The Worlds Best Poetry, Volume 4 | Page 3

to solve must always be before his mind, and he must have something to say about them, if he hopes to command the attention of thoughtful men. Yet while we need not depreciate the service that has been rendered by preachers and professional theologians who have sought to put the facts of the religious life into the forms of the new philosophy, we must own our deeper obligation to the poets, by whose vision the spiritual realities have been most clearly discerned.
It was Wordsworth, perhaps, who gave us the first great contribution to the new religious thought by bringing home to us the fact that God is in his world; revealing himself now as clearly as in any of the past ages. The truth of the Divine immanence, which is the foundation of all the more positive religious thinking of to-day, and which is destined, when once its import has been fully grasped, to revolutionize our religious life, is made familiar to our thought in Wordsworth's poetry. To him it was simply an experience; in quite another sense than that in which it was true of Spinoza, it might have been said of him that he was a "God-intoxicated man"; and although his clear English sense permitted no pantheistic merging of the human in the divine, but kept the individual consciousness clear for choice and duty, the realization of the presence of God made nature in his thought supernatural, and life sublime. To him, as Dr. Strong has said, it was plain that "imagination in man enables him to enter into the thought of God--the creative element in us is the medium through which we perceive the meaning of the Creator in his creation. The world without answers to the world within, because God is the soul of both."
"Such minds are truly from the Deity,?For they are Powers; and hence the highest bliss?That flesh can know is theirs,--the consciousness?Of whom they are, habitually infused?Through every image and through every thought,?And all affections by communion raised?From earth to heaven, from human to divine."
The mystical faith by which man is united to God can have no clearer confession. And in the great poem of "Tintern Abbey" this truth received an expression which has become classical;--it must be counted one of the greatest words of that continuing revelation by which the truths of religion are given permanent form:
"For I have learned?To look on nature, not as in the hour?Of thoughtless youth; but hearing oftentimes?The still, sad music of humanity,?Nor harsh nor grating, though of ample power?To chasten and subdue. And I have felt?A presence that disturbs me with the joy?Of elevated thoughts; a sense sublime?Of something far more deeply interfused,?Whose dwelling is the light of setting suns,?And the round ocean, and the living air,?And the blue sky, and in the mind of man:?A motion and a spirit, that impels?All thinking things, all objects of all thought,?And rolls through all things."
We can hardly imagine that the religious experience of mankind will ever suffer these words to drop into forgetfulness; and it would seem that every passing generation must deepen their significance.
The same great testimony to the divine Presence in our lives is borne by many other witnesses in memorable words. Lowell's voice is clear:
"No man can think, nor in himself perceive,?Sometimes at waking, in the street sometimes,?Or on the hillside, always unforwarned,?A grace of being finer than himself,?That beckons and is gone,--a larger life?Upon his own impinging, with swift glimpse?Of spacious circles, luminous with mind,?To which the ethereal substance of his own?Seems but gross cloud to make that visible,?Touched to a sudden glory round the edge."
If to this central truth of religion,--the reality of the communion of the human spirit with the divine--the poets have borne such impressive testimony, not less positively have they asserted many other of the great things of the spirit. Sometimes they have helped us to believe, by identifying themselves with us in our struggles with the doubts that loosen our hold on the great realities. No man of the last century has done more for Christian belief than Alfred Tennyson, albeit he has been a confessed doubter. But what he said of Arthur Hallam is quite as true of himself:
"He fought his doubts, and gathered strength,?He would not make his judgment blind,?He faced the spectres of the mind?And laid them; thus he came at length,
To find a stronger faith his own,?And Power was with him in the night,?Which makes the darkness and the light,?And dwells 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