THE DOUBTERS AND THE CLERGY. 327

is a God, find it hard to trust him, and how fierce with those who, unable, from the lack of harmony around and in them, to say they are sure there is a God, would yet, could they find him, trust him indeed. "Ah, but," answer such of the clergy and their followers, "you want a God of your own making." "Certainly," the doubters reply, "we do not want a God of your making that would be to turn the universe into a hell, and you into its torturing demons. We want a God like that man whose name is so often on your lips, but whose spirit you understand so little -so like him that he shall be the bread of life to all our hunger-not that hunger only already satisfied in you, who take the limit of your present consciousness for that of the race, and say, 'This is all the world needs' we know the bitterness of our own hearts, and your incapacity for intermeddling with its joy. We

have another mountain-range, from whence Bursteth a sun unutterably bright;

nor for us only, but for you also, who will not have the truth except it come to you in a system authorized of man."

I have attributed a general utterance to these men, widely different from each other as I know they are.

Here is a voice from one of them, Arthur Hugh Clough, who died in 1861, well beloved. It follows upon two fine poems, called The Questioning Spirit, and Bethesda, in which is represented the condition of many of the finest minds of the pre

sent century. Let us receive it as spoken by one in the foremost ranks of these doubters, men reviled by their brethren who dare not doubt for fear of offending the God to whom they attribute their own jealousy. But God is assuredly pleased with those who will neither lie for him, quench their dim vision of himself, nor count that his mind which they would despise in a man of his making.

Across the sea, along the shore,
In numbers more and ever more,
From lonely hut and busy town,

The valley through, the mountain down,
What was it ye went out to see,

Ye silly folk of Galilee?

The reed that in the wind doth shake?

The weed that washes in the lake?

The reeds that waver, the weeds that float?—

A young man preaching in a boat.

What was it ye went out to hear
By sea and land, from far and near?
A teacher? Rather seek the feet

Of those who sit in Moses' seat.

Go humbly seek, and bow to them,
Far off in great Jerusalem.

From them that in her courts ye saw,

Her perfect doctors of the law,
What is it came ye here to note?—
A young man preaching in a boat.

A prophet! Boys and women weak!
Declare, or cease to rave:

Whence is it he hath learned to speak?
Say, who his doctrine gave?
A prophet? Prophet wherefore he
Of all in Israel tribes ?—

He teacheth with authority,

And not as do the Scribes.

IN MEMORIAM.

329

Here is another from one who will not be offended if I class him with this school-the finest of critics as one of the most finished of poets-Matthew Arnold. Only my reader must remember that of none of my poets am I free to choose that which is most characteristic: I have the scope of my volume to restrain me.

THE GOOD SHEPHERD WITH THE KID.

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 washed by the baptismal wave!"
So spake the fierce Tertullian.
But she sighed,

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 eye suffused but heart inspired true,
On those walls subterranean, where she hid
Her head in ignominy, death, and tombs,
She her Good Shepherd's hasty image drew;
And on his shoulders, not a lamb, a kid.

Of these writers, Tennyson is the foremost he has written the poem of the hoping doubters, the poem of our age, the grand minor organ-fugue of In Memoriam. It is the cry of the bereaved Psyche into the dark infinite after the vanished Love. His friend is nowhere in his sight, and God is silent. Death, God's final compulsion to prayer, in its dread, its gloom, its utter stillness, its apparent nothingness, urges the cry. Moanings over the dead are mingled with profoundest questionings of philosophy, the signs of nature, and the story of Jesus, while now and then

the star of the morning, bright Phosphor, flashes a few rays through the shifting cloudy dark. And if the sun has not arisen on the close of the book, yet the Aurora of the coming dawn gives light enough to make the onward journey possible and hopeful: who dares say that he walks in the full light? that the counsels of God are to him not a matter of faith, but of vision?

Bewildered in the perplexities of nature's enigmas, and driven by an awful pain of need, Tennyson betakes himself to the God of nature, thus :

LIV.

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?

Are God and Nature then at strife,
That Nature lends such evil dreams,
So careful of the type she seems,
So careless of the single life;

That I, considering everywhere
Her secret meaning in her deeds,
And finding that of fifty seeds
She often brings but one to bear;

I falter where I firmly trod,

And falling with iny weight of cares
Upon the great world's altar-stairs
That slope thro' darkness up to God;

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.

MARTHA, MARY, LAZARUS, AND ANOTHER. 331

Once more, this is how he uses the gospel-tale : Mary has returned home from the sepulchre, with Lazarus so late its prey, and her sister and Jesus :

XXXII.

Her eyes are homes of silent prayer,
Nor other thought her mind admits
But, he was dead, and there he sits,
And he that brought him back is there.

Then one deep love doth supersede
All other, when her ardent gaze
Roves from the living brother's face,
And rests upon the Life indeed.

All subtle thought, all curious fears,
Borne down by gladness so complete,
She bows, she bathes the Saviour's feet
With costly spikenard and with tears.

Thrice blest whose lives are faithful prayers,
Whose loves in higher love endure;
What souls possess themselves so pure,
Or is there blessedness like theirs?

I have thus traced-how slightly!--the course of the religious poetry of England, from simple song, lovingly regardful of sacred story and legend, through the chant of philosophy, to the full-toned lyric of adoration. I have shown how the stream sinks in the sands of an evil taste generated by the worship of power and knowledge, and that a new growth of the