was especially round this question of immortality that Tennyson, in his relation to Christianity, concentrated himself. Its truth held in it for him the Fatherhood of God, the salvation of man, the brotherhood of man, the worth of human life. If it were not true, Christianity in his eyes was not true, there was no God in the universe for man; there was no true union possible between man and man; there was no religion-nothing to bind men together; there was no explanation of the pain of earth, and the whole history of man was a dreadful tragedy. That was his view, and he maintained it with all a poet's fervor.

But it would not be true to say that Tennyson had not to fight for it against thoughts within which endeavoured to betray it, and against doubts which besieged it from without. He did not always repose in it; he had to fight for it sword in hand, and many a troublous wound he took. He was a poet, sensitive to all the movements of the world around him, and it fell to his lot to live at a time when the faith in immortality has had to run the gauntlet between foes or seeming friends, of a greater variety and of a greater skill than ever before in the history of man. He felt every form of this attack in himself; he battled with himself as he felt them; he battled with them outside himself; and he won his personal victory, having sympathised thus, throughout the course of sixty years, with those who have had to fight the same battle. Of what worth his contribution is to the problem is not the question here. I only state the

fact, and the manner in which it was done. It was done in the manner of a poet-never by argument as such, rarely from the intellectual point of view-but by an appeal to the emotions, by an appeal to the necessities of love. Had he done otherwise, he would have, at that point, ceased to be the poet, ceased to rest the truth of immortality on faith in that unprovable conviction that there was a God and that He was indissolubly bound up with the personality of all of His children.

The trouble began early with him. The religious change I have noted in the thirtys disturbed, no doubt, his early faith, and the result is written for us in the Confessions of a Sensitive Mind. Vacillation of faith is the basis of that poem; and no answer is given to the questions proposed therein. Again, the whole question

-on the basis of "Is life worth living? Is it not better not to be?"-is taken up in The Two Voices. The answer is "Life is not worth living if it does not continue, if love is not immortal in God and in us." Then The Vision of Sin asks the same question in another form. Sensual pleasure in youth has ended in cynicism in age. What hope? There is an answer, the poet says, but it is in a tongue no man can understand; nevertheless it comes out of a horizon where God shows like a rose of dawn.

of

The same question forms the basis of In Memoriam. What is the proper answer to the problem of sorrow, the loss of those we love heart all over the world?

to the cry of the breaking Immortal life in God who is

immortal Love, and therefore immortal Life, is the answer; immortal development-immortal union with all we love; the never-ending evolution of all into more and more of perfection.

One God-one law-one element,
And one far-off divine event,

To which the whole creation moves.

A number of questions arising out of the matter are proposed, many speculations are made, but the answers suggested are all founded, in the necessary manner of a poet, on an appeal to love in us, and to the love which, if there be a supreme goodness, must be at the very root of His being.

Lastly, it is plain that Tennyson had, when he finished In Memoriam, settled down into quiet on this matter. He had fought his doubts and laid them. But the time in which he lived did not let him rest. He had again to put on his armour and to draw his sword. The argument of Darwin that our conscience and our emotions came by descent from the brutes was used as an argument against immortality. The great development of physiological science tended to increase among persons of a certain set of mind a naked materialism, more or less cynical; and especially went against all beliefs, like that of immortality, which could not be tested by experiment. Then, all the outward authority on which the Christian faith had long reposed, the grey-haired, authority of the Church, the younger authority of the infallibility of the Bible, was shaken to its foundations by the application.

of the science of historical criticism to the New Testament stories and to the history of the Early Church, so that the outward authority for immortality passed away from the minds of multitudes, and with it that which is bound up with it—the belief in a Divine Father of mankind.

And, now, among those the greater number, it is true-who still clung to these faiths, there was no longer peace. Doubts, incessant questions troubled them; faith veiled her face for long periods. Men and women fought and still fight for the truths dearest to them, as Arthur fought with his foes in that dim, weird battle of the West, in a chill and blinding vapour, and looking up to heaven only see the mist.

Then it was that Tennyson-and it is from his poetry alone that I gather this-shaken out of his certainty in In Memoriam, feeling all the new trouble of the world, took up again the sword against his own questionings and against the scepticism of the world in which he lived. The mystery of the pains of life, side by side with a God of love, deepened around him. No creed, no faith, seemed to completely answer it. But all the more, he felt that the only chance of an answer was in clinging to the conviction of a life to come in which all shall be wrought into union with God. Once or twice he was carried beyond tolerance into hot indignation with those who took away what he believed to be the only reply to the problem of pain and evil.

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In his poem of Despair he denounced the know

nothings," as he called them, as well as the liars who held eternal punishment, and with equal wrath and vigour. In The Promise of May he painted, and unfairly, the materialist as almost necessarily immoral. He need not have been so angry, and he did no good by the passages of attack in those poems. Had he believed more at the time he wrote them he would not have been so violent. He would have felt that, if all men were God's children, it mattered little whether these persons denied immortality or not. They would find out the truth in the end, and their disbelief could do no final harm to them or to mankind. However, as his life went on, his anger seemed to pass away. He resumed his old method of warfare the method of the artist-the appeal to love, the appeal to the heart of man, the appeal to the incredibility of all the glory and all the growth of man, of all the dreadfulness of his fate, being alike closed in universal death. Many are the poems in his later volumes, poems like Vastness, for example, which take up this artist-position. At last, as it seems, all his distress ceased in quiet, in a faith even more settled than that of In Memoriam. Some trouble still lives in the last volume, published while he was yet alive. Vastness still strikes. a wavering note. He says in another poem that, “In spite of every creed and faith, Life is the Mystery." In the poem, By an Evolutionist, the end seems a matter of hope rather than of certainty. The last poem in the book, Crossing the Bar, is the first clear cry of happy faith-all doubt and trouble past; and it is a quiet