the present. Newman looked back to the past (the nearer to the Apostles the nearer to truth) for the highest point to which religious life, but not doctrine, had attained, and his immense reverence for the past became part of the mind of Tennyson. But it was balanced in Tennyson by even a greater reverence for the present as containing in it an immediate inspiration and revelation from God. This foundation for poetic thought and emotion was given to him by the religious work of Maurice. The deepest thought in the mind of Maurice was that God was moving in the present as fully as He had moved in the past; and the incessant representation of this, in every form of it, was his great contribution to Theology. Of course, others before him had said similar things, but he said this in a new way, and under new conditions. Maurice could not, however, quite escape from the web of the past, and his struggle to combine the past and the present entangled him, entangled his mind, and entangled his followers. When he clung, as he did, to the ancient intellectual formulas as laid down in the Creeds and Services of the Church, and tried to weave them into harmony with his main faith, he damaged his position, and, up to a certain point, his work.

Tennyson, as a poet, did not fall into this ill-fortuned. position. What his personal views were concerning the creed of Christendom is not the question here. would be an impertinence to discuss them. That is a private matter, and we shall hear what his family chose

to disclose to us at the fitting time. But his poetry is a public possession, and in that poetry there is naturally no doctrinal confession, no intellectual propositions which define his faith. I say naturally, because art has to do with the illimitable, with that which is for ever incapable of definition, with the things that belong to love and beauty, joy and hope and veneration-the shapes, degrees, powers, and glory of which are for ever building, un-building, and rebuilding themselves in each man's soul and in the soul of the whole world. Art not only rejects, it abhors all attempts to bind down into unchanging forms the thoughts and emotions which play like lightning round the infinite horizons towards which the imagination sails, piloted by love, and hope, and faith. It has no creeds, no articles of faith, no schemes of salvation, no confessions; it cannot have them by its very nature. The unknowable, but the believable, is its country, its native land, its home.

Whatever, then, in this matter of religion, the man as thinker may confess, the man as poet keeps in the realm of the undefined, beyond analysis, beyond reasoning. When he does not, when he is tempted into analytic discussion, into doctrinal definition, he ceases to be a poet for the time and the trouble into which he gets is pitiable. When Milton argues like a school divine, when Wordsworth draws out a plan of education, when Byron explains his view of original sin, how sad it is, how the Muses cover their faces, how angrily Apollo frowns! Even Dante, who was obliged to do something of this

kind of work, does it only as a means by which he may launch himself forward into the infinite. And Tennyson rarely in this way lost his position as an artist. There is no formulated creed in his work.

But the main faiths of Maurice, which were assertions of what he conceived to be "eternal verities" concerning the relations of God to man and to the universe, and concerning the end to which God was leading them— assertions backed up by no proof, for the matters insisted on could neither be proved nor disproved-were naturally in the realm of the imagination, of faith and hope, in the infinite realm of love, and were brought to receive acceptance or dismissal before the tribunal of human emotion, not before the tribunal of the understanding. As such they were proper subjects of poetry; and the ever-working immanence of God in man and in the universe as Will and Love, as King and Father; the necessary brotherhood of man, and the necessary practice of love one to another, if all were in God; the necessary evolution (if this vital union between God and man existed) of the human race into perfect love and righteousness, and the necessary continuance on the same hypothesis of each man's personal consciousness in a life to be; the necessary vitality of the presentthat deep need for high poetic work-man alive and Nature alive, and alive with the life of God-these faiths (I will not call them doctrines, for their definition changes incessantly with the progress of human thought and feeling) lay at the root of the religion we find in the

poetry of Tennyson and influenced that poetry from 1830 to 1892. They were part of the elements of the soil out of which his poetry grew, and by them, and by the way in which he held them, carefully keeping them apart from all intellectual definition and in the realm of faith alone, he is separated on the one side from all those poets who either ignore these things like Keats or profess disbelief in them like Shelley, and on the other side from all those poets who like Milton, Byron, or Browning have a definite theology in their poetry.

These things, then, may justly be said with regard to the religious elements in the poetry of Tennyson, and they are all contained in In Memoriam; nay more, they are the very basis of that poem. But the assertion of them does not answer the question: What relation does Tennyson's poetry bear to Christianity? For all these beliefs might be held by a Theist-even by one who ignored or depreciated the teaching of Jesus. If Tennyson is then to be claimed as a Christian poet it must be shown that he considered Jesus to be the great proclaimer of these truths, the one who concentrated into Himself the religious truths which before Him had been in man, re-formed them in His own thought, and issued them with new power and charged with new love, to claim the belief of men. This certainly was Tennyson's position.* So far as that goes, Tennyson was distinctly Christian, and this is the position of a great

*In Memoriam, xxxvi.

But if that be all,

number of persons at the present day. then a great number of persons will deny him the right to call himself a Christian. In their mind a Christian man must have a distinct faith in Jesus as God, as the unique Saviour of man, and as a revealer of God in a way different in kind from that in which we can call any other person a saviour or revealer. Is that view contained in Tennyson's poetry? We cannot take the phrases concerning Christ used in the Idylls of the King, or such phrases as "Him who died for me" in The May Queen, as any proof of his views, for these might be said to be only local colour; but when we come to In Memoriam we have before us a poem exceedingly personal and distinctly theological; and Christ is called there “The Life indeed"; His power to raise the dead is confessed; He is the receiver of the souls of the dead into the world beyond this world; He is the Word of God that breathed human breath and wrought out the faith with human deeds. This is not enough to make Tennyson, as a poet, an orthodox Christian in the doctrinal sense, but it is those who confess Jesus as the Light of the world, as their spiritual Master, their Life; and that with a distinctness which does not belong to any other of the great poets of this century, so far as their poetry is concerned. This position becomes a certainty if the introduction to In Memoriam-beginning "Strong Son of God, immortal Love"-be an address to Jesus. I think it is, and that this is the most natural explanation; but nevertheless it

enough to place him among