which outran the hearer in its fiery course.' If the world has lost so much, the poet must not fail to do his part.

All these have been, and thee mine eyes
Have look'd on: if they look'd in vain,
My shame is greater who remain,
Nor let thy wisdom make me wise.

The evolution of earth and man suggest immortality, the crowning work of time, else evolution itself is meaningless. Each life must be a type and force of this higher progress. Amidst the mighty cosmic forces, the one abiding thing is the spirit, and the life of the spirit is love. Not by effort of the understanding do we apprehend God, but by the love of the heart; and that's what St. John said. He who cries after God shall feel Him. The faith that clings to Arthur is the faith that worketh by love through human struggles and hopes, working out the divine plan of a nobler race.

The poet that invoked Immortal Love in the beginning of his song, sings at its close,

Love is and was my Lord and King;

and the prayer-hymn rises as the meaning of the years:

O living will that shalt endure

When all that seems shall suffer shock,

Rise in the spiritual rock,

Flow thro' our deeds and make them pure,

That we may lift from out of dust
A voice as unto him that hears,
A cry above the conquered years
To one that with us works, and trust,

With faith that comes of self-control,
The truths that never can be proved
Until we close with all we loved,
And all we flow from, soul in soul.

There are three characteristics that give "In Memoriam" its message to the soul of our generation,-the wonderful realism of its psychology of sorrow, its fearless but reverent facing the mysteries around and beyond us, and the triumphant faith possible for a life that will trust and follow the motions of its spiritual

nature.

Only a life that in some degree has suffered as Tennyson did can know how faithful he is to the faintest motions of the soul in sorrow. The life of the world that breaks in upon our states of grief like far-away noise, the worthlessness of the attempted comfort that loss is common, the something of standing "where he in English earth is laid," the "vain pretense" of Christmas cheer, the converse about the loved and lost, taking

the grasses of the grave,

And make them pipes whereon to blow,

the life that almost dies, "that dies not, but endures with pain," the firmer mind, slowly forming,

Treasuring the look it can not find,
The words that are not heard again;-

such pictures (and there are many others), are a mirror in which the mourner salutes his very soul.

Mr. Tennyson frankly acknowledged the difficulty that many earnest minds have over religious belief. He does not minimize or qualify the questionings of skep

tical science. He is faithful in following truth though it seem to contradict some of his cherished hopes, though it lead from beaten path of men to untrod ways. He has a true humility as the only attitude for the human soul that knows the finite can by no means grasp the infinite. This sincerity to the deepest depth makes the power of Tennyson in dealing with earnest and questioning souls. "Wordsworth's attitude towards nature was one that left science unregarded: the nature for which Wordsworth stirred our feelings was nature as known by simple observation and interpreted by religious and sympathetic intuition. But for Tennyson the physical world is always the world as known to us through physical science; the scientific view of it dominates his thoughts about it; and his general acceptance of this view is real and sincere, even when he utters the intensest feeling of its inadequacy to satisfy our deepest needs."

Professor Sidgwick speaks of the "unparalleled combination of intensity of feeling with comprehensiveness of view and balance of judgment, shown in presenting the deepest needs and perplexities of humanity." Tennyson was troubled by the lavish profusion in the natural world, the apparent waste of life, and by the vast amount of sin and suffering in the world, and he confessed that they seemed to militate against the idea of the omnipotent and all-loving Father. "Yet God is love," he would exclaim after one of these moods. "We do not get this faith from nature or the world. If we look at nature alone, full of perfection and imperfection, she tells us that God is disease, murder, rapine. We get this faith from ourselves, from what is highest within us, which recognizes that there is not one fruitless pang, just as there is not one lost good." He does

not meet the atheistic tendencies of modern science with more confident defiance, but by appeal to those high instincts, those "questionings of sense and outward things" which are the witness of the spiritual nature.

And this brings us to the last thought, the victory of his faith and how he saves faith for questioning souls. He wins victory for himself and so for other tempted souls by cherishing the love and trust and hope of his spiritual nature, by trying to keep his life free from worldliness, by patiently awaiting the unfoldings of God, by loyally doing and bearing what seems the will of God. He so trusts in eternal justice and love that a life in such an attitude will not be left in weakness and darkness.

Each realm of God has its own organs and methods of vision. The natural world is apprehended by the senses through observation. This is what men call knowledge. The spiritual world is apprehended by obedience, by love, by trust, and this is faith. There can be no real conflict between religion and science, faith and knowledge, if each will keep to its own sphere and method. "Let the scientific men stick to their science," he says one day in a friendly discussion with Froude and Tyndall, “and leave philosophy and religion to poets, philosophers, and theologians." To him faith was the "faculty of the soul which enabled him to grasp truths inaccessible to understanding and knowledge, the very truths which are required to give life its meaning and consecration," and he believed that the efficacy of faith depended upon the condition of the heart and the will. And so he taught that faith comes from selfcontrol, that it has its source in reverence, that it is the protest of the heart against the "freezing reason's colder part."

We have but faith: we can not know,
For knowledge is of things we see;

And yet we trust it comes from Thee,
A beam in darkness: let it grow.

Let knowledge grow from more to more,
But more of reverence in us dwell:
That mind and soul, according well
May make one music as before,

But vaster.

No doubt "In Memoriam" has had a certain "dissolving" influence (to use the word of James Martineau) upon religious thought, that is, it has released it from the too tight propositions which have tried to define the Infinite. And in this process of release, some lives have pushed beyond the forms of faith and lost the faith itself. But they have not followed the spirit of Tennyson. "He has never for himself surrendered the traditional form of a devout faith, till he has seized its permanent spirit, and invested it with a purer glory; so has he saved it for others by making it fairer than they had dreamt. Among thousands of readers previously irresponsible to anything Divine he has created, or immeasurably intensified, the susceptibility of religious reverence." (Martineau.)

I found Him not in world or sun,

Or eagle's wing, or insect's eye:
Nor thro' the questions men may try,
The petty cobwebs we have spun: