The Worlds Best Poetry, Volume 4 | Page 4

not in
the light alone."
Those words of his, so often quoted, are often sadly misused:
"There lives more faith in honest doubt,
Believe me, than in half the
creeds."
When men make these words an excuse for an attitude of habitual
negation and denial, assuming that it is better to doubt everything than
to believe anything, they grossly pervert the poet's meaning. It is the
faith that lives in honest doubt that his heart applauds. He is thinking of
the fact that it is real faith in God which leads men to doubt the dogmas
which misrepresent God. But conscious as he is of the shadow that lies
upon our field of vision, he is always insisting that it is in the light and
not in the shadow that we must walk. Therefore, although
demonstration is impossible, faith is rational. So do those great words
of "The Ancient Sage" admonish us:
"Thou canst not prove that thou art body alone,
Nor canst thou prove

that thou art spirit alone,
Nor canst thou prove that thou art both in
one.
Thou canst not prove thou art immortal, no,
Nor yet that thou
art mortal--nay, my son.
Thou canst not prove that I who speak with
thee,
Am not thyself in converse with thyself,
For nothing worthy
proving can be proven
Nor yet disproven. Wherefore be thou wise,

Cleave ever to the sunnier side of doubt,
And cling to Faith beyond
the forms of Faith!
She reels not in the storm of warring words,
She
brightens at the clash of 'Yes' and 'No,'
She sees the best that
glimmers through the worst,
She feels the sun is hid but for a night,

She spies the summer through the winter bud,
She tastes the fruit
before the blossom falls,
She hears the lark within the songless egg,

She finds the fountain where they wailed 'Mirage!'"
This illustrates Tennyson's mental attitude. If all who plume themselves
upon their doubts would put themselves into this posture of mind, they
would find themselves in possession of a very substantial faith.
Tennyson has touched with light more than one problem of the soul.
The little stanza beginning
"Flower in the crannied wall"
has shown us how the mysteries of being are shared by the commonest
lives; the short lyric "Wages" condenses into a few lines the strongest
proof of the life to come; and "Crossing the Bar" has borne many a
spirit in peace out to the boundless sea.
Robert Browning's robust faith helps us in a different way. His daring
and triumphant optimism makes us ashamed of doubt. In "Abt Vogler,"
in "Rabbi Ben Ezra," in "Pompilia," in "Christmas Eve," we are caught
up and carried onward by an unflinching and overcoming faith. Perhaps
the most convincing arguments for religious reality in Browning's
poems are those of "An Epistle" and of "Cleon," where the cry of the
human soul for the assurance which the Christian faith supplies is given
such a penetrating voice. And there is no reasoning about the
Incarnation, in any theological book that I have ever read, which seems

to me so cogent as that great passage in "Saul," where David cries:
"Could I wrestle to raise him from sorrow, grow poor to enrich, To fill
up his life, starve my own out. I would--knowing which, I know that
my service is perfect. Oh, speak through me now! Would I suffer for
him that I love? So wouldst thou--so wilt thou!"
But, after all, Browning's great hymns of faith are those in which he
faces the future, like "Prospice," and the prologue of "La Saisiaz," and
the epilogue of "Asolando,"--triumphant songs, in which one of the
healthiest-minded of human beings showed himself:
"One who never turned his back but marched breast forward, Never
doubted clouds would break,
Never dreamed though right were
worsted wrong would triumph, Held we fall to rise, are baffled to fight
better, sleep to wake!"
It would be a grateful task to make extended record of the service
rendered to religion by the great choir of singers whose names appear
upon the pages of this book. To Elizabeth Barrett Browning our debt is
large, though her note is oftenest plaintive and the faith which she
illustrates is that by which suffering is turned to strength. Our own New
England psalmist, also, has been to great multitudes a revealer and a
comforter; few in any age have seen the central truths of Christianity
more clearly, or felt them more deeply, or uttered them more
convincingly. In such poems as "My Soul and I," "My Psalm," "Our
Master," "The Eternal Goodness," "The Brewing of Soma," and
"Andrew Ryckman's Prayer," Whittier has made the whole religious
world his debtor.
How many more there are--of those whom the world reckons as the
greater bards, and of those whom it assigns to lower places--to whom
we have found ourselves indebted for the clearing of our