purpose here, shall be seen at last to have triumphed even in the article of death.

O yet we trust that somehow good
Will be the final goal of ill,

To pangs of nature, sins of will,
Defects of doubt, and taints of blood;

That nothing walks with aimless feet;
That not one life shall be destroyed,

Or cast as rubbish to the void,

When God hath made the pile complete.

It has been my purpose to discuss, and even to mention, the separate poems of Tennyson only as this might prepare the way for the consideration of his theology. But, before I leave the third period of his work, the period of broad humanity, I must briefly notice the dramas. Of these "The Cup," "The Falcon," "The Promise of May," and "The Foresters," may be passed by, as of no particular significance, except to demonstrate the poet's lack of supreme dramatic genius. They are slight and fanciful studies of character, which might better have been put into the form of monologue than into that of drama. Our poet is more descriptive than creative. He finds it difficult to invent situations, to diversify action, to represent passion as expressing itself in life, to make the scene supply motive and explain speech. While Shakespeare never lets our attention. flag, Tennyson gives us long harangues and comparatively little movement.

Yet "Harold," "Becket," and "Queen Mary," are great historical dramas, in spite of the fact that they are better adapted for private reading than for acting

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upon the stage. They constitute a trilogy, the common subject of which is "The Making of England." "Harold" depicts the conflict between Saxon and Norman; "Becket" the struggle between church and crown; "Queen Mary" the fight between Protestantism. and Rome. They are invaluable pictures of three great crises in English history. Freeman declared that the poet's insight and imagination had made comprehensible to him certain intricacies of those old times, as his own studies had never done. George Eliot said that "Tennyson's plays run Shakespeare's close." And Hutton, our greatest English critic, ranks "Queen Mary," in dramatic force and general power, higher even than Shakespeare's "King Henry the Eighth."

In passing to the consideration of Tennyson's theological opinions, let me sum up what precedes. The discussion thus far has shown us, not only that our poet believes in God and in a divine order in the universe, but that these beliefs are fundamental to his whole. system of thought. His view of the dignity of poetry

is based upon them. They enter into his conception of the relation of man to woman, of man to his fellow-man, of man to government, and of man to God. A more omnipresent theistic spirit it would be difficult to find in the works of any poet. For this reason I regret all the more that in Tennyson's utterances about God, he has so largely fallen in with methods of expression derived from the agnostic school of modern thinkers.

Let us remember the days in which his poetry had its origin. From 1830 to 1860 the philosophy of Sir William Hamilton was the current one in England.

Mansel showed its implications in his "Limits of Religious Thought," and Herbert Spencer took advantage of it to proclaim that the Ultimate Reality is inscrutable. In spite of the Scripture declarations that "he that loveth God knoweth God," "the pure in heart shall see God," "this is life eternal, that they should know thee, the only true God," many Christian thinkers seemed ready to return to heathen ignorance, and to build an altar "To An Unknown God." Instead of taking Jesus at his word, "He that hath seen me hath seen the Father," and so attributing to God the characteristics of Jesus, they made Jesus' revelation a proof that God is essentially incognizable to finite intelligences.

I find much of this agnosticism in Tennyson. In the introduction to "In Memoriam " we read:

We have but faith: we cannot know;
For knowledge is of things we see ;
And yet we trust it comes from thee,
A beam in darkness: let it grow.

Here is a denial that matters of religion are objects of knowledge since science is knowledge, such matters cannot be objects of science, and there is no science of theology. The poet adopts the vicious principle that knowledge is only of sensuous phenomena and their relations: supersensible things must be apprehended by faith, and faith is not knowledge at all. Henry Drummond challenged this whole method of representation when he said that faith in the New Testament is opposed, not to reason, but to sight. Faith is a higher sort of knowledge. It is an act of reason, of reason in

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the sense of the mind's whole power of knowing, of reason therefore as conditioned upon a right state of the affections. Faith then is the higher knowledge possessed by the loving heart and the upright will.

Yet in his use of the words knowledge and faith Tennyson is not consistent. When it comes to apprehension of the inward world, even though this is supersensible, he calls it knowledge. And at times the soul knows God as it knows itself:

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.

But his wrong conception of faith, as somehow sundered from knowledge, leads the poet to divest God to a large extent of cognizable attributes, and to clothe him with a mist of words in which all definiteness is lost. To Christian hearts that say "Our Father, who art in heaven," it seems chilling as well as tantalizing to hear the prayer at the close of "De Profundis":

Hallowed be Thy name-Halleluiah!

Infinite Ideality!

Immeasurable Reality!

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!

I call the reader to witness, however, that this is no pantheistic prayer. Pantheism denies the separate existence and personality of God. This prayer calls God a Personality, and implies the continued and distinct existence and personality of man also. It is an expression, though in our judgment not a highly poetical or impressive expression, of the doctrine of Paul that in God "we live and move and have our being." There is unquestionably in Tennyson the belief that man is an emanation from God. "The great deep" from which King Arthur comes and to which he goes is not simply the deep of eternity, it is also the deep of the divine existence. So, in "De Profundis," written at the birth of his son, the poet writes:

Out of the deep, my child, out of the deep,
From that true world within the world we see,
Whereof our world is but the bounding shore-
Out of the deep, Spirit, out of the deep,

With this ninth moon, that sends the hidden sun
Down yon dark sea, thou comest, darling boy.

For in the world which is not ours They said

"Let us make man," and that which should be man,

From that one light no man can look upon,

Drew to this shore lit by the suns and moons

And all the shadows.

The thought of this derivation of the soul from God and of its essential oneness with its divine original, is found in Tennyson's earliest poems, it crops out in the works of his middle life, and it persists in those printed just before his death. One may say indeed that this