his little arms beguiled 
 So many wounded hearts ! 
 
 ** And centuries came and ran their course. 
 And unspent all that time 
 Still, still went forth that Child's dear force, 
 And still was at its prime. 
 
 "Ay, ages long endured his span 
 Of life — 'tis true received — 
 That gracious Child, that thorn-crown'd 
 
 Man! 
 — He lived while we believed. 
 
 ** While we believed, on earth he went. 
 And open stood his grave. 
 Men call'd from chamber, church and tent ; 
 And Christ was by to save." 
 
 This is looking backward. Why will 
 we look ever backward or forward, when 
 we should look inward ?
 
 Of Recent English Poetry 77 
 
 This is a merely historical Christ — and 
 such can never save a living man. Too 
 soon such a Christ vanishes. The New 
 Testament is never true for long as an 
 historical document unless it is true as a 
 record of present experience. 
 
 ** Now he is dead ! Far hence he lies 
 In the lorn Syrian town ; 
 And on his grave, with shining eyes, 
 The Syrian stars look down. 
 
 ** In vain men still, with hoping new, 
 Regard his death-place dumb, 
 And say the stone is not yet to. 
 And wait for words to come." 
 
 Surely, he can only look into the future 
 — " wandering between two worlds — one 
 dead." Then he looks for another dream 
 and its own mystic literature. This is not 
 the Christian's position at all. His Christ 
 ever liveth within. Christ within authen- 
 ticates the historic Christ. Man was 
 taught by Christ to expect it. The spirit 
 beareth witness and will show Christ's 
 words to a man. Without the indwelling 
 Christ, he may only write and speculate. 
 And this will ever be the pathetic record 
 of it:
 
 ^8 The Higher Ministries 
 
 ** A fever in these pages burns 
 Beneath the calm they feign ; 
 A wounded spirit turns, 
 Here, on its bed of pain. 
 
 " Yes, though the virgin mountain-air 
 Fresh through these pages blows ; 
 Though to these leaves the glaciers spare 
 The soul of their white snows ; 
 
 " Though here a mountain-murmur swells 
 Of many a dark-bough'd pine; 
 Though, as you read, you hear the bells 
 Of the high-pasturing kine — 
 
 " Yet, through the hum of torrent lone. 
 And brooding mountain -bee. 
 There sobs I know not what ground-tone 
 Of human agony." 
 
 Of all lessons which Matthew Arnold's 
 spiritual career has to teach through his 
 poetry, probably the most characteristic 
 and hence autobiographical, is this — 
 Stoicism fails to-day with any true soul 
 just as it failed and for the same reasons 
 that it failed on that far off yesterday. 
 Arnold sought to turn from the fever and 
 fret which the author of Obermann only 
 quickened, and his cry was for calm. Let
 
 Of Recent English Poetry 79 
 
 us analyze it. Taking the age into his 
 consciousness, that there may be one 
 open secret to state, he says truly : 
 
 Too fast we live, too much are tried, 
 
 Too harass' d to attain 
 Wordsworth's sweet calm, or Goethe's wide 
 
 And luminous view to gain. 
 
 Now, why do we live so fast ? Surely 
 modern man ought not to be driven by 
 the multitude of his own time-savers or 
 frightened by a world which has shrunken 
 in physical proportions only at the com- 
 mand of his own inventions. The 
 genius which has achieved has been so 
 educated in and through its own achiev- 
 ing that it ought not to be conquered by 
 its great achievements. Even such cul- 
 ture must mean poise and mastery, above 
 all, self-mastery. Of course, every step 
 leads to a vision of much beyond ; and 
 yet modern man, other things being 
 equal, should have obtained some sense 
 of the calm universal and the unfretting 
 eternal. This, however, is just what 
 modern man has not acquired. Why ? 
 Why are we in such haste ? There is
 
 8o The Higher Ministries 
 
 only one answer — We do not believe 
 deeply, loftily, grandly. Here comes 
 back an old word which unhappily es- 
 caped the absorbing and assimilating 
 thought of Arnold, but it is as true as the 
 Greek vision of beauty and as valuable 
 as the Greek contribution to religious 
 philosophy : " He that believeth shall 
 not make hasted Goethe's " unhasting — 
 unresting" was born of the serenity and 
 eagerness of faith. All sobriety of mind 
 where the realities of life are in full view, 
 all calm at the centre of the storm as 
 coolness in the heart of the flame, all self- 
 restraint amidst noisy anarchy, all cloud- 
 less vision while clouds smite below as 
 "ignorant armies clash by night" — these 
 are cradled and nurtured by faith. Faith 
 has the sense of the universal and says 
 with Emerson, to voluble haste : " Why 
 so hot, my little sir?" Faith knows 
 the mighty presences ; and, trusting 
 them, faith enters and encamps within 
 —JEheir silences. Faith has the sense of the 
 V eternal and dwells there. It has taken 
 all its chastened care and feverish anxiety 
 where time is no more. It knows the 
 place and room, the time and leisure of
 
 Of Recent English Poetry 8l 
 
 the Father of Eternity whose home is the 
 Infinite. Faith does not make haste. 
 " My Father worketh hitherto and I 
 work " — this is its untroubled mood. 
 " The Eternal Not Ourselves that Makes 
 for Righteousness " — if God be nothing 
 more — He is eternally for righteousness. 
 Faith lives in the consciousness that there 
 is much done, much doing, and much , 
 
 yet to do which God has done, is ^^'^'^%\*&»M, / 4^ \ -^ 
 and will do ; and it escapes all stoical in- 
 difference, through working as cheerfully 
 and hopefully, because of the character 
 and method of God. The contrast be- 
 tween the Stoicism of Arnold and the 
 Christian vision and temper is as great as 
 that between the latter and Swinburne's 
 Epicureanism. The minister of to-day 
 must be familiar with the fretful cry of 
 Arnold and all that it signifies as to the ef- 
 fect of Stoicism in its ending in petulance 
 with unrest, and he must know the pain 
 and want hiding beneath the flaccid lux- 
 uriousness of Epicureanism — for Stoicism 
 and Epicureanism even yet confront the 
 preacher as they did in Paul's day and 
 for the same reasons. Here are two 
 ancient and apparently deathless foes to
 
 82 The Higher Ministries 
 
 manly faith ; and they are to be under- 
 stood by the minister, as the minstrels 
 portray them, if he is to find out men's 
 sorrows and meet them with a divine 
 medication. 
 
 Not in Greece had Epicureanism the 
 advantage of songful championship more 
 magnificent or forceful than in Swin- 
 burne ; not in Greece had Stoicism the 
 gift of musical speech more philosophic 
 or clear than in Arnold, His appeal is 
 clothed with the robes of both day and 
 night. Now it dims the sun ; now it 
 startles the stars : 
 
 "Ah, once more," I cried, " ye stars, ye waters, 
 On my heart your mighty charm renew ; 
 
 Still, still let me, as I gaze upon you, 
 Feel my soul becoming vast like you ! " 
 
 From the intense, clear, star-sown vault of 
 heaven. 
 
 Over the lit sea's unquiet way, 
 In the rustling night air came the answer : 
 
 ** Wouldst thou be as these are ? Live as they. 
 
 "Unaffrighted by the silence round them, 
 Undistracted by the sights they see. 
 
 These demand not that the things without them 
 Yield them love, amusement, sympathy.
 
 Of Recent English Poetry 83 
 
 " And with joy the stars perform their shining, 
 And the sea its long moon-silver'd roll; 
 
 For self-poised they live, nor pine with noting 
 All the fever of some differing soul. 
 
 *« Bounded by themselves, and unregardful 
 In what state God's other works may be, 
 
 In their own tasks all their powers pouring, 
 These attain the mighty life you see." 
 
 Two things are evident in all this har- 
 mony which rises out of discord ; first, 
 Arnold is so personally truthful, that is, 
 he so sincerely gets into the core of his 
 essential being in and through this ex- 
 pressed longing, that he betrays man's 
 thirst for the Infinite. 
 
 " Still let me as I gaze upon you. 
 Feel my soul becoming vast like you^ 
 
 Deep calleth to deep. Man is made 
 for communion with God. Father and 
 child must live each in the other, or their 
 natures fail and lapse. As we shall see 
 later, his poems find their deeper music 
 only as human life deepens and widens 
 into the Divine. Matthew Arnold never 
 could make a melodious rhyme in sight
 
 84 The Higher Ministries 
 
 of the suspicion that man ever could yearn 
 away from vastness towards pettiness. 
 The escape for the finite is not away from, 
 but into the Infinite. But this, he be- 
 lieves, is the way to calm. It is interest- 
 ing to see that Arnold does not attempt 
 to obtain this much desired calm by turn- 
 ing to the noisy race of men to reform 
 them and get them to be quiet. He would 
 look to nature, and away from man. He 
 has, however, expressed an implied faith 
 that, after all, calm is to come from above 
 and from God. O let us believe a little 
 more, Mr. Arnold ! — and we will not make 
 haste ! Again he sings : 
 
 Calm soul of all things ! make it mine 
 
 To feel, amid the city's jar, 
 That there abides a peace of thine, 
 
 Man did not make, and cannot mar. 
 
 The will to neither strive nor cry. 
 The power to feel with others give 1 
 
 Calm, calm me more ! nor let me die 
 Before I have begun to live. 
 
 Now, that is a good and well reasoned 
 prayer. God alone can answer it. It 
 brings the problem before God and His
 
 Of Recent English Poetry 85 
 
 unwearied calm. He at least has never 
 been hasty or fevered, and thus gotten 
 things into a turmoil, because He has 
 never been untrue to Himself — " Calm 
 soul of all things." The tranquillity of 
 God then comes in sight as the only real- 
 ity to which our appeal may be made. 
 There is a peace — " a peace of thine man 
 did not make and cannot mar." To per- 
 ceive this is to begin the reconstruction of 
 a ruined world. The universe is right side 
 up ; the restful sky is over the restless 
 earth, when we pray thus. But what if 
 this "will to neither strive nor cry" — 
 bringing to our memory One who did not 
 strive or cry nor was His voice heard in 
 the streets — is attained only by yielding 
 to Him whose will becomes our law 
 through our love of Him ? How near we 
 are come to God in Christ who says : 
 " Peace I leave with you : My peace I 
 give unto you." 
 
 This brings us to the second thing of 
 importance : there is a fallacy in this rea- 
 soning, even though it be melodious and 
 surcharged with a noble longing for the 
 Infinite. It is quite inspiring to gaze on 
 the stars and accurately accord with
 
 86 The Higher Ministries 
 
 their quiet movement ; but we cannot 
 suit man's cry to their calm with any- 
 logical anticipation, even if he shall imi- 
 tate them, without comprehending man's 
 restlessness and finding out that the cause 
 of his disquietude and fret is somehow re- 
 lated either by likeness or unlikeness to 
 the cause of their placidity and poise. 
 And here the truth which Matthew Ar- 
 nold's earlier poetry left too often unsung, 
 emerges from the soul in all its undenia- 
 ble force. The soul confesses : " I have 
 had experiences which the stars never had 
 and never can have ; * self-poised they 
 are * but I have lost my self-poise ; I was 
 created with the awful gift of freedom and 
 responsibility ; I could say no to the 
 'Calm soul of all things,' and I have 
 done it ; I have sinned and I am as sure 
 of it as that I yet ' yearn to the greatness 
 of nature,' as Mr. Arnold advises me, and 
 desire to * rally the good in the depths of 
 myself ' as he also exhorts me to do." 
 
 This is a brief page from every true 
 soul's autobiography. The sight of the 
 stars made the moral law within, not less, 
 but more dreadfully apparent to so great 
 a man as Kant. All sound philosophy so
 
 Of Recent English Poetry 87 
 
 regards this phenomenon of the soul. 
 That moral law is founded in the fact that 
 man is God's child and God is man's 
 Father. This reality of man's sonship 
 unto God quickens and broadens into the 
 brotherhood of humanity under the Fa- 
 therhood of God. The stars ? They may 
 be " unregardful in what state God's other 
 works may be" ; but man cannot. As 
 he reaches calm, he is more sympathetic. 
 To ask less of man is to misconceive him, 
 and to obtain less would unman him. 
 ** Wouldst thou be as these are ? Live 
 as they " — but once having lost self-poise, 
 we cannot be as the stars, and so we can- 
 not live as they live. But let the truth be 
 told, and it is this : at our best, we do 
 not expect, cannot desire to be only as 
 they are. Man is so created that he must 
 be more. No star's possibilities touch a 
 segment of the weakest man's orbit. He 
 is so hereditarially related to the " calm 
 soul of all things " that he must be in 
 communion and fellowship with it or Him. 
 This is his life. 
 
 Now, leaving for a moment these con- 
 siderations as to the manner in which 
 Arnold's Greek Stoicism striving with an
 
 88 The Higher Ministries 
 
 Hebraic religiousness breaks down in the 
 presence of the human soul and its ex- 
 periences, which are the stuff and impulse 
 of all poetry and piety, we must note that 
 Matthew Arnold himself has too much 
 youth and promise of soul to abide long 
 in his starlit dream of calm. One virile 
 and eager life makes sad work of an in- 
 adequate spiritual hostelry like this. 
 Here is the working of that noble discon- 
 tent which cries for a better day and 
 sings at stormy crises, with Wordsworth ; 
 
 " Bliss it were to be alive 
 And to be young was heaven." 
 
 Arnold was too sound an educator to 
 remand youth to such a fate as would 
 deny the highest value to youth's divinely 
 bred agitations. And so he sang a song 
 true to human nature ; and it has a bugle 
 call, even if, at the conclusion, it is some- 
 what muffled by the stoic who too often 
 gets control of the musician in him : 
 
 'Tis death ! and peace, indeed, is here, 
 And ease from shame and rest from fear ; 
 There's nothing can dismarble now 
 The smoothness of that limpid brow.
 
 Of Recent English Poetry 89 
 
 But is a calm like this, in truth, 
 
 The crowning end of life and youth, 
 
 And when this boon rewards the dead. 
 
 Are all debts paid, has all been said ? 
 
 Ah no, the bliss youth dreams is one 
 
 For daylight, for the cheerful sun. 
 
 For feeling nerves and living breath — 
 
 Youth dreams a bliss on this side death. 
 
 It dreams a rest, if not more deep. 
 
 More grateful than this marble sleep ; 
 
 It hears a voice within it tell : 
 
 Calni' s not life's crown, though calm is well. 
 
 'Tis all perhaps which man acquires, 
 
 But 'tis not what our youth desires. 
 
 We are relieved of one of the weights 
 of our own scepticism, and a certain 
 shadow lifts from the path of heroic living, 
 which always involves service and self- 
 sacrifice, when so clear-headed and true- 
 hearted a man as Matthew Arnold breaks 
 his own cherished equation of life and 
 tells us that " calm is not life's crown." 
 We all know that ** calm is well." Such 
 an admission as this by Arnold, in the 
 presence of the facts we have reached and 
 known by living truly and loftily, is most 
 important. But Arnold has made addi- 
 tional admissions which are even more
 
 go The Higher Ministries 
 
 valuable, since they come from one so 
 thoroughgoing, scholarly and sincere. 
 
 He has aforetime urged the man in an 
 arid state of spiritual existence to 
 
 ** Yearn to the greatness of nature ; 
 Rally the good in the depths of thyself." 
 
 Most of us have long ago thrown off the 
 incubus of that distrust of nature and our- 
 selves consequent upon any belief in the 
 total depravity of animate and inanimate 
 things. We have wished both to yearn 
 and to rally ; and, in the confidence that 
 each was a good thing to attempt, we 
 have done our best. Alone we have 
 failed. First, we have found nature to be 
 what nature is to Matthew Arnold. Nature 
 has been very little productive of that calm 
 which is "their joy" who trust her. 
 Mind has dominated matter. We have 
 troubled the mirror as Arnold himself reads 
 himself into nature ; and each man says ; 
 
 " Well I know what they feel ! 
 They gaze, and the evening wind 
 Plays on their faces ; they gaze — 
 Airs from the Eden of youth 
 Awake and stir in their soul ; 
 The past returns — they feel
 
 Of Recent English Poetry 91 
 
 What they are, alas ! what they were. 
 They, not nature, are changed. 
 Well I know what they feel ! 
 
 " Hush, for tears 
 Begin to steal to their eyes ! 
 Hush, for fruit 
 
 Grows from such sorrow as theirs ! 
 Thou, O Nature, wast mute, 
 Mute as of old ! " 
 
 Mr. Arnold is too sincere to hide the 
 truth that man is more than nature and 
 that he cannot wisely " yearn " to some- 
 thing less than himself. He says to us : 
 
 "Know, man hath all which Nature hath, but 
 
 more. 
 And in that more lie all his hopes of good. 
 Nature is cruel, man is sick of blood ; 
 Nature is stubborn, man would fain adore ; 
 
 " Nature is fickle, man hath need of rest ; 
 Nature forgives no debt, and fears no grave ; 
 Man would be mild, and with safe conscience 
 blest. 
 
 " Man must beg in, know this, where Nature ends ; 
 
 Nature and man can never be fast friends. 
 
 Fool, if thou canst not pass her, rest her slave ! " 
 
 So, as instructed, we will yearn to some-
 
 gl The Higher Ministries 
 
 thing more than nature. How swiftly 
 Matthew Arnold's failure to stop any- 
 where this side the fact, is leading us to 
 the Divine Incarnation ! Man can yearn 
 to God alone. And as he finds God in 
 humanity, he must yearn upward and 
 personally towards personality. 
 
 And now comes another confessed 
 failure. His exhortation is this : " Rally 
 the good in the depths of thyself 1 " This 
 means energy, moral motive power, the 
 ethical dynamic. But I have sinned ; I 
 have no will to rally ; I need a captain — 
 and if I have any good in the depths of 
 myself, Love only can reach it, and Love 
 must be my captain. And the fact is — 
 and Arnold sings of the serious condition ; 
 indeed, no other minstrel so reinforces the 
 minister at this critical point — I cannot 
 extemporize the ethical dynamic with any 
 more success in the attempt than I can 
 get power from obeying his apparently 
 judicious words : 
 
 ** Resolve to be thyself : and know that he 
 Who finds himself loses his misery." 
 
 Ah ! it is myself that confronts me with 
 shame. To find myself and to do that
 
 Of Recent English Poetry 93 
 
 only does not mean that I shall even try 
 to lift myself by my own boot straps — a 
 thing impossible. What can be done ? 
 Mr. Arnold again advertises nature. But 
 here he invests nature with an intelligence 
 and ethical judicature which is in man 
 alone. He has caught the way of the 
 vanishing band of materialistic scientists. 
 They once denied God's presence and 
 His sovereignty. Something had to take 
 the vacant position in thinking. The 
 atom and law came into use, and then 
 our teachers poured all divine potencies 
 into the atom, in order to get the physical 
 universe to go. We are weary of scien- 
 tifically worded phantoms, but we listen 
 to this : 
 
 Then when the clouds are off the soul, 
 
 When thou dost bask in Nature's eye, 
 Ask, how she view'd thy self-control. 
 Thy struggling, task'd morality — 
 Nature, whose free, light, cheerful air, 
 Oft made thee, in thy gloom, despair. 
 
 What a mythical thing is this nature ? 
 It is hard for Matthew Arnold to kick 
 against the goads ; but he will do it, as 
 did Saul of Tarsus. Nevertheless, both
 
 94 The Higher Ministries 
 
 Saul and Arnold are too sincere to be 
 left in the darkness or the twilight. He 
 must lodge his faith somewhere. So he 
 sings again of nature, as a child with par- 
 donable anthropomorphism. Tell me, 
 whether it be worse and more unphilo- 
 sophical to give God the features of a 
 man and pray to Him or to give nature 
 the faculties of God and talk to her. 
 
 And she, whose censure thou dost dread, 
 
 Whose eye thou wast afraid to seek, 
 See, on her face a glow is spread, 
 A strong emotion on her cheek ! 
 
 "Ah, child!" she cries, "that strife di- 
 vine, 
 Whence was it, for it is not mine ? 
 
 "There is no effort on my brow — 
 I do not strive, I do not weep ; 
 I rush with the swift spheres and glow 
 In joy, and when I will, I sleep. 
 Yet that severe, that earnest air, 
 I saw, I felt it once — but where? 
 
 " I knew not yet the gauge of time, 
 Nor wore the manacles of space ; 
 I felt it in some other clime, 
 I saw it in some other place. 
 
 'Twas when the heavenly house I trod, 
 And lay upon the breast of God."
 
 Of Recent English Poetry 95 
 
 Let us notice here that this effort to ob- 
 tain a moral motive-power in nature has 
 compelled Matthew Arnold to invest na- 
 ture with a history which is at least as 
 much an assertion of preexistence as we 
 would make concerning Jesus Christ ; 
 and that, as yet, nature gives no calm to 
 us in the Garden of Gethsemane such as 
 did He who spoke out of the heart of 
 sin's tragedy, saying : " My peace I give 
 unto you." If preexistence of moral basis 
 and ethical dynamic is superstitious in 
 the case of Jesus Christ, it is in the case 
 of nature still more so. More reasonable 
 is it to believe in the moral right to com- 
 mand in a Son of God — a man who came 
 straight from the heavenly house — in 
 Jesus Himself — than in insensate though 
 sublime and beautiful nature. Always, 
 when scepticism has to believe at all, her 
 credulity is excessive, if not ludicrous. 
 
 Mr. Arnold himself has forced us even 
 farther towards what we have called the 
 probability that Jesus Christ alone fur- 
 nishes the moral dynamic demanded by 
 such natures as Matthew Arnold himself. 
 He says truly :
 
 g6 The Higher Ministries 
 
 We cannot kindle when we will 
 
 The fire which in the heart resides ; 
 The spirit bloweth and is still, 
 In mystery our soul abides. 
 
 But tasks in hours of insight will'd 
 Can be through hours of gloom fulfill'd. 
 
 What then can kindle the human per- 
 sonality ? Nothing but the personality of 
 Love. Light of truth will not kindle ; 
 only warmth of Love can kindle and this, 
 I repeat, must be personal. Let us be 
 done with " what" for a soul ; let us ask 
 " who " can deliver me from the body of 
 this death ? " Who can forgive sin ? " 
 diiid^'Who is life?" "Who is God?" 
 The answer is : "I that speak unto you 
 am He." But that answer is upon the 
 lips of Jesus Christ. 
 
 Why should we any longer detain the 
 unveiling of the picture Christianity of- 
 fers ? Here are certain facts and among 
 them is this : after serious study of 
 Matthew Arnold's poetry, we must ap- 
 peal to man as God's recipient of His 
 self-revelation — not to nature. Nature 
 never " lay on the breast of God " and 
 nature never *' trod the heavenly house," 
 as has man whose "shadowy recollec-
 
 Of Recent English Poetry 97 
 
 tions " attest his essential childhood unto 
 his Father in heaven. Man is, at least, 
 the highest point in nature. Upon him 
 breaks the all-revealing light of God. 
 And here is Arnold's most important 
 confession and the light of his faith is so 
 hardly won that it is full of heroic flame. 
 It involves this, at least, that good and 
 true humanity is the best manifestation of 
 God. That is the core of the fact of God 
 incarnated in humanity as the only ade- 
 quate moral motive power. Let us note 
 the corroborative evidence in his own 
 best poetry, which is, of course, the ex- 
 pression of his noblest religious feeling. 
 He is telling us of his father at Rugby 
 Chapel. We may well be reverent here, 
 for no more genetic soul ever touched 
 the future of England than Thomas Ar- 
 nold. Sing ever so admiringly, O child- 
 hood, — sing of thy father, for admiration, 
 hope, and love, as Wordsworth has told 
 us, are what we live by, and God is ever 
 coming again in redeemed humanity ! 
 We shall see the Fatherhood of God, 
 when we know the Brotherhood of man. 
 But what a kinship is this which indites 
 the ode : —
 
 98 The Higher Ministries 
 
 " O Strong soul, by what shore 
 Tarriest thou now ? For that force, 
 Surely, has not been left vain ! 
 Somewhere, surely, afar. 
 In the sounding labour-house vast 
 Of being, is practiced that strength, 
 Zealous, beneficent, firm ! 
 
 "Yes, in some far-shining sphere. 
 Conscious or not of the past, 
 Still thou performest the word 
 Of the Spirit in whom thou dost live — 
 Prompt, unwearied, as here ! 
 Still thou upraisest with zeal 
 The humble good from the ground, 
 Sternly repressest the bad ! 
 Still, like a trumpet, dost rouse 
 Those who with half-open eyes 
 Tread the border-land dim 
 'Twixt vice and virtue ; reviv'st, 
 Succourest ! — this was thy work. 
 This was thy life upon earth. 
 
 " What is the course of the life 
 Of mortal men on the earth ? — 
 Most men eddy about 
 Here and there — eat and drink, 
 Chatter and love and hate. 
 Gather and squander, are raised 
 Aloft, are hurl'd in the dust. 
 Striving blindly, achieving
 
 Of Recent English Poetry 99 
 
 Nothing ; and then they die — 
 
 Perish ; — and no one asks 
 
 Who or what they have been, 
 
 More than he asks what waves, 
 
 In the moonlit soHtudes mild 
 
 Of the midmost Ocean, have swell'd, 
 
 Foara'd for a moment, and gone." 
 
 What a basis for belief in the Incarna- 
 tion is such a living faith in such a God- 
 inspired man ! The filial minstrel ac- 
 knowledges this : 
 
 "And through thee I believe 
 In the noble and great who are gone ; 
 Pure souls honour' d and blest 
 By former ages, who else — 
 Such, so soulless, so poor. 
 Is the race of men whom I see — 
 Seem'd but a dream of the heart, 
 Seem'd but a cry of desire. 
 Yes ! I believe that there lived 
 Others like thee in the past. 
 Not like the men of the crowd 
 Who all round me to-day 
 Bluster or cringe, and make life 
 Hideous, and arid, and vile ; 
 But souls temper'd with fire, 
 Fervent, heroic, and good. 
 Helpers and friends of mankind.
 
 lOO The Higher Ministries 
 
 ** Servants of God / — or sons 
 Shall I not call you ? because 
 Not as servants ye knew 
 Your Father's innermost mind, 
 His, who unwillingly sees 
 One of His little ones lost — 
 Yours is the praise, if mankind 
 Hath not as yet in its march 
 Fainted, and fallen, and died ! " 
 
 If then God has so manifested Himself 
 in a teacher, friend and father, that this 
 revelation of Himself constitutes a fresh 
 and permanent ethical energy, shall we 
 not rise above nature so heartless and so 
 unwilling, to that faith in the future which, 
 not nature but man under God alone may 
 promise and secure? Pessimism, which 
 always haunts the verges of Arnold's 
 philosophy of life, yields then to a Melio- 
 rism prophetic of an Optimism, when he 
 draws near to the fact that God has re- 
 vealed Himself and will continue to re- 
 veal Himself in humanity ; 
 
 " See ! In the rocks of the world 
 Marches the host of mankind, 
 A feeble, wavering line. 
 Where are they tending ? — A God
 
 Of Recent English Poetry 101 
 
 Marshall'd them, gave them their goal. 
 Ah, but the way is so long ! 
 Years they have been in the wild ! 
 Sore thirst plagues them, the rocks, 
 Rising all round, overawe ; 
 Factions divide them, their host 
 Threatens to break, to dissolve. 
 — Ah, keep, keep them combined ! 
 Else, of the myriads who fill 
 That army, not one shall arrive ; 
 Sole they shall stray ; in the rocks 
 Stagger forever in vain. 
 Die one by one in the waste. 
 
 " Then, in such hour of need 
 Of your fainting, dispirited race, 
 Ye, like angels, appear. 
 Radiant with ardour divine ! 
 Beacons of hope, ye appear ! 
 Languor is not in your heart. 
 Weakness is not in your word, 
 Weariness not on your brow. 
 Ye alight in our van ! at your voice, 
 Panic, despair, flee away. 
 Ye move through the ranks, recall 
 The stragglers, refresh the outworn, 
 Praise, reinspire the brave ! 
 Order, courage, return. 
 Eyes rekindling, and prayers 
 Follow your steps as ye go. 
 Ye fill up the gaps in our files,
 
 102 The Higher Ministries 
 
 Strengthen the wavering line, 
 Stablish, continue our march, 
 On, to the bound of the waste, 
 On, to the City of God." 
 
 But any true City of God is possible 
 only in the cooperation of the Sons of 
 God, and Jesus Christ has revealed that 
 Sonship. This is the practical aspect of 
 the truth of the Incarnation. 
 
 Of course, now that men are beset with 
 faults which becloud the mind, and so 
 many of us are not clear in vision, we 
 must not rest here, in an argument, the 
 validity of Christ's appeal to us as an au- 
 thoritative ruler of our lives, our Saviour 
 and our guide, — we cannot rest it in any- 
 thing less than life itself, and, as Arnold 
 tells us, " conduct is three-fourths of life." 
 So, then, we accept the command of our 
 poet, not different from that involved in 
 the older words : '* He that willeth to do 
 the will of my Father shall know of the 
 doctrine." Here is his statement of our 
 duty, and it is the better part of our con- 
 duct : 
 
 ** Long fed on boundless hopes, O race of man, 
 How angrily thou spurn'st all simpler fare !
 
 Of Recent English Poetry 103 
 
 * Christ,' some one says, * was human as we 
 are; 
 No judge eyes us from Heaven, our sin to scan ; 
 
 ** * We live no more, when we have done our 
 span.' — 
 ' Well, then, for Christ,' thou answerest, ' who 
 
 can care? 
 From sin, which Heaven records not, why 
 forbear ? 
 Live we like brutes our life without a plan ! ' 
 
 " So answerest thou ; but why not rather say : 
 * Hath man no second life ? — Pitch this one 
 
 high! 
 Sits there no judge in Heaven, our sin to 
 see? — 
 More strictly, then, the inward judge obey ! 
 Was Christ a man like us ? Ah ! let us try 
 If we then, too, can be such men as he /^ " 
 
 Jesus Christ is the way of God to us 
 and He is the way of us to God. Man 
 will always have an interest in the poetry 
 which will not hide his higher necessities. 
 Its compliment to the nobility of his 
 nature will not come in vain. Its implied 
 eulogium of his possibilities will make it 
 dear. Matthew Arnold, as has been seen, 
 honours the thirst in the finite for the In-
 
 104 "^^^ Higher Ministries 
 
 finite. To him man's true way out of 
 himself Hes towards the Infinite. Time's 
 river is always drawn thither to eternity : 
 
 ** Haply the river of Time — 
 As it grows, as the towns on its marge 
 Fling their wavering lights 
 On a wider, statelier stream — 
 May acquire, if not the calm 
 Of its early mountainous shore, 
 Yet a solemn peace of its own. 
 
 " And the width of the waters, the hush 
 Of the gray expanse where he floats, 
 Freshening its current and spotted with foam 
 As it draws to the Ocean, may strike 
 Peace to the soul of the man on its breast — 
 As the pale waste widens around him, 
 As the banks fade dimmer away. 
 As the stars come out, and the night-wind 
 Brings up the stream 
 Murvmrs and scents of the infinite sea." 
 
 Here is eternity. Where shall one find 
 it real, save in Christ who alone may say : 
 
 I and the Father are one." Matthew 
 Arnold's own career of mingled faith and 
 doubt was finely described in the follow- 
 ing lines, in which let us note how again 
 he gets out into the infinite. It is man's 
 only true sea and shore.
 
 Of Recent English Poetry 105 
 
 "But the majestic river floated on, 
 
 Out of the mist and hum of that low land, 
 
 Into the frosty starlight, and there moved. 
 
 Rejoicing, through the hush'd Chorasmian waste. 
 
 Under the solitary moon ; — he flow'd 
 
 Right for the polar star, past Orgunje, 
 
 Brimming, and bright, and large; then sands 
 
 begin 
 To hem his watery march, and dam his streams, 
 And split his currents ; that for many a league 
 The shorn and parcell'd Oxus strains along 
 Through beds of sand and matted rushy isles — 
 Oxus, forgetting the bright speed he had 
 In his high mountain- cradle in Pamere, 
 A foil'd circuitous wanderer — till at last 
 The long'd-for dash of waves is heard, and wide 
 His luminous home of waters opens, bright 
 And tranquil, from whose floor the new-bathed 
 
 stars 
 Emerge, and shine upon the Aral Sea." 
 
 Here is the same goal. " The luminous 
 home of waters " — and the " murmurs and 
 scents of the infinite sea " are of mighty 
 interest to a " foiled circuitous wanderer" 
 who has toiled with the sands that hem 
 the march and split the currents of a 
 baffled faith. He may disappoint you 
 and me at this point or that, but one 
 has only to possess Matthew Arnold's
 
 io6 The Higher Ministries 
 
 patience, honour of mind and a true 
 heart, with ever so Httle of his culture and 
 intellectual acumen, to find a throne-room 
 in his own thinking, which, if it ever be 
 occupied, must be occupied by Jesus 
 Christ alone.
 
 LECTURE III 
 
 ALFRED TENNYSON 
 
 The failure of Matthew Arnold's Greek 
 solution for the human problem only em- 
 phasizes the facts with which any gospel 
 must grapple, if it prove an evangel either 
 to the poet or the preacher. It is a fact 
 of fundamental importance that, moving 
 now with a quickened desire for some 
 solution for life's darkest problems out of 
 which we have made vain appeal to 
 Matthew Arnold's classical stoicism, we 
 are not in the least removed from the 
 material out of which the most important 
 experiences of the soul have come and 
 must ever come. Approaching the circle 
 where the light seen and known by 
 Tennyson falls upon everything, we have 
 with us yet the incontestable facts of man 
 missing his mark, of his sufl[ering volun- 
 tary defect as a result of what we must 
 call sin, and the desire to be free not only 
 from the consequence, but also the disor- 
 der or malady which is the cause of these 
 107
 
 io8 The Higher Ministries 
 
 bitter results. They act and react in our 
 experience, even yet. Any difference of 
 cadence, of rhythmic fervour and richness 
 of elaboration in phrase, accomplishes 
 nothing except to attest the unchanging 
 significance of the old facts. It is a testi- 
 mony which ought to be regarded by the 
 minister, that the finer minstrel, just as he 
 more truly reaches into depths and heights 
 of pure poetry, grasps more surely a 
 theological conviction and has more cer- 
 tainly become intimate with the authori- 
 tative facts of religion. We must preach 
 up and down to the realities of the soul 
 and its experience — realities which the 
 poets illumine till they stand out like 
 Sinai and Calvary. Many a man suitably 
 ordained who wishes to be a real preacher 
 misses it by the fact that, with a religious 
 atmosphere which is quickeningly poetic, 
 he fails to deal in a broad and deep and 
 high manner with the facts of soul-life 
 which long ago germinated and are de- 
 manding fair treatment in his hands and 
 at this time. He does not know and es- 
 timate these ancient and yet modern facts 
 as seriously as the poets have known 
 and estimated them. A world was once
 
 Of Recent English Poetry 109' 
 
 educated by Dante and Shakespeare to 
 have and honour, or to be had and 
 honoured, by a conscience, so long as the 
 minstrel was around ; and this ethically 
 educated world did not desire to be free 
 from that august conscience or to hear its 
 less imperious commands when the min- 
 ister came. Latterly, this conscience has 
 been singularly illumined and its forces 
 trained by such men as we are studying 
 in these lectures. They are the true min- 
 strels of the soul. They are men who have 
 told to the soul its own unspoken experi- 
 ences. They have given the soul a moral 
 integrity which demands much of any 
 other kind of ministry or minstrelsy, 
 whether the one anointed speak from a 
 pulpit or not ; whether the one with coal 
 of fire shall address men in prose or in 
 verse. It is all too evident that much of 
 the failure of the ministry of our immediate 
 day lies in this, that the minister has had 
 no such perception and conviction and 
 burden with regard to conscience, for 
 example, as has the minstrel. Only such 
 a man as Canon Mozeley, in his sermon 
 — " The Reversal of Human Judgment " — 
 can compare with any of the little masters
 
 110 The Higher Ministries 
 
 of modern poetry, in moral tension, as to 
 the matter of honouring and making clear 
 to men the immeasurable distances be- 
 tween right and wrong. Some of the 
 most widely heard of our preachers only 
 preach up to a certain point on the path 
 leading to the summit of Mount Sinai, or 
 beyond even unto Calvary, and only there, 
 they may safely quote Tennyson and 
 Browning, and use the mightier words of 
 poets to justify any expression of their 
 own apparently strong feelings. If I were 
 to say only one thing to those who are 
 searching for the most needed help for 
 the minister, which the masters of litera- 
 ture can give them, in order that they 
 shall be equal to their task as preachers 
 unto the men of to-day, it would be this : 
 Reflect that our recent English masters 
 have trained conscience and other spirit- 
 ual powers within human nature to a 
 keener sense of the terrible reality of 
 wrong. You must bring your preaching 
 up to that conviction ; and your preach- 
 ing must deal with it and triumph over 
 the difficulties it presents. To do this, 
 you would better become acquainted with 
 the soul's territory which they describe.
 
 Of Recent English Poetry 1 1 1 
 
 You must walk with the minstrels of the 
 soul down the deep ravines and gorges 
 and into the wider and profounder abyss of 
 darkness to which they lead, where sin 
 lurks and hides ; and there, with these 
 men of faith and vision, it must be yours 
 to behold the seed of the woman bruising 
 the serpent's head. 
 
 But, before we ask Alfred Tennyson 
 to instruct us as to any of these things, 
 let us again recognize the fact that the 
 age with which we are to deal, whose 
 men and women we are to instruct and 
 guide, no longer holds to certain views 
 of God, His nature. His providence, and 
 His grace — ^views which hardened into 
 dogmas that were satisfactory before the 
 era of Wordsworth, Shelley, and Coleridge 
 which we have just studied. The preacher 
 who has no adequate vision of the Divine 
 will not minister to the human. That the 
 time cannot be Godless is certain, and 
 that it will cherish and obey a vision of 
 God ennobling in the presence of its 
 moral self-respect and entirely compre- 
 hensive of all the concerns of being and 
 life, is just as certain. One thing the man 
 of faith may always count upon, that man
 
 1 1 2 The Higher Ministries 
 
 is travelling progressively, and that, there- 
 fore, he goes evermore towards a larger 
 and deeper faith. His doubts are ever 
 illustrating this — they usually involve a 
 nobler confidence in God and man than 
 the accepted beliefs. The all-encompass- 
 ing, generating, and regulating item of 
 man's faith is his vision of God. Here Al- 
 fred Tennyson offers to an age devoted 
 to psychological investigation and the 
 scientific criticism of historical docu- 
 ments, a philosophical insight into the 
 relations of nature and man with God 
 and a consequent ministry, the one as 
 reverent as it is powerful, the other as 
 pure as it is benign. 
 
 No one will question for a moment that 
 Tennyson's priestly function lies largely 
 in welcoming to the finer consciousness 
 and aspiration of man, the Immanent 
 God— The All In All— of whom Paul 
 spoke at Athens, quoting a Greek poet, — 
 God whose presence is the movement of 
 the mighty tide of being and whose ends 
 are those of universal love. Illy educated 
 persons have prophesied that if the truth 
 which is in Pantheism were ever to enter 
 the theology of literature, all the securi-
 
 Of Recent English Poetry 113 
 
 ties and interests of the personal con- 
 science would vanish away from both 
 poetry and prose. Well 1 here and every- 
 where in his best verse, a vision of the 
 Divine Sovereignty rules in which the 
 Transcendent and Immanent God lives 
 and creates : and, what is more, the be- 
 liever in 
 
 That God, which ever lives and loves, 
 One God, one law, one element, 
 And one far-off divine event, 
 
 To which the whole creation moves — 
 
 is the singer who, thus giving expression 
 to a Wordsworthian faith in the every- 
 whereness of God, turns out to be the 
 painter of the self-imposed agony of 
 Guinevere and the recorder, in awful 
 chastity of phrase, of the " Vision of Sin." 
 The truth is becoming plain that con- 
 science can have no divine authority 
 within us, if conscience be not itself a 
 manifestation of God — God's self-evi- 
 dencing life in man. If this be a truism 
 now, it would appear that no truism ever 
 so proved how far and sadly we had 
 strayed from the truth. Our ministry 
 ought to be careful as to giving due
 
 114 '^^^ Higher Ministries 
 
 reverence unto the Inner Light — for Ten- 
 nyson, the poet, has been educating the 
 audience of the preacher ; and almost no 
 one in that audience has been stupid 
 enough to miss the truth that God in 
 man is the vitahzing energy of conscience. 
 I admit that this idea of conscience is in 
 harmony with the truth in the pantheistic 
 conception of the universe. But let it be 
 admitted at once that he only who may 
 write the psalm of The Higher Pantheism 
 will escape the lower where Fate is all 
 there is of Father. With Tennyson the 
 escape is complete ; it is more than an 
 escape, and we sing : 
 
 "The sun, the moon, the stars, the seas, the hills 
 and the plains — 
 Are not these, O soul, the Vision of Him who 
 reigns ? 
 
 '* Is not the Vision He ? tho' He be not that which 
 He seems ? 
 Dreams are true while they last, and do we not 
 live in dreams ? 
 
 " Earth, these solid stars, this weight of body and 
 limb. 
 Are they not sign and symbol of thy division 
 from Him?
 
 Of Recent English Poetry 115 
 
 "Dark is the world to thee : thyself art the rea- 
 son why ; 
 For is He not all but that which has power to 
 feel ' I am I ' ? 
 
 "Glory about thee, without thee; and thou ful- 
 fillest thy doom 
 Making Him broken gleams, and a stifled 
 splendour and gloom. 
 
 "Speak to Him thou for He hears, and Spirit 
 with Spirit can meet — 
 Closer is He than breathing, and nearer than 
 hands and feet. 
 
 *' God is law, say the wise; O soul, and let us re- 
 joice, 
 For if He thunder by law the thunder is yet 
 His voice. 
 
 "Law is God, say some: no God at all, say the 
 fool; 
 For all we have power to see is a straight staff 
 bent in a pool ; 
 
 " And the ear of man cannot hear, and the eye 
 of man cannot see ; 
 But if we could see and hear, this Vision — were 
 it not He?" 
 
 Take this idea of the everywhereness of 
 God and ask what conscience is, if this is 
 what nature is — and much of our con-
 
 1 1 6 The Higher Ministries 
 
 fusion ends. We will cease appealing to 
 conscience in one moment when we need 
 to commend the morals of a decent 
 dogma about God, and discarding or ma- 
 ligning conscience with reflections as to 
 man's depravity in general when con- 
 science turns away from what offends 
 right ideas of the supreme good. 
 
 The practical conclusion that, if we 
 obey what we see and feel of this vision, 
 all goes well with us at the centre, called 
 conscience, grows into a conviction which 
 gets its own habit of ruling ; and so con- 
 science grows with rational experience. 
 We are upon times when no other kind 
 of conscientiousness may be appealed to 
 effectively. We may not all be able to 
 agree that this is an adequate statement 
 of the true relations of man and God : 
 
 "Flower in the crannied wall, 
 I pluck you out of the crannies, 
 I hold you here, root and all, in my hand, 
 Little flower — but if I could understand 
 What you are, root and all, and all in all, 
 I should know what God and man is," 
 
 But here men will ever feel the moral 
 significance of Jesus' remark to His dis-
 
 Of Recent English Poetry 117 
 
 ciples : "I am the Vine ; ye are the 
 branches " ; and the truth coming out of 
 Tennyson's Hnes and the word of the 
 Master — a truth which makes for conduct 
 and the deciding for the high in the 
 presence of the low — is this : there is one 
 goodness ; at least there are not two 
 kinds of goodness. A life-secret and im- 
 pulse common to both makes communion 
 possible. As the sap is the same in the 
 vine and branch, and the flower and root 
 are of one another, so God's life in man 
 is a divine manifestation and man's true 
 life must be generated by it and it must 
 feed upon it. This unveils the seat of re- 
 ligious authority. Appeal to it and you 
 will so strengthen it, that it will be more 
 nearly infallible than all the popes. But 
 you ask what becomes of the item of 
 Personality in all this new bookkeeping 
 and inventory of the Universe? The 
 answer which Tennyson makes in phrase 
 and line quotable in a ministers' confer- 
 ence or at a theological club, is almost 
 multitudinous. Personality — the sub- 
 jective self — not individuality which is the 
 objective self — but Personality in God 
 and in man, is rescued from Anthropo-
 
 1 18 The Higher Ministries 
 
 morphism on the one side and a low 
 Pantheism on the other, by a living faith 
 in the " / afn that I amr Tennyson 
 therefore sings ; 
 
 Hallowed be Thy name — Halleluiah ! — 
 
 Infinite Ideality ! 
 
 Immeasurable Reality 1 
 
 Infinite Personality ! 
 Hallowed be Thy name — Halleluiah ! 
 
 We feel we are nothing — for all is Thou and in 
 
 Thee; 
 We feel we are something — that also has come 
 
 from Thee ; 
 We know we are nothing — ^but Thou wilt help us 
 
 to be. 
 Hallowed be Thy name — Halleluiah ! 
 
 In the wake of this idea, Tennyson has 
 much to gather up and to authenticate in 
 other waves of experience or trial. Emer- 
 son may stand by the grave of his child 
 and sing : 
 
 " The great heart answered : weepest thou? 
 Worthier cause for sorrow wild 
 If I had not taken the child. 
 My servant. Death, with solving rite 
 Pours finite into Infinite ; 
 House and tenant go to ground, 
 Lost in God, in Godhead found."
 
 Of Recent English Poetry 1 19 
 
 But this is not a complete account to 
 the head and heart of Tennyson. He 
 sings : 
 
 " That each, who seems a separate whole, 
 Should move his rounds, and fusing all 
 The skirts of self again, should fall 
 Remerging in the general Soul, 
 
 " Is faith as vague as all unsweet : 
 Eternal form shall still divide 
 The eternal soul from all beside j 
 And I shall know him when we meet : 
 
 "And we shall sit at endless feast, 
 Enjoying each the other's good : 
 What vaster dream can hit the mood 
 Of Love on earth ? He seeks at least 
 
 *' Upon the last and sharpest height. 
 Before the spirits fade away, 
 Some landing-place, to clasp and say, 
 * Farewell ! We lose ourselves in light.' " 
 
 This is a single illustration of Tenny- 
 son's power of movement, and the result 
 of his vision as he soars through the cloud 
 of sorrow and bereavement, trusting the 
 " Immeasurable Reality, Infinite Person- 
 ality." 
 
 To record the answer which this same
 
 120 The Higher Ministries 
 
 poet makes, in the more eloquent, philo- 
 sophical and " flesh and blood " manner, 
 through characters of the first importance 
 who furnish a full series of clinics for all 
 true soul-physicians, would require me to 
 give the whole list of Tennyson's men 
 and women with their biographies. The 
 manner of Tennyson's dealing with men 
 and women, his requirements of them, 
 his questions to them, the tasks laid upon 
 them, the duties suggested and heroisms 
 offered to them, and, above all, their God 
 to love and to obey — these make the truth 
 of Personality sure. At the highest, it 
 bleeds as on Calvary. So also must the 
 minister confront and guide, inspire and 
 baptize human beings, as does the min- 
 strel. 
 
 There is much revivalistic cant in our 
 day which usually quiets its extempo- 
 raneous enthusiasm in painting country 
 fences with the command : " Get right 
 with Gody Now, if these arduous per- 
 sons only meant so sublime a task to be 
 imposed as their words imply, it would 
 not offend any thoughtful man who re- 
 gards religion seriously. But they mean, 
 instead, that you and I shall get into
 
 Of Recent English Poetry 121 
 
 harmony with their very incomplete, 
 somewhat earthly and always metaphys- 
 ical notion of what God is and how God 
 acts. The principal item in their inven- 
 tory of Divine attributes is that of Right- 
 eousness. Even they will concede this. 
 But the power of God to rule must sin- 
 cerely and effectively appeal to the ruled, 
 if it be a forceful motive to accept His 
 governance. This they will not allow. 
 They are surer of man's depravity than 
 they are of his divinely implanted power 
 to respond to God, his Father, But some- 
 how, in every strong and true govern- 
 ment, the consent of the governed is ob- 
 tained. This is easily proved in all his- 
 tory. If there is nothing of appealing 
 and convincing Right in God unto what 
 is held as Right in the soul of man, the 
 command to be or to become right for 
 God's sake comes in vain. Here, too 
 often the preacher fails, where the poet 
 succeeds. Your parishioner stays at home 
 to read admiringly a poem which erects 
 in their place and teaches him to revere 
 and honour the living altar-fires of Divine 
 Righteousness in man's spiritual nature, 
 while you and I, with a vicious notion of
 
 122 The Higher Ministries 
 
 total depravity in you and me, throw down 
 these altars and put out these fires. We 
 leave God and man with nothing of the 
 magnetic experience which similar natures 
 know ; there is no quickening convic- 
 tion that our life is God's life within us. 
 We substitute some impossible dog^a for 
 the simple creed of love's experience ; and 
 men go away, saying to some amiable 
 child of credulity : 
 
 " You say, but with no touch of scorn, 
 
 Sweet-hearted, you, whose light-blue eyes, 
 Are tender over drowning flies, 
 You tell me, doubt is Devil-born. 
 
 ** I know not : one indeed I knew 
 In many a subtle question versed, 
 Who touch'd a jarring lyre at first, 
 But ever strove to make it true : 
 
 " Perplext in faith, but pure in deeds, 
 At last he beat his music out. 
 There lives more faith in honest doubt, 
 Believe me, than in half the creeds. 
 
 " He fought his doubts and gathered strength, 
 He would not make his judgment blind. 
 He faced the spectres of the mind 
 And laid them : thus he came at length
 
 Of Recent English Poetry 123 
 
 ** To find a stronger faith his own ; 
 
 And Power was with him in the night, 
 Which makes the darkness and the light, 
 And dwells not in the light alone, 
 
 "But in the darkness and the cloud, 
 As over Sinai's peaks of old, 
 While Israel made their gods of gold, » 
 Altho' the trumpet blew so loud." 
 
 Alfred Tennyson appeals to life and ex- 
 perience. Arthur Hallam was, indeed, a 
 son of knowledge. No superficial scep- 
 ticism clouded his youth. He inherited 
 the historical imagination from the author 
 of "The History of the Middle Ages." 
 He felt, by instinct, that there is something 
 worth fighting for, in this affair of the 
 soul's convictions. It is this "stronger 
 faith " that alone will interest thoughtful 
 men of the twentieth century. The age 
 believes more, not less, than its prede- 
 cessor. It fears not darkness. It has a 
 new understanding, in physics and meta- 
 physics, of the nature of the darkness and 
 the light. It adores no God whose pres- 
 ence dwells in the light alone. It gladly 
 welcomes the revealing of the light which 
 comes by way of the cloud. It has been
 
 124 '^^^ Higher Ministries 
 
 apprehended by Love — and having been 
 apprehended, it seeks " to apprehend," as 
 St. Paul suggests. Its manner towards 
 truth is scriptural, if it is not " orthodox." 
 It is in the air, and the preacher must 
 reckon with the poet's vision and ex- 
 perience, with sympathetic intelHgence and 
 candour, else his pulpit will go down be- 
 fore the breath of a song. In the heaven 
 of Truth, " i/iey shall sing^^ and we can 
 have no confidence in the survival of any 
 view of God, man, or nature which will 
 not yield itself and contribute to the soul's 
 essential music. 
 
 Having arrived at this understanding 
 with respect to Tennyson's verse as with 
 the poetry of Matthew Arnold, we may 
 well note also that these three singers who 
 are influencing our Christian thinking are 
 all psalmists of that all-informing, all-en- 
 folding God who is both Immanent and 
 Transcendent "in whom we live and 
 move and have our being," — this exposes 
 them to the charge of being pantheistic ; 
 that they are all of the deeper faith in the 
 universal self-revelation of God, in nature, 
 human history, and above all, in humanity 
 at its best and highest, — this exposes them
 
 Of Recent English Poetry 125 
 
 to the charge that, denying any exclusive- 
 ness of Divine cuhure as given to the 
 Hebrew nation, for example, they des- 
 troy the value of the Bible ; that they all 
 entertain reverently and gratefully what 
 is called " the larger hope " which, while 
 it has fine poetic statement in Matthew 
 Arnold's sonnet where again we see the 
 Good Shepherd of the catacombs return- 
 ing bearing on his shoulders " not a lamb 
 but kid " and a continuous proclamation 
 in Browning's verse, has had its com- 
 pletest utterance in Tennyson's well- 
 known lines : 
 
 ** Oh, 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 no one life shall be destroyed. 
 Or cast as rubbish to the void. 
 When God hath made the pile complete ; 
 
 " That not a worm is cloven in vain ; 
 That not a moth with vain desire 
 Is shrivel' d in a fruitless fire. 
 Or but subserves another's gain.
 
 126 The Higher Ministries 
 
 ** Behold, we know not anything ; 
 I can but trust that good shall fall 
 At last — far off — at last, to all, 
 And every winter change to spring. 
 
 << So runs my dream : but what am I ? 
 
 An infant crying in the night : 
 
 An infant crying for the light : 
 
 And with no language but a cry." 
 
 This, of course, has disquieted the main- 
 tainers of certain time-honoured positions, 
 because, as they opine, it removes a cer- 
 tain hitherto useful moral leverage from 
 beneath a world which must be lifted into 
 light and holiness. It shall not seem too 
 far from the present purpose to remark 
 that the above-mentioned world is a world 
 of human personalities ; and personalities 
 have to be personally lifted. They can- 
 not be lifted mechanically by urgency 
 from beneath, but, rather, must be wooed 
 and won from above ; they must be ex- 
 alted morally by an attractive power to 
 which they freely respond by "admira- 
 tion, thought, and love." No government 
 as touching both father and child, can 
 ignore the fact that, partaking each of 
 the other's nature, there must be a con-
 
 Of Recent English Poetry 127 
 
 sent upon the part of the governed— such 
 a consent, indeed, upon the part of the 
 child as develops and crowns the qualities 
 of justice and reason, and the contempla- 
 tion of noble ends which makes the child 
 most like the father. Surely the tradi- 
 tional view of everlasting and hopeless 
 suffering must pay a heavy bill charged 
 up by everything in the human which 
 man is asked or commanded to worship 
 as Divine. 
 
 It is just at this point — and it is even 
 now a most critical one in our thinking on 
 matters religious — that Tennyson meets 
 the perplexed and true-hearted man, and, 
 as I believe, has to give him a tonic for 
 his faith such as no one else may supply. 
 Let us use a homely figure of speech. 
 While we see both Tennyson and Brown- 
 ing bringing succour to the endangered 
 or sinking craft of faith, the rope which 
 Tennyson holds so firmly as he breasts 
 white breakers, carrying its rescue and 
 assurance to those in a foundering ship, 
 is woven of the same convictions, ideas, 
 and hopes as that which Browning grasps 
 and holds with stronger hand. Brown- 
 ing's rope is much larger, let us confess
 
 128 The Hifiher Ministries 
 
 &' 
 
 but, when we are distressed in night and 
 fog by a grinding reef near shore, Tenny- 
 son's rope is surer to reach us. Tenny- 
 son is more easily seen to be our helper ; 
 he has a light in his surf-beaten lantern 
 which common eyes will less often fail to 
 see. His way is that of our own minds 
 more often and steadily — and he is less 
 likely, if he comes close to us, to upset 
 our little toiling craft by his weight and 
 rapid motion. These things being so, let 
 us look into the message which will prob- 
 ably be his alone to get into our thinking 
 and life at a critical hour. 
 
 I do not think, as may already be sur- 
 mised, that his distinctive message comes 
 in that greatest of all psalms of grief and 
 loss and love and hope : " In Memoriam." 
 It has a place above the ** Adonais " of 
 Shelley, because of its deeper insight and 
 loftier confidence. It is as much more in- 
 forming to other children of sorrow than 
 Milton's " Lycidas " as the age was more 
 introspective and inscrutable to its own 
 overstrained eye. It moves like a stream 
 through the lands where Matthew Arnold 
 gathered cold dews with white flowers 
 which he has strewn upon the grave of
 
 Of Recent English Poetry 129 
 
 Arthur Hugh Clough ; it increases in 
 volume while with crystal purity it be- 
 comes recipient of many spotless and 
 molten snow-fields descending from the 
 lofty solitudes of fear and truth ; it is 
 now a dirge and now a hymn, now a 
 threnody and now a psalm, always re- 
 flecting the shadow of the oak as well as 
 that of the bending willow, and ever mov- 
 ing through a changeful landscape com- 
 prising seventeen years of a valley. It 
 glides on widening, winding, cleaving a 
 way for itself seaward, until at length, with 
 a rush of restrained confidences, it enters 
 the mightier truth from which it had afore- 
 time come in cloud and vapour — and 
 no greater truth ever welcomed the at- 
 tained harmony of so many truths as 
 this: 
 
 "Strong Son of God, immortal Love, 
 
 Whom we, that have not seen Thy face, 
 By faith, and faith alone, embrace. 
 Believing where we cannot prove ; 
 
 " Thine are these orbs of light and shade ; 
 Thou madest Life in man and brute ; 
 Thou madest Death ; and lo, Thy foot 
 Is on the skull which Thou hast made.
 
 130 The Higher Ministries 
 
 ** Thou wilt not leave us in the dust : 
 
 Thou madest man, he knows not why, 
 He thinks he was not made to die ; 
 And Thou hast made him : Thou art just. 
 
 ** Thou seemest human and divine. 
 
 The highest, holiest manhood, Thou : 
 
 Our wills are ours, we know not how ; 
 
 Our wills are ours, to make them Thine." 
 
 "In Memoriam" is usually accepted as 
 Tennyson's best, for it seems the com- 
 pletestand most majestically rhymed pres- 
 entation — after a noble order, be it said 
 — of his religious convictions and hopes. 
 But it was only seventeen years in the 
 making. This casket for such a string of 
 gems had only seventeen, years from the 
 time its plan was seen until its key was 
 turned in the enchased lock. *' In Memo- 
 riam " could not, therefore, comprise an- 
 swers to the many involved questions 
 which rose between 1831 when he touched 
 with moulding power the legend of Elaine 
 and that day, sixty and more years after, 
 when the world entered the presence of 
 King Arthur for the last time with Lord 
 Tennyson as sponsor. It is also true that, 
 although " In Memoriam " deals with much
 
 Of Recent English Poetry 131 
 
 that is most precious in the spirit of man, 
 his knowledge, his imagination, his reason, 
 his faith and his hope, and all in the light 
 of modern philosophy which dethrones or 
 reenthrones everything, and with a mas- 
 tery of the modern scientific method en- 
 riching Tennyson with that culture and 
 information which astonish the learned of 
 a learned age, it does not lead us to that 
 fact called conscience, fling us at its feet 
 when the foundations are made to shake, 
 point us to its summit when a fatalistic 
 philosophy has darkened it with cloud, 
 and wait with us through such hours of 
 earthquake as nothing save conscience 
 has known in all the history of man's moral 
 development. Nothing which man must 
 believe in so sincerely, if he is to be and 
 remain a man — nothing at least within the 
 last fifty years — has been so besieged and 
 so apparently demolished at times as has 
 man's conscience. It would seem that, 
 while a great poet's masterpiece might 
 not be the epic of conscience, if the poet 
 of our time essayed to leave a work which 
 would surely hold its place for all time as 
 a masterpiece, its numbers must move 
 between two permanencies, the broken
 
 132 The Higher Ministries 
 
 law of Sinai and the broken life of Cal- 
 vary. 
 
 This is the distinction of the " Idylls of 
 the King." It is the achievement of Ten- 
 nyson's genius in which " the light that 
 never was on sea or land," which Words- 
 worth saw, bathes that territory of the soul 
 of which there is no geography for 
 our eyes, and while mystic vapours 
 rise from murmuring streams or clashing 
 armies wage battle between enchanting 
 silences, the truth informing all of it is 
 binding tumultuous and tender years into 
 a drama of human failure so deep that we 
 lose our way in its agonizing defiles, so 
 bewildering with gleaming accoutrement 
 that we are blind to all reality, unless we 
 behold steadily — and it is Tennyson's 
 glory that he keeps it before us and makes 
 our eye look and look again upon it at 
 every turn in the long tragic way — the 
 white and awful summit called conscience. 
 So long as men read the " Idylls of the 
 King," science will have to make record 
 of a fact which is at least as real as a shell 
 and as provable as the working of any 
 law. It is this : that white and awful 
 summit crowns a grander eminence and
 
 Of Recent English Poetry 133 
 
 rests on a broader base ; and it is not only 
 awful and white, but it is immovable. 
 Once more let us remember that his con- 
 fidence in the ultimate victory of good 
 over evil grew stronger ; and with each 
 advancing year Tennyson approached 
 more reverently and lovingly the pres- 
 ence of God as his finer faith conceived 
 Him. 
 
 Never has there been so much written by 
 any poet, save Browning, which goes to 
 prove that in the test of conduct which is 
 " three-fourths of life " and which bears 
 that proportional part in determining the 
 worth or worthlessness of our beliefs, and 
 in a mind of the first quality, there is some- 
 thing valuable in the truth expressed by 
 what are called pantheistic writers, like 
 Hegel and Erigena, Spinoza and Aratus ; 
 and this something makes for the con- 
 ception of personality. This will ever be 
 paradoxical to those who have not felt that 
 the most truly personal moments in one's 
 life are those in which the Divine life 
 reaches the highest mark ; yes, even to the 
 effacing of all marks whatsoever. Who 
 doubts, in such an experience, that con- 
 science is God-empowered and is His
 
 134 The Higher Ministries 
 
 voice and presence — His self-revelation 
 in man ? This may help some persons 
 who have much difficulty to see how 
 Tennyson reinforces, by reinvigorating the 
 fact and function of conscience, without 
 holding to the traditional theology, in- 
 cluding Lockean metaphysics and Paley's 
 watch-like world. It is no desire or ex- 
 pectation of mine to employ Tennyson to 
 help any one to hold any of this — espe- 
 cially the notion of conscience which 
 obtained when most of our creeds were 
 written. It is a far more serious, noble, 
 and commanding reality — this fact and 
 factor called conscience ; and it stands 
 with terrible splendour, all unmoved in 
 the soul of one who believes enough in 
 good, not only to hate evil but to antici- 
 pate its final overthrow. 
 
 "The wish, that of the living whole 
 No life may fail beyond the grave, 
 Derives it not from what we have 
 The likest God within the soul ? 
 
 ** I falter where I firmly trod. 
 
 And falling with my weight of cares 
 Upon the great world's altar-stairs 
 That slope thro' darkness up to God,
 
 Of Recent English Poetry I35 
 
 *' 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." 
 
 The story of King Arthur was ten cen- 
 turies old and more when it came under 
 the touch of Alfred Tennyson. It has, 
 indeed, suffered a sea-change into some- 
 thing rich and strange ; but its oceanic 
 significance still abides. Here the ele- 
 mental passions and yearnings have the 
 throb of the infinite behind them ; and 
 they beat against the pristine coasts of 
 man's soul. It is the most modern thing 
 coming out of the chivalry or mediaeval- 
 ism of England, because of the steady 
 flame of moral enthusiasm which moves 
 within every line of the tradition as Lord 
 Tennyson uses it. Taking unto itself the 
 highest interests of human conduct and 
 hope, Tennyson's genius is confessedly 
 ethical in intention. We find him here 
 fusing many legends into a unity from 
 which, after it has hardened to a mirror in 
 the lower temperature of a moral philoso- 
 phy, the conscience may see the features of 
 itself. No one but a great artist could have
 
 136 The Higher Ministries 
 
 compelled so many elements and so vari- 
 ous, to compose a portrait at once white as 
 snow and pathetic to the stirring of tears, 
 without giving the appearance of disin- 
 tegrating a strong literary figure and fact 
 to obtain a weak result in morals. If Ten- 
 nyson's Arthur is weak, his is the weak- 
 ness through which the soul and the 
 world are made strong. " Thy gentle- 
 ness hath made me great " — this is man's 
 answer to the method of God Himself, 
 who is " the great poet " ; and Chris- 
 tianity gave the world nothing so power- 
 ful as He Himself who said, " I, if I be 
 lifted up, will draw all men unto Me." 
 Crosses only are permanent thrones. The 
 value of Tennyson's treatment of this 
 story lies in its deeper explication of the 
 Christian indictment against sin — deeper 
 than any less profound and searching re- 
 ligious philosophy may ever dream of. 
 Here we will see that the horror of sin 
 has its sting in the attack made upon the 
 good which alone furnishes a foundation 
 for the universe. 
 
 Arthur, the King, is, even in spite of our 
 age's deification of assertive and often 
 coarse energy, the expression of faith
 
 Of Recent English Poetry 137 
 
 purity and love. No one but an intense 
 believer in the supremacy of conscience, 
 a poet whose priestly functions are allied 
 with those of the true prophet, could have 
 avoided lessening the moral effect of this 
 great poem by some such incorporation as, 
 for example, the story that Modred was 
 Arthur's natural son, the child of Bellicent 
 whom Arthur did not know as his half- 
 sister, but for whom he had an impure 
 passion. Of course, Swinburne urges 
 upon Tennyson a criticism in harmony 
 with the less distinctly ethical tendencies 
 of his own poems, and he cannot forgive 
 the laureate for refusing to portray some- 
 thing which might relax the grip of con- 
 science on Guinevere. Let it be a flaw in 
 the King's character, or some past shame 
 clinging to his life. It is entirely in har- 
 mony with a down-grade view of con- 
 science, cynical or rampant in the last 
 fifty years, to presume that somehow, if 
 we knew all, every Guinevere is "more 
 sinned against than sinning." This 
 Shakespearean phrase will never fit Guin- 
 evere, unless we abrogate Shakespeare's 
 moral standards, and Tennyson's are 
 fundamentally the same. The old British
 
 1^8 The Higher Ministries 
 
 legends may sustain Swinburne's con- 
 ception of Arthur's sin and its developing 
 retribution. But Tennyson's genius sets 
 itself to portray, for an age whose sur- 
 viving institutions are threatened with 
 destruction from personal wrong-doing, 
 the indubitable features of Guinevere's 
 falsity and the disastrous consequences 
 of her guilt. He will not weaken the 
 effect of her personal influence in the 
 process of bringing about the ruin of the 
 Round Table, by discounting the sig- 
 nificance of the event ; nor shall its real 
 cause be lost sight of by a reference to any 
 sin of Arthur's youth as a collateral for it 
 all. He avoids this, first, by leaving this 
 episode to silence and, secondly and more 
 surely, by painting the history of this 
 progressive assertion and victory of evil 
 over good upon the responsive, sensitive 
 tissue of the superb and undisguised soul. 
 In her disloyalty, and so in her remorse, 
 Guinevere stands with Lancelot equally 
 guilty, and none of the laborious prepara- 
 tions which a timid morality would make 
 to convey opiates or antidotes for the 
 acuteness of her malady are permitted by 
 Tennyson. Sins are terrible as results of
 
 Of Recent English Poetry 139 
 
 the disease ; but such a disease as sin it- 
 self is more terrible for the foulness which 
 such a frenzied passion breeds in Guine- 
 vere or Lancelot. He will not decrease 
 the weight of her iniquity or the bitter- 
 ness of her woe by mechanical subtrac- 
 tions. The glory of the human mind is 
 witnessed partly in this — that, intellectu- 
 ally or cesthetically, it would be inartistic 
 if Tennyson should do this ; spiritually 
 and ethically it would be an ofTense. 
 
 Later on in this study, it will be seen 
 that these matters of conscience and its 
 message are not the less imperious when 
 any such palliative as an inadequate re- 
 ligious fervour or a mystical quest is of- 
 fered. The ethical teaching of Tennyson 
 here is not less vigorous as he shows the fu- 
 tility of superstition, however gorgeously 
 arrayed and devout it may be, to offset 
 sin like that of Guinevere and Lancelot, 
 and the utter folly, if not wickedness, 
 of expecting that form of religion to re- 
 pair breaches at the Round Table or 
 otherwise to help straighten out this 
 harmed world. A ministry equal to such 
 minstrelsy will see the peril of the sinning 
 soul moving unquietly to and fro between
 
 140 The Higher Ministries 
 
 a wish that iniquity may somehow be 
 proven less than the ugly fact against 
 which conscience and history revolt, and 
 the brainless dream of a poor sanctity rely- 
 ing upon poetic ritual or theatrical ardour 
 at once externally lovely and internally 
 hollow. When pulpits are far gone astray 
 from the awful meaning of the cross, 
 which is a reality of man's memory and 
 of man's imagination — a reality which 
 certainly would have quite faded out of 
 both, had there been no fearful fact in 
 history called sin to which that cross 
 makes satisfactory answer, — and when 
 ministers assume that Guinevere's wrong- 
 doing may be accounted for on any 
 theory which makes Arthur's stainless 
 life and noble dreams matters of indiffer- 
 ence or even of folly, then it is well to re- 
 turn to Tennyson, the minstrel, and behold 
 him refusing at the beginning of his great 
 work and declining over and over again 
 in the course of its achievement, any com- 
 promise on the part of the behests of con- 
 science as this inner reality has appeared 
 and ruled in the Bible, Dante, and 
 Shakespeare. No misconduct of others, 
 no apparent force of inner fate which
 
 of Recent English Poetry 141 
 
 mysteriously operated on Guinevere, can 
 confuse the distinction in Tennyson's 
 mind and art between right and wrong. 
 If Arthur was excluded from the search 
 of the Holy Grail because, as Tennyson 
 thinks, the search was an abandoning of 
 the less apparently religious, but really 
 more holy task of restoring order on 
 earth ; if Arthur is so cold and lofty that 
 Guinevere afterwards says ; 
 
 " I thought I could not breathe in that fine air, 
 That pure serenity of perfect light — 
 I wanted warmth and colour which I found 
 In Lancelot," 
 
 if she also says ; 
 
 " *To me 
 He is all fault who hath no fault at all : 
 For who loves me must have a touch of earth ; 
 The low sun makes the colour,' " 
 
 and if Vivien has a grossness unre- 
 lieved by any kind of dignity, — Tenny- 
 son is moved by none of these. They 
 are only circumstances like those of 
 which we are perpetually reminded by a 
 school of philosophers who would make
 
 142 The Higher Ministries 
 
 sin something less destroying in its na- 
 ture and consequences than it really is. 
 Whatever may be the force of environ- 
 ment or the anaesthetic ethical theory 
 for troublesome reflection, Tennyson 
 never swerves from the idea that sin is a 
 personal affair, the missing of the mark, 
 indeed, but a transgression also — a per- 
 sonal revolt, and of such power and cer- 
 tainty of self-propagation that its conse- 
 quences upon the world and its hopes 
 are never so awful as its consequences 
 upon the human self-will which initiates 
 it. 
 
 In the first poem we get some outline 
 of the moral beauty in presence of which 
 evil begins to enact its bold tragedy. 
 The picture is as psychologically true as 
 a leaf from the gospels where we see 
 Judas becoming darker-souled every day 
 in the light and presence of his Christ. 
 Merlin, who is masterful of all knowl- 
 edge, who is ever reminding us in many 
 ways of the weak but brainy Hamlet of 
 Shakespeare, or a straying Paracelsus of 
 Browning, makes a declaration of King 
 Arthur's place in the world, in words as 
 memorable as are the lambent flames
 
 Of Recent English Poetry 143 
 
 which were said to have played around 
 him as a babe : 
 
 *' From the great deep to the great deep he goes." 
 
 Tennyson may have never thought, at 
 the first, of the epical orchestration he 
 was to give to the theme of King Arthur 
 and the Round Table ; but it came as a 
 necessity to art and truth. 1870 was the 
 date of the publication of the " Coming of 
 Arthur." The date is also significant as 
 that of Stuart Mill's Essays and Huxley's 
 sketched automaton or the chess-player 
 in life. Conscience was perishing in the 
 test-tube of science and the ratiocination of 
 philosophy. But here came a life-picture 
 which was more than an argument for 
 conscience ; it was a statement of facts 
 upon which the moral universe is founded 
 and by which moral activity goes on. 
 This statement of facts was a judgment 
 already rendered against evil tendencies 
 of the time which were quite willing to 
 have the protection of the philosophy of 
 Stuart Mill and Mr. Huxley. Tennyson's 
 mission is not yet done. We still have to 
 learn that Arthur, who may stand for the 
 rational soul, is always threatened in his
 
 144 '^^^ Higher Ministries 
 
 kingdom by the powers of sense, by- 
 pleasure and passion, and by selfishness. 
 Ours is a golden moment like that when 
 
 " the king in low deep tones, 
 And simple words of great authority, 
 Bound them by so strait vows to his own self. 
 That when they rose, knighted from kneeling, 
 
 some 
 Were pale as at the passing of a ghost, 
 Some flush'd, and others dazed, as one who wakes 
 Half-blinded at the coming of a light." 
 
 We think we are too civilized for such an 
 incursion of brutality as once laid waste 
 Arthur's royal dream, but the truth is 
 that our enervated and tenuous life need 
 fear nothing else so much. 
 
 Sir Lancelot is apparently bound to his 
 king in fine seriousness. 
 
 " ' Thou dost not doubt me king. 
 So well thine arm hath wrought for me to-day.' 
 * Sir and my liege,' he cried, * the fire of God 
 Descends upon thee in the battle-field : 
 I know thee for my king ! ' Whereat the two, 
 For each had warded either in the fight, 
 Sware on the field of death a deathless love. 
 And Arthur said, ' Man's word is God in man : 
 Let chance what will, I trust thee to the death. ' "
 
 Of Recent English Poetry 145 
 
 A careful and sympathetic study of 
 Merlin at his first appearance here pre- 
 pares us for finding out that the intellectual 
 acumen and mysterious skill allied to 
 great achievement of knowledge at any 
 time cannot prove itself the saviour of 
 Arthur, or make Merlin self-protective 
 against the heat and breath of base desire. 
 Guinevere is hardly ever to be mistaken 
 for anything more nor less than that as- 
 semblage of powers which nestle and 
 reign in a woman's heart, and with which 
 every Arthur must be genuinely wedded 
 in order that he may even dream, and 
 much more that he may do what he 
 dreams, as he cries : 
 
 '* Then might we live together as one life, 
 And reigning with one will in everything 
 Have power on this dark land to lighten it, 
 And power on this dead world to make it live." 
 
 She is at least superb in capability of 
 promise. 
 
 ** And Arthur said, ' Behold, thy doom is mine. 
 Let chance what will, I love thee to the death ! ' 
 To whom the queen replied with drooping eyes, 
 * King and my lord, I love thee to the death ! ' "
 
 146 The Higher Ministries 
 
 Around these two move the knights of 
 the Round Table. They stand for the 
 lofty faculties of our humanity with which 
 every hopeful vision of the King and his 
 kingdom must be allied. These are the 
 faculties which are to enter into all the 
 activities of the kingdom, and they re- 
 joice on the coronation and the marriage 
 of King Arthur and Queen Guinevere, 
 when faith, hope, and charity stand near, 
 and Excalibur — the sword of the Spirit 
 — is given to the King by the Lady of 
 the Lake, *' clothed in white samite, 
 mystic, wonderful." Soon the war has 
 begun, and Arthur, who thus obeys the 
 church, is seen to be the royal foe against 
 the evil which disorders the world. It is 
 all of yesterday ; it is of to-day also. 
 
 The minister of to-day will join with the 
 student of psychology to pay homage to 
 a minstrel who is even nearer the heart 
 and intellect of humanity to-day, as men 
 deal with the problem of civilization and 
 its methods and hopes, than he was when 
 the first of the " Idylls of the King " was 
 written so long ago. Tennyson's place 
 as a philosopher of ethical phenomena is 
 surer far than Mill's or Huxley's. Peace
 
 Of Recent English Poetry 147 
 
 and law and governmental order are still 
 to be brought about by one like Arthur, 
 who cannot work without love and who 
 does not expect love to exist for long 
 without work. Now that we are in an 
 age of Tolstoi and William Morris, he 
 must be more certainly than ever the re- 
 deemer of waste lands and wasted souls. 
 He may be called a practical statesman, 
 a constructive reformer, or an inspiring 
 leader; one thing is sure, he will not be- 
 lieve in following fantastic and exhaust- 
 ing dreams, the " wandering fires " of 
 the mind. It is of the utmost impor- 
 tance that we should honour the light of 
 that good sense in Arthur's eye as he 
 looks forward to the time when he shall 
 stand between the two perils ; on the one 
 side the iniquity of his own court, and 
 on the other side, the fascinating super- 
 stition and fanaticism of those who leave 
 the world's work following useless 
 visions. He cries : 
 
 " O ye stars that shudder over me 
 O earth that soundest hollow under me 
 Vext with waste dreams ! " 
 
 When Lancelot appears, we are struck
 
 148 The Higher Ministries 
 
 with his full and convincing humanity. 
 The cup of his Ufe fairly overflows with 
 wine. 
 
 Here is King Arthur's first address to 
 his manhood : 
 
 " ' Lancelot, my Lancelot, thou in whom I have 
 Most joy and most affiance, for I know 
 What thou hast been in battle by my side, 
 And many a time have watched thee at the tilt 
 Strike down the lusty and long practiced knight. 
 And let the younger and unskilled go by 
 To win his honour and to make his name, 
 And loved thy courtesies and thee, a man 
 Made to be loved ; but now I would to God, 
 Seeing the homeless trouble in thine eyes. 
 Thou couldst have loved this maiden, shaped, it 
 
 seems, 
 By God for thee alone, and from her face, 
 If one may judge the living by the dead, 
 Delicately pure and marvellously fair, 
 Who might have brought thee, now a lonely man, 
 Wifeless and heirless, noble issue, sons 
 Born to the glory of thy name and fame, 
 My knight, the great Sir Lancelot of the Lake. ' " 
 
 Even though at last we see that 
 
 " His honour rooted in dishonour stood, 
 And faith unfaithful kept him falsely true,"
 
 Of Recent English Poetry 149 
 
 — even then the pure Elaine may half 
 adore him, for 
 
 " Marred as he was, he seemed the goodliest man 
 That ever among ladies ate in hall. 
 And noblest, when she lifted up her eyes. 
 However marred, of more than twice her years, 
 Seamed with an ancient sword-cut on the cheek, 
 And bruised and bronzed, she lifted up her eyes 
 And loved him, with that love which was her 
 doom." 
 
 What a height to fall from ! How deep 
 must be any hell corresponding to such 
 a heaven of power and possibility. 
 When the King sends him to fetch 
 Guinevere, after Arthur and Lancelot 
 have fought against rebellious Kings, 
 saved each other's lives and plighted an 
 eternal love, we are aware that more than 
 chemic forces are at work in this solution 
 which may throw down an unwelcome 
 precipitate. We feel that we have come 
 upon an event in the lives of all of these 
 persons at court which will reveal their 
 souls, lighten up the sky above them to a 
 higher glory, or dig deep an abyss of ruin 
 below to a profounder hell than mediaeval 
 theology ever pictured.
 
 150 The Higher Ministries 
 
 We looked for the king when 
 
 ** Lancelot passed away among the flowers, 
 (For then was latter April) and returned 
 Among the flowers, in May, with Guinevere," 
 
 and we did not anticipate that Guinevere 
 would ever characterize her Arthur as 
 
 "A moral child without the craft to rule." 
 
 These three persons have each their 
 share of what we call human nature, 
 and their tragedy is possible in every 
 age like our own which Tennyson, even 
 now, instructs against its low-browed 
 vulgarity of both money and penury, its 
 studious meannesses and its unequalled 
 heroisms ; its thick-breathed indifferences 
 and the intrusive gospelizing of its scep- 
 ticism. It is scepticism — doubt as to the 
 worth of goodness which willingly con- 
 fuses it with anything less self-revealing 
 than itself in the experience of conscience. 
 This scepticism is not always aware of 
 itself in pulpits, where it is as poisonous 
 in the statement of the untruth which is 
 in Pantheism and which relieves us of 
 personal responsibility, as it is in the form
 
 Of Recent English Poetry 151 
 
 of offering to impurity and injustice in- 
 adequate conceptions of right and wrong. 
 These are each and all disastrous alike to 
 excellent literature and noble lives. 
 
 Against these all, with the Round Table 
 now established and the Knights riding 
 away to subdue the oppressor, Tennyson 
 gives a more radiant meaning to this 
 Golden Time. It is not a place or era for 
 worldlings or weaklings ; and in the se- 
 cond of these poems, " Gareth and Ly- 
 nette," there works a virility with tenacity 
 of mind which accords with human life. 
 No delicacy or enchantment may hide 
 from us the encounter at Castle Perilous 
 or the nobility of the strife against all 
 fleshly appetite. Soon after Tennyson 
 has pictured to us the kingdom of Arthur 
 and we are full of anticipation as to the 
 future of the Round Table, an anticipation 
 made vigorous by the gay energy of 
 Gareth, with what singular invasion of 
 distrust, through the Idyll called " Enid," 
 the serpentine rumour slides in, which 
 breathes the first nameless poison in an 
 air which all must live in and which only 
 a little time ago was so sunny and benign I 
 The change is known to any close student
 
 l^"! The Higher Ministries 
 
 of the psychology of sinning and the 
 history of its impersonal result on social 
 units. The cause of it is the just suspi- 
 cion that Guinevere and Lancelot are 
 lovers and false to King Arthur. 
 
 If ever minister must go to minstrel in 
 order to discover the taint of death with 
 which an atmosphere may become 
 charged at the first, in which even yet 
 beings may live, though uncertainly and 
 dreamily, let him find it in that hour 
 when Enid is exalted by the attachment 
 of Guinevere, and when the very loftiness 
 of such a position in life makes the evil 
 report to which any one gives currency a 
 baser coin of sinister magnitude, because 
 it goes through such good and bad hands. 
 Let him feel the strain when a sincere 
 purpose to do right and to be right, em- 
 bodied in some Geraint, strives to main- 
 tain its vitality in the foul air. This is 
 not hell perhaps ; but this is a way to it. 
 Even here the path is hot ; grass and 
 bloom are parched. Not an external, 
 mechanical, penal hell in this, but it is 
 more awful because it is consequential, 
 and it is more abiding because the soul 
 builds it of the soul's self. Here is a
 
 Of Recent English Poetry 153 
 
 picture of the hatefulness of every such 
 an influence as this which has aheady 
 fallen upon everything that is made 
 more abominable to the conscience which 
 Tennyson keeps in training through 
 these poems. It is more abominable be- 
 cause Guinevere's reputation for virtue, 
 which has now been attacked, is always 
 finely protected by the white radiance of 
 the King, the no less snowy purity of 
 Enid, and the firm attitude which Geraint 
 takes as against all reports and all suspi- 
 cions. Tennyson here restrains himself 
 mightily ; but he cannot keep us from 
 feeling the pathos of the situation. 
 
 Though it is early in the story, the past 
 has wonderfully quickened our sense of the 
 destructiveness of any faithlessness like 
 this of the Queen and Lancelot. Tenny- 
 son may be criticised for the insanity of 
 Geraint's later jealousy, but he will not be 
 criticised by men who know human life 
 and perceive the wreckage wrought by 
 Vivien, not so much because of what she 
 herself, the loose-tonged siren, has done, 
 or what she may be seeking, but because 
 of the more wretched disaster wrought by 
 the Queen. This disaster lies in the fact
 
 154 '^^^ Higher Ministries 
 
 that she has unbound the hitherto man- 
 ageable passions which are ever hiding 
 in decencies, until some great one has 
 fallen low ; and then they yelp with cynical 
 joy that man is the child of hell, not of 
 heaven. Guinevere's shame makes such 
 a woman as Vivien shameless. Her 
 ecstasy of conquest comes when, not even 
 the Queen dare restrain her festival at 
 the ruin of human hope. The enchant- 
 ress had failed with the King himself. 
 As that apparently cold and white being 
 paused and seemed for an instant about 
 to melt before her, her fires were quenched 
 in the few crystal drops which fell in the 
 chill damp air. On the other hand, the 
 deadly charm by which mere intellect 
 always falls into the meshes prepared by 
 passion is still hers. 
 
 Here we see the saying illustrated : 
 
 " For men at most differ as heaven and earth, 
 But women, worst and best, as Heaven and Hell." 
 
 It is only a stronger picture of the weak- 
 ness of intellect alone, added to the Hamlet 
 of Shakespeare and the Paracelsus of 
 Browning, when we see Merlin in the 
 hands of Vivien.
 
 Of Recent English Poetry 155 
 
 " And Vivien ever sought to work the charm 
 Upon the great Enchanter of the Time, 
 As fancying that her glory would be great 
 According to his greatness whom she quench' d." 
 
 Geraint, with his unnecessary jealousy, is 
 the product intellectually of that unrea- 
 soning iniquity which ever communicates 
 its madness to the atmosphere. As we 
 see him, we can say with Tennyson : 
 
 " O purblind race of miserable men. 
 How many among us at this very hour 
 Do forge a lifelong trouble for ourselves 
 By taking true for false, or false for true — " 
 
 Geraint is not a great person ; but we 
 begin to see in his confusion, the impos- 
 sibility of Arthur's kingdom resting for 
 long, even upon the foundations of human 
 nature, for they are restless and disturbed, 
 and certain malevolent acids are in the 
 air pulling the structure down. All this 
 makes a searching appeal to us, as we 
 try once more to see : 
 
 *' Clear honour shining like the dewy star 
 Of dawn, of faith in their great King, with pure 
 Affection, and the light of victory. 
 And glory gain'd, and ever more to gain."
 
 1^6 The Higher Ministries 
 
 Sad as Geraint's heart is, in fearing that 
 his wife Enid must suffer reproach as the 
 Queen's friend because of the suspicions 
 against the Queen herself, the picture of 
 his mental weakness is quite as appealing. 
 Yet it is weak indeed compared to another 
 picture rendered here — the picture of this 
 pervasive satanic influence blighting all 
 hope and endeavour ; and the man comes 
 upon death's spectral hour, while yet 'tis 
 true that 
 
 '< Never yet, since high in Paradise 
 O'er the four rivers the first roses blew. 
 Came purer pleasure unto mortal kind 
 Than lived thro' her, who in that perilous hour 
 Put hand to hand beneath her husband's heart, 
 And felt him hers again : she did not weep, 
 But o'er her meek eyes came a happy mist 
 Like that which kept the heart of Eden green 
 Before the useful trouble of the rain." 
 
 Even more masterful in his man- 
 agement of light and shade does Tenny- 
 son, the artist as well as the moralist, be- 
 come when he portrays through Balin and 
 Balan a violent temper exiled from the 
 Round Table, now restored, now lost 
 again unto many struggles. Balin ap- 
 peals strongly to a true ethical philos-
 
 Of Recent English Poetry 157 
 
 ophy. He strives for character, because 
 he beholds constantly upon his shield 
 nothing less than the Queen's crown. Is 
 there anything more true in the history 
 of such an iniquity, which winds itself 
 down from some high source and glides 
 in and on until it encircles all human in- 
 terests in a community, than what follows 
 when even humble heroisms die at birth 
 and truly maddened is dependent aspira- 
 tion ? Having heard of the falsity of the 
 Queen to the King and that of Lancelot, 
 from whom as a great knight Balin has 
 sought to learn gentleness, his frenzied 
 wrath hastens to trample his shield. 
 Nothing is so terrible as a cheated con- 
 fidence. He shrieks so like the Demon of 
 the Wood, that, attacked by his brother, 
 they kill each other. Conscience was 
 present when 
 
 " Balan answered low, 
 * Good-night, true brother here ! Good-morrow 
 
 there ! 
 We two were born together, and we die 
 Together by one doom : ' and while he spoke 
 Closed his death-drowsing eyes, and slept the 
 
 sleep 
 With Balin, either lock'd in either 's arms,"
 
 158 The Higher Ministries 
 
 and conscience is not less luridly re- 
 vealing or more assuredly eloquent than 
 when we discover Vivien standing silently 
 by — this Vivien who has removed their 
 helms that each may know the other in 
 death. 
 
 But there is a picture even more 
 deeply-toned than this, in this series of 
 richly coloured works of genius, and that 
 is unequalled for its teaching to a time 
 like our own disposed to be prouder of 
 feats of the intellect than of warmth or 
 purity of heart — I mean the portrait of the 
 philosopher-magician, Merlin, while his 
 character is under the disintegrating in- 
 fluence of the enchantress Vivien who 
 now comes forth having tested the charm 
 which Tennyson has described. There 
 is a likeness in these so seemingly unlike 
 characters. Both rely much on enchant- 
 ment. Merlin enchants by exhausting 
 the intellect : Vivien enchants by empty- 
 ing the heart. The fire of Vivien's heart, 
 breaking out through and increasing by 
 consuming the fuel of her sensual nature, 
 constantly growing fiercer by the current 
 of air thus set astir, is so much more pow- 
 erful for invasion than the coldness of
 
 Of Recent English Poetry 159 
 
 Merlin's mentality is for resistance, that 
 the latter's molten personality is licked up 
 on parched ground, 
 
 *' And lissome Vivien, holding by his heel, 
 Writhed towards him, slided up his knee and 
 
 sat, 
 Behind his ankle twined her hollow feet 
 Together, curved an arm about his neck, 
 Clung like a snake ; and letting her left hand 
 Droop from his mighty shoulder, as a leaf. 
 Made with her right a comb of pearl to part 
 The lists of such a beard as youth gone out 
 Had left in ashes." 
 
 But she wishes something more and seeks 
 it through one of the long besiegings of 
 which passion never tires. She knows 
 enough to sing 
 
 '♦ In Love, if Love be Love, if Love be ours, 
 Faith and unfaith can ne'er be equal powers : 
 Unfaith in aught is want of faith in all. 
 
 " It is the little rift within the lute, 
 That by and by will make the music mute. 
 And ever widening slowly silence all." 
 
 Strangely enough, some of the wisest of 
 earth and the most eminent in intellect 
 have fallen before such as Vivien just
 
 l6o The Higher Ministries 
 
 when Vivien becomes the example of those 
 who 
 
 "Inflate themselves with some insane delight 
 And judge all Nature from her feet of clay." 
 
 She gathers an awful pre-natal remem- 
 brance into her quiver of poisoned arrows 
 and sends it forth to complete her half- 
 fiendish joy at the downfall of Merlin : 
 
 " ' My father died in battle against the king, 
 My mother on his corpse in open field ; 
 She bore me there, for born from death was I 
 Among the dead and sown upon the wind — 
 And then on thee ! ' " 
 
 The sorrowful fact is that such judg- 
 ments have their possibility lying back a 
 long way, even in the sin of Guinevere 
 and Lancelot. To show this is to trace 
 the sinfulness of sin to its origin in the 
 responsible personality. Such is Tenny- 
 son's philosophy. 
 
 In the Idyll of " Lancelot and Elaine," 
 the poorness, as well as the richness, of 
 our humanity is strongly and subtly de- 
 picted. It is a fearful thing to think of 
 Elaine's defeat in contrast with Vivien's
 
 Of Recent English Poetry 161 
 
 even temporary triumph. The utter 
 chastity of the one — is it sHghtly nega- 
 tive ? Has it the purity of fire with all 
 its force or the purity of snow only ? 
 Whatever be the answer, quivering black 
 is never like this which may be "dark 
 with excess of light " only. Innocence 
 may be as uninteresting to Lancelot as 
 Arthur's "white flower of a blameless 
 life" is to Guinevere. These surmises 
 come with life's problems while Vivien's 
 lust grows hate and Elaine's love has a 
 snowy lily for bloom called purity. If 
 one must have the biography of a cynical 
 woman, let him watch Vivien's career. 
 If one will learn the tragedy of inno- 
 cence, not the epic of holiness, he must 
 live in Elaine's fantasy — the spiritual 
 fragrance of the woman-soul — and stag- 
 ger on, or rise on wings, with her spirit 
 even after her death when the diamonds 
 fall into the river, 
 
 "And down they flash'd, and smote the stream. 
 Then from the smitten surface flash'd as it were, 
 Diamonds to meet them, and they pass'd away." 
 
 It is with the transformation of those 
 gems to tears that we discover this, that
 
 i62 The Higher Ministries 
 
 her girHsh heart wrecked itself against 
 the Lancelot who could say : 
 
 ♦* Had I chosen to wed, 
 I had been wedded earlier, sweet Elaine ; 
 But now there never will be wife of mine." 
 
 Only such a woman, when Lancelot is 
 wounded, could witness to the sinfulness 
 of sin, as 
 
 "Through her own side she felt the sharp lance 
 go." 
 
 Only such a man as Lancelot himself 
 ever may give a true account of his 
 stained and faithless self. He cries out: 
 
 " * Alas for Arthur's greatest knight, a man 
 Not after Arthur's heart ! I needs must break 
 These bonds that so defame me : not without 
 She wills it : would I, if she willed it ? Nay, 
 Who knows ? But if I would not, then may God, 
 I pray Him, send a sudden angel down 
 To seize me by the hair and bear me far. 
 And fling me deep in that forgotten mere. 
 Among the tumbled fragments of the hills.' " 
 
 If now we have learned what a ruin 
 any such crowned and beautiful iniquity 
 may achieve, and if, like the knights of
 
 Of Recent English Poetry 163 
 
 the Round Table, we turn from it all, 
 Tennyson is yet with the human soul, 
 ever faithful and ever true. Now even the 
 knights and ladies must turn to some- 
 thing, and they obey a psychological law 
 in turning, by a certain reactionary proc- 
 ess, to religion and to that form of it 
 which most ministers to the sensuous 
 forces whose baleful activity this hot and 
 luxurious atmosphere had excited. There 
 is a world of teaching here for the true 
 minister unto men like ourselves. Re- 
 ligion is never so contemptible as when 
 it offers a retreat from morality. These 
 persons of the court, however, must find 
 such a retreat, for they have abhorred and 
 hated stern morality. Excitements of a 
 supernatural character are the demand of 
 souls who, weary of the high-pitched 
 monotony of sin and brought in sight of 
 its misery, disdain common duties wait- 
 ing to be done. Some mystic or ascetic 
 gymnastic must be appealed to, that pas- 
 sion of flesh may hide itself in the pas- 
 sion of religion. What philosopher has 
 been truer to our inner history than our 
 poet ? These chief persons of Arthur's 
 court were not a little touched with what
 
 164 The Higher Ministries 
 
 is called the insanity of genius. Ordinary 
 laws were too commonplace for them. 
 Society and institutions — and Tenny- 
 son is the singer of the worth of these — 
 are never sacred to their unrestrained ro- 
 manticism of desire. The thrill and 
 wonder of the miraculous must be had, to 
 give a gleam to heavy eyes and ecstasy 
 to half-exhausted sensibilities. Tenny- 
 son's account of all this, in their effort to 
 escape the results of sensuality by adopt- 
 ing sensuousness in religious life by way 
 of a sensational search for the Holy 
 Grail, is the wisest and fearfulest indict- 
 ment ever made against a theatric form 
 of religion as a refuge for man when he 
 has failed to obey the religion of duty 
 and righteousness. 
 
 Here appears the grandeur of pu- 
 ritanism with all its lack of charm and art, 
 its baldness and its antipathy for mere 
 gesture and costume in piety. Tennyson 
 will not permit us to believe that the 
 King joins not in this search for the 
 Holy Grail — though Sir Gawain is 
 disloyal and Lancelot has felt remorse — 
 because the King has long ago sinned. 
 His King Arthur had a royal reason
 
 Of Recent English Poetry 165 
 
 within himself. Tennyson is too true to 
 psychological conditions following years 
 of stainless life, to accord with any tradi- 
 tion or his vapid critics at this point. He 
 will colour for us the Year of Miracle as 
 has not been painted since Tintoretto. 
 The heaven of heavens will yield him hues 
 for his high portrayal of souls engaged 
 in rapturous moral blundering. His Per- 
 civale may suggest with a dauntless 
 realism the reflected accounts of those 
 ecstasies usually oblivious of simple 
 duties undone. But his King Arthur, 
 never so kingly as now, like his Christ 
 who, when His disciples were disputing 
 about their occupancy of the twelve 
 thrones in the upper room at Jerusalem 
 just before the Crucifixion, flashed both 
 a human and divine light upon all of it 
 and took a towel to wash the feet of the 
 disputants — King Arthur will banish 
 visions, if need be, though he has more 
 of these than all of them ; and he who is 
 so royal in soul-fibre and experience that 
 he knows the sublimity of duty even 
 when his fortunes have waned to a shred 
 of hope — he will not play or treat with 
 visions, his task being always in his eye :
 
 i66 The Higher Ministries 
 
 "And some among you held, that if the King 
 Had seen the sight he would have sworn the 
 
 vow : 
 Not easily, seeing that the King must guard 
 That which he rules, and is but as the hind 
 To whom a space of land is given to plough, 
 Who may not wander from the allotted field 
 Before his work be done ; but, being done, 
 Let visions of the night or of the day 
 Come, as they will ; and many a time they 
 
 come, 
 Until this earth he walks on seems not earth. 
 This light that strikes his eyeball is not light, 
 This air that smites his forehead is not air. 
 But vision — yea, his very hand and foot — 
 In moments when he feels he cannot die, 
 And knows himself no vision to himself, 
 Nor the high God a vision, nor that One 
 Who rose again : ye have seen what ye have 
 
 seen." 
 
 Against this " clear-shining after rain," 
 how sullenly moves the fool remembered 
 from "The Last Tournament," who ad- 
 umbrates that ray of light which always 
 falls on love and service. The end comes. 
 The dish once in use at the Last Supper 
 of Jesus with His disciples, Joseph's 
 treasured last drop of the blood which 
 fell to him from the Christ's riven side,
 
 Of Recent English Poetry 167 
 
 the sacramental efficacy of the Grail are 
 not of supreme worth compared with 
 King Arthur's devotion to common 
 duties. As the whole epic moves to- 
 wards a conclusion, we learn much. We 
 learn that while heaven is attractive to 
 religious souls, earth is the place to win 
 heaven ; that passionate purity alone may 
 weave of a maiden's hair a girdle for 
 Galahad, the warrior, and he alone may 
 win the sight of the Grail, as did the nun, 
 Percivale's sister; that Galahad never 
 retires from the world of duties and tasks ; 
 that while Merlin may fear to sit in the 
 chair where men lose themselves, Galahad 
 cries : ** If I lose myself, I save myself " ; 
 and that, of course, he clings to the thing 
 which never leaves his sight or thought, 
 and so, as he says, he has rode. 
 
 "Shattering all evil customs everywhere. 
 It past thro' Pagan realms and made them mine, 
 And clashed thro' Pagan hordes and bore them 
 
 down, 
 And broke thro' all, and in the strength of thi* 
 Came victor." 
 
 But where is Lancelot ? The King in' 
 quires :
 
 ]68 The Higher Ministries 
 
 " 'Thou, too, my Lancelot, my friend. 
 Our mightiest, hath this quest availed for thee ? ' " 
 
 This is his sad reply : 
 
 •''Our mightiest 1 ' answered Lancelot, with a 
 
 groan ; 
 ' O King, my friend, if friend of thine I be, 
 Happier are those that welter in their sin, 
 Swine in the mud, that cannot see for slime, 
 Slime of the ditch : but in me lived a sin 
 So strange, of such a kind, that all of pure, 
 Noble, and knightly in me twined and clung 
 Round that one sin, until the wholesome flower 
 And poisonous grew together, each as each, 
 Not to be plucked asunder,' " 
 
 and his heart sobs : 
 
 *" O yet methought I saw the Holy Grail, 
 All palled in crimson samite, and around, 
 Great angels, awful shapes, and wings and eyes. 
 And but for all my madness and my sin. 
 And then my swooning, I had sworn I saw 
 That which I saw ; but what I saw was veiled 
 And covered ; and this quest was not for me.' " 
 
 The Holy Grail has been seen, but it 
 does not save. The Round Table is 
 demolished. Lancelot and Guinevere are
 
 Of Recent English Poetry 169 
 
 torn apart by forces they have themselves 
 nursed with fondness. 
 
 "The queen 
 Looked hard upon her lover, he on her ; 
 And each foresaw the dolorous day to be : 
 And all talk died, as in a grove all song 
 Beneath the shadow of some bird of prey ; 
 Then a long silence came upon the hall, 
 And Modred thought, ' The time is hard at 
 hand.' " 
 
 And Arthur, the King, what of him ? 
 
 " That night came Arthur home, and while he 
 
 climbed, 
 All in a death-dumb autumn-dripping gloom, 
 The stairway to the hall, and look'd and saw 
 The great Queen's bower was dark, — about his 
 
 feet 
 A voice clung sobbing till he questioned it, 
 ' What art thou ? ' and the voice about his feet 
 Sent up an answer, sobbing, ' I am thy fool. 
 And I shall never make thee smile again.' " 
 
 Yet is this all ? Is Tennyson untrue 
 to the words : " Where sin abounded, 
 there grace did much more abound " ? 
 Surely not. Within certain limits of time, 
 we have swept through this gallery of 
 pictures. A definite, coherent, powerful
 
 lyo The Higher Ministries 
 
 philosophy of Hfe keeps them all upon 
 the walls of the soul. At length, we come 
 to the dreadful conclusion of sin's logical 
 development. Not to a hopeless end, 
 however, have we come. There is hope 
 when sin consumes itself in its defiance 
 of love. Even now it falters and sickens 
 and sobs its repentance. Tristam on the 
 day of the last tournament seeks the prize, 
 and — O hideousness of irony in the annal 
 of sin ! — Lancelot asks him : " Art thou 
 the purest, brother?" only to be seared 
 by the reply : " Be happy in your fair 
 Queen, as I in mine." The rain comes 
 and women scoff. It is all they can do 
 now. Arthur as a King may yet serve 
 only to make the cause of his disaster 
 more visible. Lancelot is whipped " into 
 waste fields far away," with scarred ele- 
 ments of nobleness in him even yet. But 
 the real world has vanished, though hearts 
 beat still. And now the ruin appears, 
 for light divine falls into these burned- 
 out aisles and upon the strewn terraces, 
 yet a cold mist 
 
 " Like a face-cloth to the face 
 Clung to the dead earth, and the land was still."
 
 Of Recent English Poetry 171 
 
 All the rhythmic strength of Tennyson, 
 with pellucid sympathy and an accuracy 
 of ethical self-command which must be 
 studied to be understood, is devoted to 
 the record of the self-destruction of this 
 germ of desire which for so long has de- 
 veloped its virulent quality. The true 
 observer of human life and its experience 
 will bear with the philosopher now, for 
 Tennyson is a more heavily laden thinker 
 here than was the author of " In Memo- 
 riam." He knows more and he rejects 
 more of what he thought was known. 
 We may well stand silently here for a 
 moment to wait on him, for, even now, 
 he has found his bearings. He has looked 
 into humanity and observed much of God 
 and man even since he made King Ar- 
 thur say sadly : 
 
 ** I found Him in the shining of the stars, 
 I mark'd Him in the flowering of His fields, 
 But in His ways with men I find Him not. 
 I waged His wars, and now I pass and die. 
 O me ! for why is all around us here 
 As if some lesser god had made the world, 
 But had not force to shape it as he would, 
 Till the High God behold it from beyond, 
 And enter it and make it beautiful ?
 
 172 The Higher Ministries 
 
 Or else as if the world were wholly fair, 
 But that these eyes of men are dense and dim, 
 And have not power to see it as it is : 
 Perchance, because we see not to the close ; — 
 For I, being simple, thought to work His will. 
 And have but stricken with the sword in vain ; 
 And all whereon I leaned in wife and friend 
 Is traitor to my peace, and all my realm 
 Reels back into the beast and is no more. 
 My God, Thou hast forgotten me in my death : 
 Nay — God my Christ — I pass but shall not die." 
 
 Nothing now can postpone the calamity 
 of soul in Guinevere. Even her lover, 
 Lancelot, must help to dig her hell the 
 deeper into herself. Modred is on his 
 victorious path to the throne, when he 
 peers upon the Queen and Lancelot who 
 are met for the last time. 
 
 " Passion-pale they met 
 And greeted. Hands in hands, and eye to eye, 
 Low on the border of her couch they sat 
 Stammering and staring. It was their last hour, 
 A madness of farewells. And Modred brought 
 His creatures to the basement of the tower 
 For testimony ; and crying with full voice 
 'Traitor, come out, ye are trapt at last,* aroused 
 Lancelot, who rushing outward lionlike 
 Leapt on him, and hurl'd him headlong, and he 
 fell
 
 Of Recent English Poetry 173 
 
 Stunn'd, and his creatures took and bare him off, 
 And all was still : then she, ' The end is come 
 And I am shamed forever ; ' and he said, 
 * Mine be the shame ; mine was the sin : but rise, 
 And fly to my strong castle overseas : 
 There will I hide thee, till my life shall end, 
 There hold thee with my life against the world.' 
 She answer'd, ' Lancelot, wilt thou hold me so ? 
 Nay, friend, for we have taken our farewells. 
 Would God that thou couldst hide me from 
 myself 1 ' " 
 
 Yes ; it is also with one's self one has 
 to reckon ; and this is of the same philos- 
 ophy which indited the description of the 
 wanderer — ** when he came to himselfP 
 
 She flees to a convent ; but she cannot 
 escape herself. Lancelot, with all his in- 
 herent moral value, cannot pay the debt 
 incurred to her, to Arthur, to himself. 
 Rich in ability, he is morally bankrupt. 
 In her sequestration, the Queen's sin is 
 made more manifest to her by the little 
 novice's song : " Too late, ye cannot enter 
 now." Lancelot, " love-loyal to the least 
 wish of the Queen," may say : " I needs 
 must break these bonds that so defame 
 me," only to add instantly : " Not with- 
 out she wills it." Yes : the chain that
 
 1^4 The Higher Ministries 
 
 enslaves me the most is the one I love 
 the most. It is not of rusted iron, but 
 of gold and it is jewelled. Guinevere's 
 words to Lancelot were indeed agonies. 
 
 But a more fearful judgment awaits 
 her — this is the judgment-power of that 
 greatest fact in morals, the Incarnation of 
 God in man — she must meet King Arthur. 
 Let these words of the Te Deum be al- 
 ways sung : " We believe that Thou shalt 
 be our Judge." Sorrowful as are her 
 words with Lancelot, this is the terrible 
 eminence of her grief when the King 
 speaks to her : 
 
 "He paused, and in the pause she crept an 
 inch 
 Nearer, and laid her hands about his feet. 
 Far off a solitary trumpet blew. 
 Then waiting by the doors the warhorse neigh' d 
 As at a friend's voice, and he spake again : 
 
 " ' Yet think not that I come to urge thy 
 crimes, 
 I did not come to curse thee, Guinevere, 
 I, whose vast pity almost makes me die 
 To see thee, laying there thy golden head, 
 My pride in happier summers, at my feet. 
 The wrath which forced my thoughts on that 
 fierce law,
 
 Of Recent English Poetry 175 
 
 The doom of treason and tlie flaming death, 
 (When first I learnt thee hidden here) is past. 
 The pang — which while I weigh 'd thy heart 
 
 with one 
 Too wholly true to dream untruth in thee, 
 Made my tears burn — is also past — in part. 
 And all is past, the sin is sinn'd, and I, 
 Lo ! I forgive thee, as Eternal God 
 Forgives : do thou for thine own soul the rest. 
 But how to take last leave of all I loved ? 
 
 golden hair, with which I used to play 
 Not knowing ! O imperial-moulded form. 
 And beauty such as never woman wore, 
 Until it came a kingdom's curse with thee — 
 
 1 cannot touch thy lips, they are not mine, 
 But Lancelot's: nay, they never were the King's.' 
 I cannot take thy hand, that too is flesh, 
 
 And in the flesh thou hast sinned ; and mine 
 
 own flesh 
 Here looking down on thine polluted, cries 
 ' I loath thee ' : yet not less, O Guinevere, 
 For I was ever virgin save for thee, 
 My love thro' flesh hath wrought into my life 
 So far, that my doom is, I love thee still. 
 Let no man dream but that I love thee still. 
 Perchance, and so thou purify thy soul. 
 And so thou lean on our fair father Christ, 
 Hereafter in that world where all are pure 
 We two may meet before high God, and thou 
 Wilt spring to me, and claim me thine, and know 
 I am thine husband — not a smaller soul.
 
 176 The Higher Ministries 
 
 Nor Lancelot, nor another. Leave me that, 
 I charge thee, my last hope. Now must I hence. 
 Thro' the thick night I hear the trumpet blow : 
 They summon me their King to lead mine hosts 
 Far down to that great battle in the west, 
 Where I must strike against my sister's son, 
 Leagued with the lords of the White Horse and 
 
 knights 
 Once mine, and strike him dead, and meet myself 
 Death, or I know not what mysterious doom. 
 And thou remaining here wilt learn the event ; 
 But hither shall I never come again. 
 Never lie by thy side, see thee no more. 
 Farewell ! 
 
 And while she grovell'd at his feet, 
 She felt the King's breath wander o'er her neck. 
 And, in the darkness o'er her fallen head, 
 Perceived the waving of his hands that blest." 
 
 Guinevere cannot answer now. She 
 can only stammer forth later : "His 
 mercy choked me." 
 
 " The wrath of the Lamb ! " 
 
 Awful and pathetic as is burden of the 
 phrase of the Revelator, yet we may well 
 say that something of the " wrath of the 
 Lamb " is in these words and in this end. 
 Does any traditional conception of hell go 
 so deep, burn so fiercely, or appear so 
 certain as this ? If not, it is for the same 
 reason that none of the traditional con-
 
 Of Recent English Poetry 177 
 
 ceptions of heaven is so high or so glori- 
 ous as this which possesses the soul of 
 King Arthur when he says farewell to 
 Guinevere, leaving her half-hidden in the 
 splendour of Christian hope. What we 
 need to ponder are these things — the art 
 of the poet still kindles its torch where 
 the Bible and Dante and Shakespeare 
 found " Sinai all aflame " ; and Tenny- 
 son's Higher Pantheism and Larger 
 Hope are worth studying, again and 
 again, in the light of the Idylls, that we 
 may ascertain if the truth which lies 
 in what is called the Higher Pantheism 
 may not reinforce and honour conscience, 
 giving conscience a rightful place on the 
 judgment-seat such as neither any past 
 dogmatic theology nor any fatalistic 
 philosophy has thought of, and, most of 
 all, if we must not welcome an ethical 
 vision of God which radiates with what 
 Tennyson names the Larger Hope. This 
 vision will create an awe within the soul 
 and inspire such a revolt of character 
 against evil as must ever reflect not only 
 the throne of God, but the great throne 
 of God ; and not only the great throne, 
 but The Great White Throne,
 
 LECTURE IV 
 
 ROBERT BROWNING 
 
 In our study of the poets whose verses 
 have most adequately expressed the spir- 
 itual problem of our time, or most effec- 
 tively uttered its solution, we have thus 
 far had to do with singers, the acknowl- 
 edged triumph of whose art has conspired, 
 with strength of imagination or truth of 
 thought, to make their poetry attractive. 
 Both Arnold and Tennyson are artistic ; 
 — the one by the growth of a talent 
 severely trained by classical models, the 
 other by the influence of a genius which 
 has left its impress upon the very language 
 in which it has worked. Robert Brown- 
 ing's most devoted eulogist, however, will 
 hardly assert that he is as musical in ex- 
 pression, as he is great and true in con- 
 ception. He must not be praised for his 
 finish or for his beauty — and these are 
 marks of the artist. Always will it be 
 suspected that these lofty ideas and rich 
 sentiments might have had a more worthy 
 178
 
 Of Recent English Poetry 179 
 
 form. Power in its lawlessness will for- 
 ever seem to have lorded it over harmony 
 — and thus to have been less powerful 
 than it ought to have been ; since real 
 power never wholly expresses itself save 
 in harmony with grace. " Strength and . 
 beauty are in his sanctuary." More like 
 Angelo than like Raphael, Browning 
 lived in an age of over-refinement, with 
 an undismayed trust in pure power. He 
 had seen Lord Tennyson multiply his 
 miniatures and enjoy the longest day of 
 fame which any English singer has known, 
 as he gave one after another of his ex- 
 quisite pictures to an admiring public, 
 Browning all the while showing that, if 
 he desired to do so, he could do some 
 beautiful things as well, but instantly re- 
 treating from the dew-drop to the thun- 
 der-cloud where is the hiding of power. 
 
 Browning was like his own Paracelsus, 
 who says : 
 
 " God's intimations rather fail 
 In clearness than in energy," 
 
 as Tennyson was more like his own King 
 Arthur, simply 
 
 " Wearing the white flower of a blameless life."
 
 i8o The Higher Ministries 
 
 Tennyson, as an artist, with his faultless 
 harmony, his delicate purity, his fine 
 colour, and his serene certainty of stroke, 
 teaches the holiness of beauty ; Browning, 
 if he may be called an artist, with his 
 rugged force, his intense passion for 
 movement, his nervous splendour, his 
 abrupt change from an old to a new pur- 
 pose, teaches the holiness of power. As 
 a religious teacher, Tennyson helps us to 
 learn from his weary sinners and his 
 lovely saints, the beauty of holiness ; 
 Browning, from his wretched ruins and 
 his sublime devotees, the power of holi- 
 ness. 
 
 I do not offer this brief comparison as 
 a complete account of these poets or their 
 ministry, but I am persuaded that as 
 Tennyson has been the best leader for our 
 faith in a somewhat consciously refined 
 age, Mr. Browning will prove to be the 
 best teacher for us, now that the over-re- 
 finement of our time begins to yield to 
 the presence of strength. How strong is 
 the genius of Browning may be seen in 
 the perfectly distinct way which he 
 made for himself, after having confessed 
 the power which Shelley had over him,
 
 Of Recent English Poetry l8l 
 
 when, at thirteen years of age, he began 
 to read his writings and to search for 
 others. It has other testimony in the 
 freedom and force with which he mas- 
 ters the vast accumulations of learning 
 which he made in his life under the skies 
 where Leonardo painted and Virgil and 
 Dante had sung. Indeed, Mr. Brown- 
 ing's very trying style is the unpleasant, 
 but resistless evidence of his power. Per- 
 haps every man's weakness is but the ex- 
 aggeration, or lawless exercise of some 
 untrained strength. This fullness which 
 bursts through rhyme, and this strength 
 which crushes accepted theories of metre ; 
 this suddenness of energy which snaps 
 the cords which rhetoricians admire, and 
 this richness which overloads the chariots 
 of verse and makes the bridges in their 
 track to creak with the burden they bear, 
 have come from a great fertile soul whose 
 attribute is certainly not weakness. Here 
 is a man who has subtlety of mind suf- 
 ficient to understand Hegel and Fichte 
 and Schelling with power enough to teach 
 the idealism of Germany as its waves 
 reach again and again unto our shores, a 
 still deeper idealism. Here is a poet,
 
 i82 The Higher Ministries 
 
 often more refined than the refiners who 
 would modify his harsh verse, who yet 
 trusts his powers so faithfully that he 
 sings carelessly : 
 
 " What the poet writes, 
 He writes ; mankind accepts it if it suits, 
 And that's success ; if not, the poem's passed 
 From hand to hand, and yet from hand to hand, 
 Until the unborn snatch it, crying out 
 In pity on their fathers being so dull, 
 And thai' s success, foo." 
 
 He has been conscious that he was 
 often too strong for an age which had 
 read its Tupper and sent " Yesterday, To- 
 day and Forever" through so many 
 editions. He says : 
 
 " The public blame originalities. 
 You must not pump spring water unawares, 
 Upon a gracious public, full of nerves." 
 
 Concerning these manifestations of this 
 power which do not spring from Brown- 
 ing's efifort to express the greatest truths, 
 I have not time to speak at length, so 
 valuable and so comprehensive is his 
 dealing with the ideas, sentiments and
 
 Of Recent English Poetry 183 
 
 hopes of the larger spiritual life. And it 
 may be said without question, that so 
 long as men believe the dictum which 
 hung upon the wall of Sir William 
 Hamilton's lecture-room : " There is noth- 
 ing great on earth but man, there is noth- 
 ing great in man but mittd^' there will be 
 a noble interest in these pages of Brown- 
 ing, in which is told with a power un- 
 matched since Shakespeare, the story of 
 the human mind, with its great harmonies 
 and stormy discords ; its abysmal doubts 
 and heaven-revealing faith ; its brute-like 
 passion, wallowing in the fires of hell ; 
 its godlike aspirations, mounting midst 
 the lights of heaven ; its wild, grand 
 agonies of pain ; its pure, sweet tran- 
 sports of joy. 
 
 Walter Savage Landor probably was 
 never more careful of the value of his 
 praise than when he sang : 
 
 " Shakespeare is not our poet, but the world's ; 
 Therefore on him no speech ! and brief for thee, 
 Browning ! Since Chaucer was alive and hale. 
 No man hath walked along our roads with step 
 So active, so inquiring eye, or tongue 
 So varied in discourse. But warmer climes 
 Give brighter plumage, stronger wing ; the breeze
 
 184 The Higher Ministries 
 
 Of Alpine heights thou playest with, borne on 
 
 Beyond Sorrento and Amalfi, where 
 
 The Siren waits thee, singing song for song." 
 
 And it was not love at all, but her 
 critical instinct simply, which led Eliza- 
 beth Barrett to expect 
 
 ** From Browning, some * Pomegranate ' which, 
 
 if cut deep down the middle, 
 Shows a heart within, blood-tinctured, of a veined 
 
 humanity." 
 
 * Humanity " — that always it is — a 
 *' blood-tinctured, veined humanity " — 
 that alone it is, by which one man may 
 understand and reveal men to themselves 
 and to others ; that it is by which even 
 the Eternal God has revealed Himself in 
 us and in the Incarnation, Jesus Christ, 
 — " a blood-tinctured, veined humanity." 
 Robert Browning has appeared in a time 
 when a scientific psychology has felt about 
 fearlessly in human nature for its founda- 
 tions ; and while scalpel and anatomist 
 have been going together along through 
 the mysteries of mind and brain, this 
 many-sided man has put his very soul so 
 close to throbbing human nature, in
 
 Of Recent English Poetry 185 
 
 various moods and at sundry times, that 
 his poetry is laden and inspired with the 
 deepest history of the human spirit. He 
 has revealed humanity, through its having 
 told its secrets to his humanity. He has 
 written out, in those moments when it most 
 lifted him towards the throne of the uni- 
 verse, these results which no unpoetic 
 soul may ever group together in its lists 
 of mental phenomena ; he has made the 
 portraits, for all generations, of those men 
 and women whose features have told to 
 him alone the circumstances of their 
 spiritual life, the forces which have acted 
 in their mental growth, the influences 
 which flash out in lightning strokes of 
 passion or compel a prophetic peace. 
 
 Now, it is certain that to such a living 
 man as this, facts of human character and 
 life will come which give him a larger 
 view, a surer vision, and a profounder 
 philosophy of human action and destiny, 
 than other men may obtain. Shakespeare 
 furnishes to theology ateaching in Hamlet, 
 Othello, Macbeth, which every advancing 
 step of human vision appreciates more 
 highly, because, all unintentionally per- 
 haps, he came so near to humanity that
 
 i86 The Higher Ministries 
 
 conscience, reason, hope, love, whispered 
 truths through his dramas, unuttered to 
 other men. 
 
 It is the high privilege also of Brown- 
 ing to listen to the humanity of well-nigh 
 all ages ; and living in a somewhat ques- 
 tioning, often hopeless time, to bring back 
 the gospel of hope. Like Shakespeare, 
 the very ruins he finds in wrecked 
 humanity need but such a fine eye and 
 the heart of a " blood-tinctured, veined 
 humanity " such as theirs, to disclose hope 
 hiding there. Here is the phenomenon 
 of our profoundest modern student of 
 what we call " poor human nature," all 
 undiscouraged, singing without a note of 
 pessimism 
 
 "Where brooding darkness spreads his jealous 
 
 wings 
 And the night-raven sings." 
 
 Do you say Mr. Browning has not 
 gone to the lowly and brutal for any ac- 
 count of man, that his optimism comes 
 because he has not sought to understand 
 the bestial currents of life which war with 
 the spiritual ? The answer is a poem like 
 " Caliban Upon Setebos, or Natural
 
 Of Recent English Poetry 187 
 
 Theology on an Island." With his un- 
 canny ability to throw himself into the 
 existence of another being and to live its 
 most involved and characteristic life, he 
 lives with and by this brute's soul ; the 
 "moon-calf" supplies him with blood in 
 which act and react the beast's very 
 nature, with which " pigs might squeak 
 love-odes, dogs bark satire." In it all, 
 the sottish animalism reaches up for a 
 theology and crouches in terror midst 
 the thunder-storm. Shakespeare's Cali- 
 ban in " The Tempest " was made a 
 figure for the analytic nineteenth cen- 
 tury, when the question of anthropo- 
 morphism and of our relations to the 
 animals below us became living ones ; yet, 
 no one who may ever adopt Dr. Wilson's 
 view which makes the Caliban in Shake- 
 speare the missing link of Darwin, will 
 fail to see in Browning's ** Caliban upon 
 Setebos " perhaps the finest evidence of 
 how deeply Browning has gone into 
 animal psychology and how surely his 
 genius has comprehended the dark prob- 
 lems which hover over the nature of man. 
 Man and human hope are what they are 
 to Browning, because he has gone more
 
 l88 The Higher Ministries 
 
 deeply than even Tennyson into modern 
 science ; because he has an eye for psy- 
 chological phenomena and an under- 
 standing of the real value of the doctrine 
 of natural selection and evolution surer 
 than is even his who sees men as they 
 
 " Move upward, working out the beast, 
 And let the ape and tiger die." 
 
 By this spiritual and pathological equip- 
 ment, Browning is sure to have the ear of 
 the next generation, whose fathers have 
 been told not only that the soul is not im- 
 mortal, but also that ** man is not only a 
 vertebrate, a mammal, and a primate, 
 but he belongs, as a genus, to the Cata- 
 rhine family of apes." Of the higher life 
 of man, there is no greater singer. Like 
 his monk, he might say, since love is so 
 supreme in woman : 
 
 " For me, I think I speak as I was taught — 
 I always see the Garden, and God there — 
 A-making man's wife — and, my lesson learned, 
 The value and significance of flesh, 
 I can't unlearn ten minutes afterwards." 
 
 For to him, nature has its goal in man.
 
 Of Recent English Poetry 189 
 
 The great truth underlying the doctrine 
 of evolution shines with all its optimistic 
 light everywhere in his verses. 
 
 The power in the spiritual realm upon 
 which the hopes of this poet stand and 
 the music which inspires his own is 
 Christianity. It furnishes a perpetually 
 true, because growing revelation to the 
 reason of God and humanity ; it supplies 
 the human heart with an affection which 
 strengthens and refines it, and whatever 
 other value real Christianity has, its chief 
 value lies in the gift it has made of 
 motive-power for a motiveless world. It 
 came when the hands of man were hang- 
 ing down, and the knees were feeble ; it 
 somehow stirred the latent forces of 
 human nature as nothing else has ever 
 done ; it put a new sky over the intellect ; 
 it recreated the human heart by a new 
 and attractive love ; but it also sent along 
 the nerves of the purposeless humanity 
 which it touched, a thrill divine ; and the 
 will of man, clinging to the will of God, 
 began again its all-conquering career. 
 To Robert Browning that great power 
 which came to the world in Christ Jesus 
 is as yet unspent. It is a revelation of
 
 IQO The Higher Ministries 
 
 God and man in Christ — the revelation 
 of the fact that they belong to each other 
 by nature — and for him, this revelation, 
 coming upon the human soul, upon the 
 intellect, sensibilities, and will, makes the 
 new humanity. 
 
 Of course, it is not scholastic or an ec- 
 clesiastical Christianity which has made 
 Browning both poet and priest. No 
 man, however, has more truly appre- 
 hended the forms into which men have 
 put the Gospel of Christ, from Pope In- 
 nocent XII in " The Ring and the Book," 
 to Renan in the " Epilogue," he has gone 
 over the extreme positions of medieval 
 credulity and modern rationalism. 
 Bishop Blougram and a sceptical Got- 
 tingen Professor ; the Bishop of St. 
 Praxed and Karshish, the Arab Physi- 
 cian ; Fra Lippo Lippi, and Saul ; Rabbi 
 Ben Ezra and Mr, Sludge, the Medium ; 
 — these are only some of the characters 
 of his poems on whose features play with 
 various language, the lights of Chris- 
 tianity. With such a number of persons, 
 each speaking a characteristic word, it is 
 easy to study their author's interpreta- 
 tion and proclamation of Christianity, as
 
 Of Recent English Poetry 191 
 
 through them it operates as a controlling 
 force upon the intellect, the sensibilities 
 and the will. 
 
 Browning's message to the intellect 
 is his message to the whole man. I look 
 upon him, in the midst of the hghts and 
 shadows of our rationalism, as the 
 prophet of the age of reason, — not Vol- 
 taire's age of reason, but the Christ's. 
 Our so-called rationalism has largely been 
 the triumph of unreason. We have wor- 
 shipped logic and have made feast-day 
 over the results of our reasoning. Every- 
 thing which the feelings have sought to 
 reveal has been called effeminate, and 
 the action of the emotional nature, to 
 which in every age the largest truths 
 have disclosed themselves, has been de- 
 clared sentimental. Our theology has 
 long been developing a rationalism inside 
 the lines of orthodoxy which finally began 
 to lord it over God's entire spiritual heri- 
 tage. The mystic has been rejected on 
 all sides ; the lover and the bard have 
 been cast out, together with the material- 
 ist and sceptic. But now that truths 
 which an unintelligent theology has neg- 
 lected, come up like unquiet ghosts for
 
 192 The Higher Ministries 
 
 their rightful place, and now that the 
 calculating hardness of our practical 
 materialism seems to resist everything 
 but a deep spiritual experience which 
 runs beyond our intellectual accounts of 
 it, the hour strikes for the singer, whose 
 poetry is often vague and mysterious 
 with visions of the infinite God whose 
 greatness and nearness only the mystics 
 have known, — a poet whose passion is 
 equal to his thought, whose love is as 
 strong as his logic, whose martial strains 
 sound to the sleeping human will as never 
 yet English music has sounded. 
 
 Browning saves the intellect, grants it 
 its full scope, and achieves for it its surest 
 successes, by relieving it from dominat- 
 ing the heart and will in the search for 
 truth ; he leads it to work together with 
 them — one soul, — intellect, sensibilities 
 and will — seeking truth. The head seek- 
 ing truth or greatness of life, without the 
 heart, is sure to fail. In the words of 
 Paracelsus we have the lofty look of the 
 aspiring searcher for knowledge : 
 
 " Are there not, Festus, are there not, dear Michal, 
 Two points in the adventure of the diver,
 
 Of Recent English Poetry 193 
 
 One — when, a beggar, he prepares to plunge, 
 One — when, a prince, he rises with his pearl ? 
 Festus, I plunge ! 
 (Festus) * We wait you when you rise.' " 
 
 And what a splendid plunge it is ! Let 
 us remember that this poem was written 
 years before the hypothesis of the evolu- 
 tion of the higher from the lower had 
 its statement in scientific phrase. Yet 
 Browning in this matter is not far in 
 advance of Tennyson who sings it all in 
 " In Memoriam." But there is here a 
 virile apprehension of the scope and per- 
 vasiveness of these ideas entirely accord- 
 ant with the stronger intellect of Brown- 
 ing. He it is who makes Paracelsus say ; 
 
 " God . . . dwells in all, 
 From life's minute beginnings up at last 
 To man — the consummation of this scheme 
 Of being, the completion of this sphere 
 Of life." 
 
 Here we learn that 
 
 " God tastes an infinite joy, in infinite ways," 
 and that 
 
 " In completed man begins anew 
 A tendency to God."
 
 1^4 The Higher Ministries 
 
 Paracelsus reaches the full conception of 
 the *' Inner Light." " Truth," he says 
 
 " Is within ourselves ; it takes no rise 
 From outward things. . . . 
 There is an inmost centre in us all, 
 Where truth abides in fullness," 
 
 God always had yearned for 
 
 " Some point where all those scattered rays should 
 
 meet 
 Convergent in the faculties of man." 
 
 And Paracelsus has faith in Him with 
 
 "Just so much of doubt 
 As bade me plant a surer foot upon 
 The sun-road." 
 
 He sees that it is our glory to 
 
 " Add worth to worth, 
 As wine enriches blood, and straightway send it 
 
 forth, 
 Conquering and to conquer, through all eternity, 
 That's battle without end." 
 
 Even his account of nature must include 
 sentiment, and the pervasive emotion of 
 God almost challenges our love. 
 
 " The centre-fire heaves underneath the earth, 
 And the earth changes like a human face ;
 
 Of Recent English Poetry 195 
 
 The molten ore bursts up among the rocks, 
 Winds into the stone's heart, outbranches bright 
 In hidden mines, spots barren river-beds. 
 Crumbles into fine sand where sunbeams bask — 
 God joys therein ! The wroth sea's waves are 
 
 edged 
 With foam, white as the bitten lip of Hate, 
 When in the solitary waste, strange groups 
 Of young volcanoes come up, cyclops-like, 
 Staring together with their eyes on flame; — 
 God tastes a pleasure in their uncouth pride ! 
 Then all is still : earth is a wintry clod ; 
 But spring-wind, like a dancing psaltress, passes 
 Over its breast to waken it ; rare verdure 
 Buds tenderly upon rough banks, between 
 The withered tree-roots and the cracks of frost, 
 Like a smile striving with a wrinkled face ; 
 The grass grows bright, the boughs are swol'n 
 
 with blooms 
 Like chrysalids impatient of the air; 
 The shining dorrs are busy ; beetles run 
 Along the furrows, ants make their ado ; 
 Above, birds fly in merry flocks — the lark 
 Soars up and up, shivering for very joy ; 
 Afar the ocean sleeps ; white fishing-gulls 
 Flit where the strand is purple with its tribe 
 Of nested limpets ; savage creatures seek 
 Their loves in wood and plain ; and God renews 
 His ancient rapture ! " 
 
 Paracelsus has the fatal success he de-
 
 196 The Higher Ministries 
 
 sired — it is a triumph of pure intellect. 
 But it is a failure for him, a personal loss ; 
 and it is a failure for truth ; he does not 
 get the richest pearl. What a confession 
 of the failure of mere intellectualism is 
 this 1 Knowledge without love, he feels, 
 is sure to end in fog and blinding mist. 
 He meets one who has sought love as he 
 has sought nothing but knowledge. Both 
 have sinned. Fragmentariness has failed 
 to gain what comes to wholeness only : 
 
 "Love me henceforth, Aprile, while I learn 
 To love ; and, merciful God, forgive us both ! 
 We wake at length from weary dreams ! but both 
 Have slept in fairy-land. Though dark and drear 
 Appears the world before us, we no less 
 Wake with our wrists and ankles jewelled still. 
 I, too, have sought to know as thou to love — 
 Excluding love, as thou refuseth knowledge — 
 Still thou hast beauty and power. We wake ! 
 What penance can devise for both of us ? " 
 
 But why this ill-success of aspiring in- 
 tellect ? 
 
 Aprile has said : 
 
 ** I would supply all chasms with music, breathing 
 Mysterious motions of the soul, no way 
 To be defined save in strange melodies."
 
 Of Recent English Poetry 197 
 
 Aprile tells him this ; and in the telling, 
 it is clear that Browning knows the value 
 of knowledge and estimates the power 
 and privileges of the intellect, yet in all 
 the various music of the great poem, the 
 doom of a fragmentary life — a life merely 
 of intellect — goes sounding sullenly on. 
 Love must have Love's duties and privi- 
 leges. 
 
 " Love which endures and doubts and is oppressed 
 And cherished, suffering much and much sus- 
 tained, 
 And blind, oft failing, yet believing love, 
 A half-enlightened, often -chequered trust." 
 
 Christianity is much else, I know, but, 
 to the intellect, Christianity is the re- 
 asserting and reestablishing of faith as 
 the organ of knowledge and as the 
 method of life. What was the fall of 
 man, but the unreasoning triumph of 
 reason in the soul of man ? The serpent 
 which tempted to sin was rationalism, 
 charming but stinging. Man persisted 
 in eating of the tree of the knowledge of 
 good and evil. He would not wait in 
 trust upon God's knowledge. He must 
 know for himself. The heart was all love-
 
 198 The Higher Ministries 
 
 less and the will was powerless ; but the 
 reason had won a triumph ; the intellect 
 had its false supremacy. So, all through 
 the centuries of Paganism, the trustless 
 soul had been dominated by the intellect. 
 Many a Cleon had his aching heart and 
 his weak guess. He has not waited for 
 a Browning to make his portrait. Every 
 ancient literature has left the story of his 
 efforts and failure in seeking the highest 
 truth. When Christianity came, it oper- 
 ated, perhaps only incidentally, but ef- 
 fectively, in the soul of man to the re- 
 establishment of faith. If we may distin- 
 guish activities as faculties or powers, the 
 reason which had lorded it over the 
 human spirit, then took its place along 
 with sentiment and purpose ; intellect, 
 sensibility, and will were all together 
 drawn into healthful activity in the act of 
 faith. An object of attention came before 
 the whole nature of man, and that object 
 was Jesus who was called the Christ. 
 This was the revolution which the new 
 religion worked in the soul. It did not 
 destroy reason, but it put reason in the 
 proper place ; it thus made reason more 
 reasonable. This accounts for the fact
 
 Of Recent English Poetry 199 
 
 that while Christianity opposed, at all 
 costs, the ambitious intellect which ruled 
 the world's spirit, it did so, by making 
 faith the organ of knowledge ; it brought 
 about a new and greater era for the in- 
 tellect ; it made life and thought more 
 truly rational than they had been before. 
 Christianity insists upon faith. Faith is 
 the one act where all there is of a man, — 
 thought, feeling, will, — is active : " Weave 
 saved by faithP Christianity inspires this 
 act of faith by placing before the soul a fact 
 equally impressive to intellect, sensibili- 
 ties and will — the Christ of God — a fact 
 whose glory comes through faith alone. 
 It is faith which has in it the intellect's 
 truth, the heart's love and the will's pur- 
 pose. 
 
 This human totality or integrity of 
 Browning's soul is evident in his attitude 
 towards and his treatment of nature. The 
 accumulations of Tennyson's alert and 
 encompassing intelligence which made 
 Thackeray say he was the wisest man he 
 knew and which strikes the student of 
 natural phenomena as astonishing even 
 in the age of Lubbock, Grant Allen, and 
 Helmholtz, are surpassed in quantity and
 
 200 The Hiirher Ministries 
 
 fc>' 
 
 interest by those which appear in the 
 larger and more sensitive, if less highly 
 instructed mind of Browning. The value 
 of any man's information lies most in his 
 philosophy of the universe, which coor- 
 dinates it, sheds light upon it and binds 
 it to the higher interests of the soul. 
 Here Browning is a superior master, by 
 having always a more vitalizing vision of 
 man's destiny under God — a vision which 
 never could have permitted in him the 
 obscurations of Tennyson's " Locksley 
 Hall Sixty Years After." But above 
 these is the personal unit — Browning 
 himself, with his intenser faith, — the ut- 
 terance of his closely related and evenly 
 blended powers. If he paints a landscape, 
 it is as truly an appeal to the heart as it 
 is to the head. Here, for example, are 
 the grasp and moulding power of Rous- 
 seau. We are with the latter in Fon- 
 tainbleau. 
 
 " Oh, good gigantic smile o' the brown old earth. 
 This autumn morning ! How he sets his bones 
 
 To bask i' the sun, and thrusts out knees and feet 
 
 For the ripple to run over in its mirth ; 
 
 Listening the while, where on the heap of stones 
 
 The white breast of the sea-lark twitters sweet."
 
 Of Recent English Poetry 2oi 
 
 The touch of beauty which glorifies all 
 this strength reminds us of his brother 
 artist, Daubigny, who could suggest an 
 ocean in that white breast. Here again 
 are the blitheness and ecstasy of Corot's 
 dreamiest morning, suddenly localized in 
 spring's quivering branch and thrilled 
 bud: 
 
 " This is a spray the Bird clung to, 
 Making it blossom with pleasure, 
 Ere the high tree-top she sprung to. 
 Fit for her nest and her treasure. 
 Oh, what a hope beyond measure 
 Was the poor spray's, which the flying feet hung 
 
 to,— 
 So to be singled out, built in, and sung to ! " 
 
 In all this — in the fact that the bird 
 translates the life and passion of the na- 
 ture below her rank and gives it all the 
 shiver of a progressive destiny, things 
 are tending man-ward. There is the 
 ever-dramatic human interest, however 
 lyrically it may be stated. Browning's 
 stairway of existence begins with crude 
 stuff in ooze and slime, but it rises 
 steadily with ever-developing splendour 
 until it leans against the throne of God.
 
 202 The Higher Ministries 
 
 Man can no more commune with nature 
 if she be not man-infused and man-mak- 
 ing, as she slowly realizes her own dream, 
 than man can commune with God if God 
 be not in man as a father has his being 
 in the child. Nature's language is com- 
 prehensible and interesting to man only 
 because man's symphony is in the wind 
 and his own lay is in the chaffinch's song. 
 This is very human, but it is as far from 
 our current human talk by our book- 
 made birds as dynamics is from mechan- 
 ics. 
 
 " Oh, to be in England 
 
 Now that April's there, 
 And whoever wakes in England 
 
 Sees, some morning, unaware. 
 That the lowest boughs and the brush-wood sheaf 
 Round the elm-tree bole are in tiny leaf, 
 While the chaffinch sings on the orchard bough 
 In England — now ! 
 
 " And after April, when May follows, 
 
 And the whitethroat builds, and all the swallows ! 
 
 Hark, where my blossomed pear-tree in the hedge 
 
 Leans to the field and scatters on the clover 
 Blossoms and dewdrops — at the bent spray's 
 edge —
 
 Of Recent English Poetry 203 
 
 That's the wise thrush; he sings each song 
 twice over, 
 Lest you should think he never could recapture 
 The first fine careless rapture! " 
 
 Both Tennyson and Browning — proph- 
 ets because poets — uttered much of the 
 philosophy of evolution and showed many 
 of its modes of interpreting nature before 
 the evolutionists had even found a name. 
 Browning's dramatic vigour, his pene- 
 trative light discovering and portraying 
 the significance of forces here and there 
 flashing out, his all-defying songfulness 
 when mere things would clash and he 
 must wait for the " C major of this life," 
 and willingly " try to sleep " — these come 
 from his glad discernment of a man-ward 
 up-going in and through nature — a move- 
 ment for whose progress he often gives a 
 shout and always has a song. He knows 
 how nature has trembled with her load 
 and by what a sacrificial route man 
 comes. So he is not offended in Him 
 who incarnates all law, saying as He 
 comes near to Calvary : " My Father 
 worketh hitherto and I work." 
 
 " Oh, long ago 
 The brow was twitched, the tremulous lids astir,
 
 204 '^^^ Higher Ministries 
 
 The peaceful mouth disturbed; half uttered 
 
 speech 
 Ruffled the lip, and then the teeth were set, 
 The breath drawn sharp, the strong right-hand 
 
 clenched stronger, 
 As it would pluck a lion by the jaw ; 
 The glorious creature laughed out even in sleep ! " 
 
 No less an expositor than Mr. Stopford 
 Brooke has pointed out what appears to 
 him as the deficiency of Tennyson's love 
 and appreciation of nature. He says : 
 " His natural world is not of itself alive ; 
 nor has it anything to do with us of its 
 own accord. It is beautiful and sublime : 
 we can feel for it admiration or awe ; but 
 it sends nothing of itself to us. It is the 
 world of the imaginative scientific man 
 who has an eye for beauty and a heart to 
 feel it." Browning's natural world is the 
 world of a philosopher who goes beneath 
 the achievements of science. 
 
 In any event, if this is true of Tenny- 
 son, we may say more of Browning, in 
 another direction. There may be little 
 in nature for the poet, unless man is by 
 her side, or by his side, when Tennyson 
 considers nature ; there is less in nature 
 for Browning, unless she herself at her
 
 Of Recent English Poetry 205 
 
 best is man's history rather than his pic- 
 ture-gallery. She is also his servant more 
 than his mistress. He must learn the 
 higher things from man and the highest 
 from God in man — from the Incarnation. 
 
 " Round the cape of a sudden came the sea, 
 And the sun looked over the mountain's 
 
 rim : 
 And straight was a path of gold for him, 
 And the need of a world of men for me.'* 
 
 So nature is to him like a living ped- 
 estal out of which the statue has grown ; 
 and nature cannot reveal any greatness 
 or loveliness without creating a demand 
 for a noble figure — for man all-glorious, 
 above her as well as of her. As Brown- 
 ing surveys both nature and man, the 
 richer the way man came, the richer must 
 man be, having thus come within the 
 range of the vision of this poet and 
 philosopher. Man's very body is nascent 
 with divine and upspringing potencies, 
 and his soul lives in the indwelling God : 
 
 "Rejoice we are allied 
 To that which doth provide 
 And not partake, effect and not receive I
 
 2o6 The Higher Ministries 
 
 A spark disturbs our clod ; 
 Nearer we hold of God 
 
 Who gives, than of His tribes that take, I 
 must believe. 
 
 " 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, and 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 i' the scale." 
 
 No scepticism with its learned manners, 
 however arrogant in the arid realms of 
 pedantry, can resist the fine invasions of 
 a faith like this, at once so scholarly and 
 uplifting. Browning's warmth is gener- 
 ated at the same dynamic source which 
 produces his Hght. This is well exempli- 
 fied in his poems : '* Christmas Eve and 
 Easter Day." The Gottingen professor
 
 Of Recent English Poetry 207 
 
 out-Arnolds Mr. Matthew Arnold in the 
 cool, if not frigid manner, yet patronizing 
 and ghostly enough, as he also treats of 
 the " mythical character of Christ and 
 Christ's religion." He has no great tasks 
 beating in his blood and demanding more 
 than this shadow of a faith. To him the 
 Christian vision does not upbear a man ; 
 man bears it up as he does most of his 
 so-called consolations. There is fine irony 
 in Browning's words addressed to this 
 theologic or neologic speaker who has 
 just broken " into his Christmas Eve's 
 discourse." Many a minister may learn 
 much, here, of the completer statement of 
 much with which a bumptious parishioner 
 may be only stammering ; and he will 
 learn more of the manner of meeting it. 
 Browning shows the good humour such 
 an one must possess in dealing with one 
 who has this burden upon him. He says 
 to the professor : 
 
 " Go on, you shall no more move my gravity 
 Than, when I see boys ride a-cock horse, 
 I find it in my heart to embarrass them 
 By hinting that their stick's a mock horse. 
 And they really carry what they say carries 
 them:'
 
 2o8 The Higher Ministries 
 
 We cannot help following the eager 
 steps of such earnest humanity as Brown- 
 ing depicts, from the close chapel so un- 
 aesthetic and crowded with unintellectual 
 humanity to Rome's St. Peter's with its 
 grandeur and worse superstitions. But no 
 superstition, however, is so vacuous as the 
 "exhausted air-bell of the critic" in the 
 lecture-hall where the spectacled professor 
 makes small dust of the " Christ-myth." 
 
 The soul of man is still " incurably 
 religious." God and nature have not 
 been destroyed. But what of nature? 
 Why shall w^e " consider the lilies, how 
 they grow," if there is nothing in this suc- 
 cess of man's having kept a respect for 
 the soul, which has been all the while ut- 
 tering its inner appeal for the reality 
 which he finds in Christ alone, and break- 
 ing down the arrogant fortress of nega- 
 tions recommended by the Gottingen 
 professor? Light is not found in the 
 unctiousness of this ardent orthodoxy, we 
 admit ; but let us go out from its hot and 
 thick air, not merely to get a clean breath, 
 but to get the healthful rhythm of nature in 
 our blood ! They who go with Browning 
 will see better ; they do see better. They
 
 Of Recent English Poetry 209 
 
 see nature, according to this nobler man- 
 ner of true science — a manner not sup- 
 plied by the Gottingen professor. They 
 see nature both as truth and loveliness. 
 But we must go deeper than science into 
 the very spirit which informs and rules ; 
 and this Browning has done, leaving us 
 a universe where the head is taught and 
 the heart is charmed. Browning will al- 
 ways teach men how accurately one may 
 deal in laboratories with a globule of 
 hydrogen and oxygen, chemically consti- 
 tuted, and how scientifically one may also 
 think about such a physical fact as a 
 moon, and yet how a lunar rainbow may 
 live and tremble with something greater 
 far ; for 
 
 " Suddenly 
 The rain and the wind ceased, and the sky 
 Received at once the full fruition 
 Of the moon's consummate apparition. 
 The black barricade was riven. 
 Ruined beneath her feet, and driven 
 Deep into the West ; while bare and breathless. 
 
 North and South and East and West lay ready 
 For a glorious thing that, dauntless, deathless, 
 
 Sprang across them and stood steady. 
 'Twas a moon-rainbow, vast and perfect,
 
 210 The Higher Ministries 
 
 From heaven to heaven extending, perfect 
 As the mother moon's self, full in face. 
 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 triumph of whitest white, — 
 Above which intervened the night. 
 
 But far above the night, too, like only the next, 
 The second of a wondrous sequence, 
 Reaching in rare and rarer frequence. 
 
 Till the heaven of heavens were circumflexed, 
 Another rainbow rose, a mightier, 
 A fainter, flushier, and flightier, — 
 Rapture dying along its verge. 
 O whose foot shall I see emerge. 
 Whose, from the straining topmost dark, 
 On to the key-stone of that arc ? 
 
 He was there. 
 
 He Himself, with His human air." 
 
 In Browning's experience with life and 
 truth which is the substance of his poetry, 
 Tnan — and Browning furnishes man with 
 brain, heart, will and voice — simply breaks 
 through assumption, tears away disguises, 
 because he is so deadly in earnest as to 
 right and wrong ; and so, it is also in
 
 Of Recent English Poetry 21 1 
 
 man's desolating presence that self-suf- 
 ficient rationalism falls into painted rags ; 
 and it is likewise in man's self-respecting 
 grasp that Love's hand finds a human 
 need holding to it with desperation of 
 destiny. 
 
 " He was there, — 
 He Himself with His human air ! " 
 
 In " Christmas Eve " love is constantly 
 asserting her province, and what the in- 
 tellect of the Gottingen professor misses, 
 the weary soul keeps, by its grasp upon 
 that garment, by the vision of that face 
 seen through love : 
 
 "Love was the starting thing, the new; 
 Love was the all-sufficient, too; 
 And seeing that, you see the rest. 
 As the babe can find its mother's breast 
 As well in darkness as in light ; 
 Love shut our eyes and all seemed light." 
 
 On the other hand, there is no finer 
 picture of the narrowing process of 
 rationalism, of how unreasoning reason 
 is, if she walks alone. Browning sees 
 the " exhausted air-bell of the Critic." 
 The atmosphere may be bad where what
 
 212 The Higher Ministries 
 
 we name superstition reigns, in that dis- 
 senter-chapel, but 
 
 " The critic leaves no air to poison ; 
 Pumps out with ruthless ingenuity 
 Atom by atom, — and leaves you — vacuity." 
 
 There are many such examples of the 
 conduct of our modern rationalist in the 
 pages of this poet, but perhaps there 
 is none whose intellectual prepossession 
 and critical analysis so dash themselves 
 to pieces before our eyes, in their effort 
 to discover the meanings of that which 
 is too great and too personal for such a 
 method of appreciation. But at length 
 the true rationalism comes. The verses 
 which follow these which I have quoted, 
 in which the Spectator muses on what he 
 has heard, are very strong indeed. 
 Position after position must yield and 
 does yield, as the same reason which 
 has been stimulated into activity goes 
 into the rationalist's view of Christ. 
 Inch after inch is given up to the deeper 
 reasoning which at last makes its proof 
 that Christ is not an affair of abstract rea- 
 soning at all, but an affair of personal life.
 
 Of Recent English Poetry 213 
 
 For Arnold is right, even in the matter of 
 finding true faith : " Conduct is three- 
 fourths^of life," and Browning sings : 
 
 " My fact is, 
 'Tis one thing to know and another to practice 
 And thence I conclude that the real God-function 
 Is to furnish a motive and injunction 
 For practicing what we know already. 
 And such an injunction and such a motive 
 As the God in Christ, do you waive and * heady, 
 High-minded,' hang your tablet-votive 
 Outside the fane on a finger-post ? 
 Morality to the uttermost 
 Supreme in Christ, as we all confess, 
 Why need we prove would avail no jot 
 To make him God, if God he were not ? 
 Where is the point where himself lays stress? 
 Does the precept run — * Believe in good, 
 In justice, truth, now understood 
 For the first time ' ? — or, ' Believe in me, 
 Who lived and died, yet essentially 
 Am Lord of Life ' ? Whoever can take 
 The same to his heart, and for mere love's sake 
 Conceive of the iove — that man obtains 
 A new truth ; no conviction gains 
 Of an old one only, made intense 
 By a fresh appeal to his faded sense." 
 
 Once let us get hold of God's idea of 
 man, whether we obtain that estimate
 
 214 "^^^ Higher Ministries 
 
 and plan through nature, which is God's 
 studio apparently littered about with 
 broken bits of marble and many tools, yet 
 the place where man was fashioned ; or 
 through the blood of crucifixion, the 
 altar-pain of ages, the cross of Calvary, 
 — once, I say, let our pulpits gain this 
 divine valuation of man and the reasons 
 for such valuation, and then appeal may 
 be made to man as God's child, who has 
 " the geometry of the City of God " in his 
 brain and heart. This interior congeries 
 of potencies and prophecies within man's 
 personality will create havoc when it has 
 such a voice as Browning gives to human 
 nature, as it stands to answer falsity of 
 any sort. Often it need not speak at all. 
 The better and more eloquent the state- 
 ment of anything less than the whole 
 truth as to man, his intuitions, conscience 
 and hope, the more certainly it tumbles 
 to pieces or shows its deadl)^ incomplete- 
 ness in the presence of man's soul claim- 
 ing itself and its destiny. 
 
 Take such a poem as " Cleon," and you 
 will see at once what the Paganism which 
 made possible our use of a materialistic 
 philosophy which has so splendid a singer
 
 Of Recent English Poetry 215 
 
 as Swinburne, may do and may not do 
 with the human spirit's insistent needs. 
 Cleon resists the new revelation and is a 
 child of the past. We are back in the 
 time before Christianity had made for 
 the world a new atmosphere ; we are 
 where human thought and hope are too 
 large for the old beliefs, and where, as 
 yet, faith has no reality to which she can 
 look. Suddenly we step into the atmos- 
 phere of St. Paul, — a light ! but the dark- 
 ness comprehendeth it not, though Paul 
 has just quoted from Aratus : " For in 
 Him we live and move and have our be- 
 ing " — and we see instantly that the light 
 does comprehend the darkness. Higher 
 and higher, as the pagan thinks of it, 
 does life rise in its keen demands — de- 
 mands all so sure of disappointment, un- 
 til it seems quite impossible that it should 
 not reach its aching hand of developed 
 need through the gloom and take hold of 
 a life beyond. Yet that ache and the 
 guess which half denies itself are the 
 best the Pagan knows. He cries out : 
 
 "Every day my sense of joy 
 Grows more acute, my soul intensified
 
 2i6 The Higher Ministries 
 
 By power and insights more enlarged, more keen ; 
 
 While every day my hairs fall more and more, 
 
 My hand shakes, and the weary years increase — 
 
 The horror quickening still from year to year. 
 
 The consummation coming past escape. 
 
 When I shall know the most, and yet least enjoy — 
 
 When all my works wherein I prove my worth, 
 
 Being present still to mock me in men's mouths, 
 
 Alive still, in the phrase of such as thou, 
 
 I, the feeling, thinking, acting man, 
 
 The man who loved his life so over-much, 
 
 Shall sleep in my urn. It is so horrible, 
 
 / dare at times imagine to my need 
 
 Some future state revealed to us by Zeus, 
 
 Unlimited in capability 
 
 For joy, as this is in desire for joy, 
 
 — To seek which, the joy -hunger forces us : 
 
 That, stung by straitness of our life, made strait, 
 
 On purpose to make prized the life at large — 
 
 Freed by the throbbing impulse we call death. 
 
 We burst there as the wonn into the fly. 
 
 Who, while a worm still, wants his wings. But 
 
 no ! 
 Zeus has not yet revealed it ; and alas, 
 He must have done so, were it possible. 
 
 Thou canst not think a mere barbarian Jew, 
 As Paulus proves to be, one circumcised. 
 Hath access to a secret shut from us ? 
 Thou wrongest our philosophy, O King."
 
 Of Recent English Poetry 217 
 
 Cleon has stated his longing too man- 
 fully, too fairly, to carry us with his prej- 
 udice and doubt. Here is a man, indeed, 
 — that constantly authoritative being, at 
 least with himself when he reasons in any 
 manner whatsoever, — and the person who 
 emerges out of the controversy inside the 
 Pagan is not Cleon who complains of the 
 fate of a philosophy which is more to him 
 than he is to himself, as he says : 
 
 ** Thou wrongest our philosophy, oh, King," — 
 
 the man who emerges is the man in Cleon 
 who is more than any of man's philoso- 
 phies, — the man who is still heard say- 
 ing: 
 
 " I dare at times imagine to my need, 
 Some future state." 
 
 With this same man in us all, in the 
 doubter and in the one who has shame- 
 fully sinned without at all doubting de- 
 liberately, we take another step. Matthew 
 Arnold never so relied on conduct to clear 
 up one's faith, as does Browning. If 
 Browning can persuade one to do a great 
 thing, one must come from it, believing 
 greatly. Here is the appeal to history,
 
 2i8 The Higher Ministries 
 
 in man's case with himself. Emerson 
 says : "Of immortality the soul, when 
 well employed, is incurious. It is so well 
 that it is sure it will be well." 
 
 " What is excellent, 
 As God lives, is permanent." 
 
 To these well-employed, Robert Brown- 
 ing will come with a reasonable faith in 
 the life to come. He will so build them 
 up with the immortalities of truth and 
 love that they will have an eye for im- 
 mortality. He will so infuse into their 
 life and thought and spirit, a movement 
 of hope that it will be reason enough. 
 " We are saved by hope." Indeed, there 
 is no other hope for the intellectual man 
 than the faith, not of the intellect alone, 
 but of the will which does the immortal 
 truth and right in every act, and of the 
 heart which feels it in its love. Strongest 
 of all singers does Browning seem when 
 this faith fills his soul : 
 
 " Fear death ? — to feel the fog in my throat, 
 
 The mist in my face, 
 When the snows begin, and the blasts denote 
 
 I am nearing the place.
 
 Of Recent English Poetry 219 
 
 The power of the night, the press of the storm, 
 
 The post of the foe ; 
 Where he stands, the Arch-Fear, in a visible form, 
 
 Yet the strong man must go ; 
 For the journey is done and the summit attained, 
 
 And the barriers fall. 
 Though a battle to fight ere the guerdon be 
 gained, 
 
 The reward of it all, — 
 I was ever a fighter ; so — one fight more 
 
 The best and the last ! 
 I would hate that death bandaged my eyes and 
 forbore 
 
 And bade me creep past. 
 No : let me taste the whole of it, fare like my 
 peers. 
 
 The heroes of old, 
 Bear the brunt ; in a minute pay glad life's ar- 
 rears 
 
 Of pain, darkness and cold. 
 For sudden the worst turns the best to the brave. 
 
 The black minute's at end. 
 And the elements rage, the fiend-voices that rave 
 
 Shall dwindle, shall blend. 
 Shall change, shall become first a peace, out of 
 pain. 
 
 Then a light, then thy breast, 
 O thou soul of my soul 1 I shall clasp thee again, 
 
 And with God be the rest ! " 
 
 "The heart," says Pascal, " has reasons
 
 220 The Higher Ministries 
 
 which the reason cannot know," and it is 
 the reason of both the heart when its 
 love finds out the sweetness of something 
 loved by loving it, and that of the will 
 when it realizes the strength of something 
 which its purpose has taken into itself by 
 acting it, — these are the reasons which 
 Mr. Browning proposes that our rational- 
 ism should accept along with the reasons 
 of the intellect. Then we have the power 
 of the heart's reason for immortality — a 
 Love looks out upon the future — and we 
 feel what a gain comes to the whole life. 
 So Love continually reveals. It is all so 
 reasonable, too. God is Love. Christ is 
 the Incarnate Love of God for man as 
 well as the incarnation of man's upward- 
 looking love for God. Calvary is the 
 spot where that Love opened its blood- 
 red glory of sacrificial power. Is it 
 strange that the intellect should need 
 Love's revelations wherewith to under- 
 stand these divine things? Of course, 
 Love has its wise agnosticism which 
 Browning recognizes — it has a mystic 
 quality from which he does not try to 
 free it. 
 
 Perhaps never in the history of religion
 
 Of Recent English Poetry 221 
 
 and poetry, as these have found a mutual 
 interest to defend or a common throne of 
 influence to assert, has any singer come 
 more close to portraying perfectly the os- 
 cilation of the soul of a man (more than 
 the sceptic, or the physician) between faith 
 and doubt, than has Browning in his 
 " Karshish, the Arab Physician." This 
 first-century Oriental practitioner is on his 
 holiday. He is spending some days in 
 the interesting country of Jesus and 
 Lazarus. Every element of the subtle and 
 contented scepticism of dreamy ages 
 resists the appeal which, because Karshish 
 is a man, is made to him by the story of 
 Lazarus, his death and Christ's power at 
 his grave to renew his life, as Karshish 
 now sees it. The distinguished leech's 
 pride as a leech matches the leech's in- 
 terest in his profession and in his friend 
 Abib. Seeing to it that no fact shall be 
 missed by either of them, yet these collide 
 in his experience with this perplexing case. 
 The letter he writes attests his careful 
 studiousness. He has found many gums 
 and herbs and made many observations 
 as to diseases of which he writes to his 
 master-physician Abib ; and this case of
 
 222 The Higher Ministries 
 
 " mania subinduced by epilepsy " must 
 be dealt with fairly. He writes : 
 
 ** The man, — it is one Lazarus a Jew, 
 Sanguine, proportioned, fifty years of age, 
 The body's habit wholly laudable. 
 As much indeed beyond the common health 
 As he were made and put aside to show." 
 
 He cannot find any other equation for 
 all the quantities, save this — it is a case 
 of one restored from epilepsy. Is this a 
 complete diagnosis ? For a physician, 
 yes ; for a man, scarcely. Lazarus im- 
 parts to Karshish something of his own 
 intensity of mind. Jerusalem is trembling 
 with revolution, but the case here is of 
 more importance. Perplexity and a set- 
 tled bigotry — these form the cloud against 
 which play the wonder and the feeling of 
 the man, Karshish : " / wish it could be 
 so^^ — is a feeling which Christianity has 
 found at every point of man's hope. It has 
 been met in Christ who is always saying 
 to our power and tendency to believe the 
 best : " If it were not so, I would have 
 told your But Karshish has only this to 
 say and to say it twice : " It is stratige^ 
 Once he cradles the tiny life of his " will
 
 Of Recent English Poetry 223 
 
 to believe " in the soft folds of his wonder, 
 as we all must cradle our faith in wonder, 
 and he writes again ; 
 
 *♦ This man so cured regards the curer then 
 As — God forgive me — who but God Himself, 
 Creator and Sustainer of the world, 
 That came and dwelt in flesh on it awhile ! 
 — Sayeth that such an One was born and lived, 
 Taught, healed the sick, broke bread at his 
 
 own house. 
 Then died, with Lazarus by, for aught I know, 
 And yet was . . . what I said nor choose re- 
 peat. 
 And must have so avouched Himself in fact, 
 In hearing of this very Lazarus, 
 Who saith — but why all this of what he saith ? 
 Why write of trivial matters, things of price 
 Calling every moment for remark ? 
 I noticed on the margin of a pool 
 Blue-flowering borage, the Aleppo sort 
 Aboundeth very nitrous. It is strange. ^^ 
 
 The man still oscillates like a pendulum 
 between the faith which nearly captures 
 him and holds him, because a real man 
 must believe high things which are ac- 
 cordant with his high destiny, — between 
 this faith and the doubt that buries the 
 man's mind enswathed in a theory about
 
 224 The Higher Ministries 
 
 great facts. It is shallow grave, indeed, for 
 no man can bury himself to his own satis- 
 faction. At last, and once more his " will 
 to believe " nearly conquers, and he writes 
 in that doubt of his doubt which is so 
 near to faith : 
 
 " The very God ! Think, Abib ; dost thou think ? 
 So the All-great were the All-loving, too — 
 So, through the thunder comes a human voice, 
 Saying, ' O heart I made, a heart beats here ! 
 Face, my hands fashioned, see it in Myself, 
 Thou hast no power nor may'st conceive of 
 
 Mine; 
 But love I gave thee, with Myself to love. 
 And thou must love Me who have died for thee.' 
 The madman saith He said so : /'/ is strange." 
 
 Is it as strange^ after ally when ojie lives 
 with Christ, as that it cannot be true ? 
 Scepticism is more credulous than faith, 
 oftentimes. 
 
 Man — God's child — man, the believer, 
 the lover and the doer of God's will is 
 victorious over all, in Mr. Browning's 
 philosophy. He triumphs even over the 
 " aber-glaube " and the mannerisms, the 
 superstitions and assumptions which grow 
 like parasites upon the burdened form of 
 faith. Bishop Blougram with his sophistry,
 
 Of Recent English Poetry 225 
 
 the papal ambassador with his pietistic 
 craft, the Church functionary ordering 
 his tomb at St. Praxed's with a turn for 
 Latinity, conceit and sensuality, — all these 
 go down with the Gottingen professor, 
 before the face of man looking to God in 
 Christ. Christ is man's way to God, be- 
 cause evermore He was, is and shall be 
 God's way to man. At length — and this 
 is but a sketch of Browning's thought 
 presented as strongly in as many other 
 poems which I cannot even mention — the 
 philosophy of our poet makes us rich with 
 his noblest gift, "The Ring and the Book " 
 — that annal of the soul where Sinai thun- 
 ders and flames, until we hasten from the 
 terror thereof and flee towards Calvary. 
 The theology of "The Ring and the 
 Book" is scriptural ; it is also both human 
 and divine. It is an antidote to all super- 
 ficial notions of sin ; and the hideous por- 
 trait of iniquity it presents, in loathsome 
 record or self-confession, demonstrates the 
 goodness and severity of God in con- 
 science. Every character in the poem 
 should be known in every minister's 
 study, else some day the minister shall 
 fail to hear God's voice in man. As a
 
 226 The Higher Ministries 
 
 study in clinical psychology, it has no 
 equal for dreadful spiritual self-illumina- 
 tion, since Dante and Shakespeare. A 
 sinner has made here such an account of 
 himself, that the pope, lawyers, victims, 
 and courts only give their slight com- 
 ment on the interior disaster we behold. 
 Guido has sinned past more than these, 
 as he went down. He must swiftly call 
 upon them to save, when the mob comes 
 and he would fain return. 
 
 "Who are these you have let descend my stair? 
 Ha, their accursed psahn ! Lights at the sill ! 
 Is it ' Open ' they dare bid you ? Treachery ! 
 Sirs, have I spoken one word all the while 
 Out of the world of words I had to say ? 
 Not one word ! All was folly — I laughed and 
 
 mocked ! 
 Sirs, my first true word, all truth and no lie, 
 Is — save me notwithstanding ! Life is all ! 
 I was just stark mad, — let the madman live 
 Pressed by as many chains as you please pile ! 
 Don't open ! Hold me from them ! I am yours 
 I am the Granduke's — no, I am the Pope's ! 
 Abate, — Cardinal, — Christ, — Maria, — God, 
 Pompilia, will you let them murder me?" 
 
 Pompilia? Compared with God, the 
 Almighty, who is Pompilia? — She is, as
 
 Of Recent English Poetry 227 
 
 Guido sees, greater because she is nearer 
 to him than God Himself, as Guido knows 
 God ; she is abler to save Guido now. 
 But the order of these persons is most 
 suggestive of moral values in the mind. 
 These — "Abate, Cardinal, Christ, Maria, 
 God, — Pompilia" — mark the stations of 
 moral influence past which he went to 
 peril. Now these, in their order^ must be 
 seen, grasped and held, if the sinner be 
 made safe. God is more authoritative and 
 real in Pompilia, than in His own far-o£f 
 greatness. What a cry for God incarnate 
 in humanity I Always, in crises, the soul of 
 man cries out for a human manifestation 
 of God. It is the beleaguered Saul of 
 Israel again crying : " Bring me up 
 Samuel." Whom have we most sinned 
 against? He must save us. Neither 
 Pompilia nor Samuel can succour Guido 
 or Saul now. God has been sinned 
 against — and God in humanity. 
 
 It is in his " Saul " that Browning rises 
 to such a faith in God's Incarnate Love, 
 that everything which man at his best has 
 ever dreamed or wished of God is caught 
 and held for adoration within a thorn- 
 crowned man's evangel. God becomes
 
 228 The Higher Ministries 
 
 Christ and Christ is God ; and this is our 
 poet's faith — that God will do what David 
 at his noblest would do, if he could. 
 David sings : 
 
 «* I believe it ! 'Tis Thou, God, that givest, 'tis 
 
 I who receive : 
 In the first is the last, in Thy will is my power 
 
 to believe. 
 All's one gift : Thou canst grant it moreover, 
 
 as prompt to my prayer 
 As I breathe out this breath, as I open these arms 
 
 to the air. 
 From Thy will stream the worlds, life and na- 
 ture, Thy dread Sabaoth : 
 /will ? — the mere atoms despise me ! Why am 
 
 I not loth 
 To look that, even that in the face too ? Why 
 
 is it I dare 
 Think but lightly of such impuissance ? What 
 
 stops my despair ? 
 This ; — 'tis not what man Does which exalts 
 
 him, but what man Would do ! 
 See the King — I would help him but cannot, 
 
 the wishes fall through. 
 Could I wrestle to raise him from sorrow, grow 
 
 poor to enrich, 
 To fill up his life, starve my own out, I would 
 
 — knowing which, 
 I know that my service is perfect. Oh, speak 
 
 through me now !
 
 Of Recent English Poetry 229 
 
 Would I suffer for him that I love ? So wouldst 
 
 Thou — so wilt Thou ! 
 So shall crown Thee the topmost, ineffablest, 
 
 uttermost crown — 
 And Thy love fill infinitude wholly, nor leave 
 
 up nor down 
 One spot for the creature to stand in ! It is by 
 
 no breath, 
 Turn of eye, wave of hand, that salvation joins 
 
 issue with death ! 
 As Thy Love is discovered almighty, almighty 
 
 be proved 
 Thy power, that exists with and for it, of being 
 
 Beloved ! 
 He who did most, shall bear most ; the strong- 
 est shall stand the most weak. 
 'Tis the weakness in strength, that I cry for ! 
 
 my flesh, that I seek 
 In the Godhead ! I seek and I find it. O 
 
 Saul, it shall be 
 A Face like my face that receives thee ; a Man 
 
 like to me. 
 Thou shalt love and be loved by, forever : a 
 
 Hand like this hand 
 Shall throw open the gates of new life to thee ! 
 
 See the Christ stand ! " 
 
 This is a dauntless and divine faith. 
 It involves man's essential trust in God ; 
 it involves all that God has put in trust in 
 man. The autograph of Love is upon
 
 230 The Higher Ministries 
 
 the universe, and it is in the heart and 
 hope of humanity. '■^ For My 7iame^s 
 sake,'' thus He hath written it. 
 
 A great Personal Fact rises and re- 
 mains before the consciousness of man- 
 kind — a living- Christ, at once the mani- 
 festation of God and the divine illustra- 
 tion of man. Truths and forces celestial 
 centre themselves there — let no human 
 lips seek profanely to define them ! Ex- 
 pect words to be inadequate — 
 
 " These filthy rags of speech, this coil 
 Of statement, comment, query and response, 
 Tatters all too contaminate for use. 
 Have no renewing ; the Truth, is, too, 
 The Word." 
 
 So Browning is the poet of reverence. 
 A human soul survives and asserts its 
 personality in these poems — a soul so real 
 and so true, so unswerving by native vi- 
 tality that sin at last must somewhere tell 
 its own story — all of it ; in fevered Guido's 
 dream so honest that the whole past is 
 realized, or in a bower where Siebald 
 cannot crown Ottima "magnificent in 
 sin," since Pippa has just been singing;
 
 Of Recent English Poetry 231 
 
 " God's in His Heaven, 
 All's right with the World " ;— 
 
 and let us here reflect here that it is not 
 God in nature who makes that proposed 
 coronation a profanation of the highest — ■ 
 even though one of the guilty pair says : 
 
 "Buried in wood we lay, you're collect ; 
 Swift ran the searching tempest overhead ; 
 And ever and anon some bright white shaft 
 Burned through the pine-tree roof, here burned 
 
 and there, 
 As if God's messenger through the close wood- 
 screen 
 Plunged and replunged his weapon at a venture, 
 Feeling for guilty thee and me; then broke 
 The thunder like a whole sea overhead " — 
 
 but it is God in humanity — it is Pippa ; 
 and this is another hint of the moral mo- 
 tive-power which can come only in the 
 Incarnation of God in humanity. 
 
 A human soul survives which gathers 
 up the wealth of ages past and feels that 
 these are but fragments falling from the 
 working of the great God — a human soul 
 in whose future the greatest forces run to 
 assert its certainty and sublimity. Every 
 great idea of our time, every noble feeling
 
 232 The Higher Ministries 
 
 of our age, which we have seen stimulated 
 into life by Wordsworth, Shelley and 
 Coleridge, examined and trecitcd by Ar- 
 nold, made musical by Tennyson, falls 
 into harmony, deep, swift, true, in Brown- 
 ing's song. With an honesty lambent 
 as flame is pure and with a sureness 
 of aim altogether manly, he has lifted a 
 rod which embodies God's purpose and 
 he has smitten the rocks in lonely deserts 
 and found their treasured fountains. 
 Deeper than Arnold, he has spoken in the 
 midst of Arnold's languor and chill, and 
 lifted up the banner of intelligent cour- 
 age ; even richer and stronger in endow- 
 ment than TennysorL, he leads the race to 
 a severer discipline and a firmer posses- 
 sion, often bidding us leave our Handel 
 and listen to Beethoven. I know of no 
 discovery for which he will not prepare 
 the soul — I know of no experience for 
 \vhich his lines will not equip the minds 
 of modern men. A broad theology, deep 
 and true as broad, a distinct assertion of 
 the place of the individual in all life and 
 destiny, and a fatal questioning of aged 
 error are his ; and for them who are to 
 lead others to a lasting faith his muse is
 
 of Recent English Poetry 233 
 
 teacher and friend. For the spiritual eye 
 whose vision looks beyond, he stands 
 alone, supreme. Life's defeats to all who 
 have aspirations greater than perform- 
 ance — life's struggles to all who let the 
 life of God stir within them — life's ulti- 
 mate triumph and peace to man — these 
 have no such psalmist as he. And God 
 at last shall have His Victory, for 
 
 " There shall never be one lost good ! what was 
 shall live as before, 
 The evil is null, is naught, is silence imply- 
 ing sound ! 
 What was good shall be good, with for evil so 
 much good more ; 
 On the earth the broken arcs, in the heaven 
 the perfect round. 
 
 ** 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." 
 
 THE END
 
 NEW EDITIONS 
 
 Quiet Talks on Service 
 
 i6mo. Cloth, 7SC net. S. D. GORDON 
 
 As a third volume in a series of "Quiet Talks" upon 
 the elements of the Christian Life, this volume will find a 
 ready welcome from the hundreds of thousands who have 
 read and re-read, either in their original form or in their 
 many translations, "Quiet Talks on Power" and "Quiet 
 Talks on Prayer," the earlier works by Mr. Gordon. The 
 sequence^ of "power," "prayer" and "service" suggests the 
 possibilities of this trinity of spiritual forces. 
 
 By the author of Quiet Talks on Power and Prayer and 
 Service. 
 
 The Transfiguration of Christ 
 
 i2mo. Cloth, $1.00 net. FRANK W. GUNSAULUS 
 
 Dealing with the deeper truths embodied in the crisis 
 of our Lord's transfiguration. Dr. Gunsaulus knows how 
 to follow a ray of truth straight to the spot of human life 
 that it best illuminates. 
 
 My Spiritual Autobiography, 
 
 or How I Discovered the Unselfishness of God. 
 
 HANNAH WHITALL SMITH 
 
 Vtw Edition. 12mo, Cloth, $1.00 net. 
 
 "Those who have read and rejoiced over "The Chris- 
 tian's Secret of a Happy Life" will need no further recom- 
 mendation of this book. To those aspiring after the higher 
 Christian possibilities we recommend this book as being 
 distinctly helpful." — Church Economist. 
 
 Foretokens of Immortality 
 
 New Edition. Studies "for the hour when the immortal 
 hope burns low in the heart." 
 
 i2mo. Cloth, soc net. NEWELL DWIQHT HILLIS 
 
 "It is a book that lifts us out of our narrow view, and 
 gives us the broad landscape, across which the narrow river 
 of death flows as an insignificant stream, lifts our eyes from 
 the clods of the open grave to the wide expanse of sunlight, 
 which falls to and beyond the limit of our vision." — The 
 Interior. 
 
 Loyalty : The Soul of Religion 
 
 i2mo. Cloth, $1.00 net. JAMES Q. K. McCLURE 
 
 "Dr. McClure sets forth the idea with a clearness not 
 surpassed in literature, and in a great variety of illustra- 
 tion, argument and appeal — a great book to give to a young 
 man of the college type. It takes him as he is and takes 
 hold of best possihilities in him." — N, Y, Observer,
 
 NEW EDITIONS 
 
 The Philosophy of Christian Experience 
 
 i2mo, Cloth, $1.25 net. HENRY W. CLARK 
 
 Marcus Dods in the "British Weekly" says: "Not twice 
 in a generation docs one meet with so valuable an analysis 
 of experimental religion. • • • As fresh as if no one had 
 ever written of religion before." 
 
 New Life in the Old Prayer Meeting 
 
 i2mo, Cloth, $1.00 net. JOHN F. COWAN 
 
 "Two hundred and thirty pages of the soundest com- 
 mon sense. The book is an honest consideration of what is 
 a real problem to nearly every minister." — Record of Chris- 
 tian Work. 
 
 How to Conduct a Sunday School 
 
 $1.25 net. MARION LAWRANCE 
 
 "Packed full of useful information. Filled with de- 
 tails, specific and practical, for which a host of workers 
 have longed and prayed. The book gives the cream of life 
 long experience and observation." — The Examiner. 
 
 The Twentieth Century New Testament 
 
 Substantial Cloth Binding, $1.00 net; Leather Bindings, 
 $1.50 net, $2.00 net, $3.50 net. 
 
 Translates the New Testament direct from the Greek 
 into the plainest English of our times. Every passage is 
 rendered clear as sunlight. Revised and completed after 
 thirteen years labor of twenty great scholars. 
 
 "Put into the language that we speak every day — plain 
 language — it comes to one with new and added power — a 
 fresh, racy translation of narrative, or an exact and luminous 
 translation of exposition. It is well that the most sacred of 
 books can nozv be comprehended by the plainest man."^ 
 Chicago Record-Herald. 
 
 Esperanto Students' Handy Text Book 
 
 Nev) Revised Edition of 1907, Cloth, soc net. 
 
 "The late Prof. Max Muller pronounced Esperanto the 
 best of all attempts to create an international language. It 
 has alr''ady gained considerable vogue, and is attracting 
 public attention in England as well as on the continent. 
 There are at least ten periodicals published — chiefly in France 
 — for the propagation of the new language." — Chicago Record' 
 Herald,
 
 ESSAYS. ADDRESSES, ETC. 
 
 The Supreme Conquest f^:L^,^Tn':ZZl 
 
 i2mo, $1.00 net. W. L. WATKINSON 
 
 To the list of great preachers who have made the 
 British pulpit famous, the name of William L,. Watkinson 
 has long since been added. His books are eagerly sought 
 by up-to-date ministers everywhere, and are bought with equal 
 fervor by the general public. 
 
 The Empire of Love 
 
 i2mo. Cloth, $1.00 net. W. J. DAWSON 
 
 Nothing from Mr. Dawson's pen surpasses this moderate 
 sized volume. He simply tells the striking qualities of 
 Jesus' character and its effect on those who came or now 
 come under its spell. The pages seem like magnets drawing 
 you closer to the heart of the Master. It is a book of 
 power, rare, beautiful and irresistablc. 
 
 Life That Follows Life 
 
 i6mo. Cloth, 7SC net. JOHN BALCOM SHAW 
 
 This is no volume of philosophical speculation, but the 
 answer which Dr. Shaw as a man of sanity and Christian 
 faith gives to the plain questions which the children of men 
 ask about the hereafter. 
 
 The Marks of a Man 
 
 i2mo, Cloth, $1.00 net. ROBERT E. SPEER 
 
 Mr. Speer knows how not only to paint the highest 
 ideals of manhood, but what is more, and better, he knows 
 how to stimulate men to attempt to realize them. Effective, 
 is the word that describes his work, both as speaker and 
 writer. Then, too, his constant experience with young men 
 keeps him in touch with their actual feelings and needs, so 
 that he is always talking "to the point" and his readers and 
 hearers know it instantly. 
 
 The Eternal in Man 
 
 i2mo. Cloth, $1.00 net. JAMES I. VANCE 
 
 Dr. Vance has the rare gift of Stimulating and arousing 
 both head and heart. These chapters dust off the common- 
 place of human life and its experiences and show the 
 eternal immortal part of us that lies underneath. Dr. 
 Vp.nce's previous books demonstrate his power of simple and 
 lofty language and this volume is the flower of his earlier 
 promise.
 
 FOR THE CHRISTIAN LIFE 
 
 The Simple Things of the Christian Life 
 
 i6mo. Cloth, 50c net. Q. CAMPBELL MORGAN 
 
 As indicated by the title, the author here deals with 
 commonplace experiences. The New Birth, Holiness, Growth, 
 Work, Temptation. Hut by no means commonplace is the 
 treatment of the themes. In that lucid and convincing style 
 of which he is master, the author charms as he instructs and 
 inspires. 
 
 Anecdotes and Illustrations 
 
 w R. A. TORREY 
 
 Illustrated, i2mo. Cloth, 730 net; Paper, 35c net. 
 
 The value of apt illustration can hardly be overestimated. 
 It is oftentimes the entering wedge or the clinching conclu- 
 sion for the more serious argument; at times it is both. 
 This collection of stories, drawn largely from the wide and 
 varied experience of the author have added largely to the 
 eflective ministry of his powerful addresses. 
 
 The Listening Heart 
 
 ' i2mo. Cloth, $1.00 net. JOHN A. KERN 
 
 A book of Devotional Interpretation by the professor 
 of practical theology in Vanderbilt University. 
 
 The Pre^ctice of Prayer 
 
 i2mo. Cloth, 75c net. G. CAMPBELL MORGAN 
 
 The aim of this book is purely practical. "Teach us to 
 pray" is taken to mean not teach us how, but teach us the 
 habit of prayer. "Any discussion," says the preface, "of 
 the doctrine of prayer which does not issue in the practice 
 of prayer is not only not helpful, it is dangerous." The 
 work is a serious effort to make more universal the "Morn- 
 ing Watch," the "Still Hour" and the family prayer circle. 
 
 The Daily Altar 
 
 Cloth, 23c net; Leather, 35c net. J. H. JOWETT 
 
 A companion to the popular "Yet Another Day," giv- 
 ing a very brief prayer for each day in the year. 
 
 The Second Coming of Christ 
 
 i6mo, Cloth, soc net. LEN Q. BROUGHTON
 
 PASTORAL PROBLEMS 
 
 An Efficient Church 
 
 With an introduction by Bishop Earl OaiTStCn, IXi. D., 
 i2mo, Cloth, $1.25 net. CARL QREQG DONEY 
 
 This book is one of the first fruits of the science of 
 Psychology in the sphere of the modern pastorate. His 
 conclusions are drawn from a prolonged process of close 
 questioning of a great number of students, laymen and 
 ministers. He presents data gathered at first hand and 
 ■works with the clear, fearless spirit of the trained mind. 
 He opens up the pathway to methods of working and teach- 
 ing in the modern religious congregation that will upset 
 some old ideals, but cannot fail to give every alert religious 
 worker a fresh inspiration and a new hope. 
 
 Preacher Problems °' "^'^TeTher't Su work. 
 
 i2mo, Cloth, $1.50 net. WILLIAM T. MOORE 
 
 There is very much about the actual operation of a pro- 
 fession that is not touched by the Colleges and the Schools, 
 and even after much experience the minister will find him- 
 self confronting a situation for which he has no data to 
 guide him. This book is an adviser for the minister young 
 or old; advice from a long experience and guided by the 
 sanest spirit. The author's fifty-years experience as author, 
 editor, instructor and pastor, gives his conclusions great value 
 
 The Doctrine of the Ministry: 
 
 Outlines based on Luthaidt and Krauth. 
 i2mo, Cloth, 7SC net. REVERE FRANKLIN WEIDNER 
 
 This work is the result and growth of twenty-five years 
 discussion in the class room, and though professedly based 
 on Luthardt and Krauth and containing every word of 
 Luthardt's presentation it is much more than a translation, 
 as Luthardt does not devote more than ten pages in his 
 works to this theme, and Krauth would not cover a score of 
 papers. Dr. Weidner, President of the Chicago Lutheran 
 Beminary, may therefore well claim full authorship. 
 
 THE SUNDAY SCHOOL 
 
 The Modern Sunday School in Principle 
 
 and Practice ^'' ^° Modprn school and us Educational 
 
 i2mo, Cloth, $1.00 net. HENRY F. COPE 
 
 By the General Secretary of, the Religious Education 
 Association. He presents the results of all the newest 
 experiments both with primary, adolescent and adult grades. 
 So clear and simple is his presentation, that this book will 
 be a revelation to many.
 
 BIBLE STUDY HELPS. ETC. 
 
 Angus-Green Cyclopedic Handbook of 
 
 the Bible t^'-^ LowPrUid Potutar Edition 
 
 An introduction to the study of the Scriptures by the 
 late Joseph Angus, M. A., M. l3. Thoroughly revised and 
 in part rewritten by Samuel G. Green, D.D. Cloth, $1.50 net. 
 
 Useful for all Bible students, it is invaluable for the 
 Sunday-school teacher, answering as it does the innumerable 
 questions that rise in the class as to the books of the Bible, 
 the different versions, the geography, history and customs 
 of Bible times and Bible characters. More comprehensive 
 than a Bible Dictionary; it will prove a library in itself 
 to all students of the Bible. 
 
 The IVf eSSi&h : a study in tie Gospel o( the Kincdom. 
 
 i2mo, Cloth, $1.25 net. DAVID McCONAUGHY 
 
 In two parts. I. Aiminp to trace the outlines of the 
 peerless portrait of The Messiah as depicted by Matthew. 
 II. A series of devotional meditations adapted for the "quiet 
 hour," yet intended to illustrate a method simple but suf- 
 ficient to yield substantial, results as have been proven prac- 
 ticable among busy men of business and students in the 
 schools. 
 
 The Heart of the Gospel 
 
 A Popular Exposition of the Doctrine of the Atonement. 
 
 i2mo, Cloth, $1.25 net. JAMES M. CAMPBELL 
 
 The power in the book is its clearness. It is fr'-e from 
 tenninology of the schools, uses the language of the peo- 
 ple and will do what the author hopes for in his preface — 
 "find the basis for the new evangel which is to bring in 
 the new evangelism in a conception of the Atonement which 
 is at once vital, reasonable and practicable." 
 
 Tfl*» Rifk1<» Oltf'lin^rl By Its Natural Divisions, for Bible 
 
 1 ne DlDie V^Umnea students and Sunday School Teachers. 
 
 Ninth Edition, Paper, loc net. W. J. SEMELROTH 
 
 That portion of The Compltie h'ormal Manual containing the course 
 on the Historical Divisions, containing also the department Book by 
 Books and Helps for Students and Classes. 
 
 ESPERANTO 
 
 Esperanto— A First Reader 
 
 Flexible Cloth, 25c net. CompUed by E. A. LAWRENCE 
 
 Intended for those who are beginning the study of 
 Esperanto.
 
 '^05 03057 8510
 
 
 THE LIBRARY 
 
 UNIVERSITY OF CALIFORNIA 
 
 Santa Barbara 
 
 STACK COLLECTION 
 
 THIS BOOK IS DUE ON THE LAST DATE 
 STAMPED BELOW. 
 
 1 0m-5,'6o (F4458S4) 476D
 
 UC SOUTHERN REGIONAL LIBRARY FACILITY 
 
 A A 001 433 647 3