possible in conduct?" No, thought Jesus, that is not my teaching, nor the ground I take. You must aspire to the impossible, strive to be equal to the infinite Love, love far beyond anything you can understand. It is not the possible, but the perfect, for which you must live. "Be ye perfect in love, even as your Father is perfect in love." Union with the infinite Love by loving; that is the aim of man, an illimitable aim.

At every point this position of Christ is in the strictest analogy to that which the artist takes up with regard to beauty. Love, not duty, is the first thing with Jesus; the teaching of loving, not the teaching of morality. If love be secured, morality is secured. If a man love God, that is, if he love the living source of love, righteousness, justice and truth, he is absolutely certain to secure noble conduct. Morality then is not neglected, it is taken in the stride of love. And that is the root of Jesus. Love fulfils the law; and all the poets, and every artist (whether nominally a Christian or not) take a similar position. Love, in its tireless outgoings towards infinite beauty-the seen suggesting for ever the unseen beauty, and that which is conceived of it opening out a vision of new loveliness as yet unconceived-is the artists' root; and whatever morality they teach is the secondary matter, comes as a necessary result of love having its perfect work-love which, when we have reached the farthest horizon we first saw of it, opens out another equally far, and when we have attained that, another, and again another, always and for ever.

This is the Christian position, and it is the position Tennyson preserves all through his poetry. There is no one, it is true, from whose work better lessons can be drawn for the conduct of life, for morals in their higher ranges, than can be drawn from Tennyson. But below all conduct, as its foundation impulse, lies in this poet's work the love of the infinite Love, the passion of unending effort for it, and the conviction of an eternity of life in which to pursue after it. This eternal continuance in us of the conscious life of love; in other words, of incessant action towards greater nearness to the illimitable Love which is God, is the position of Christ; and it is the position of one who believes in a personal immortality. One of the foundation faiths of Jesus was that every man and woman was as unbrokenly connected with the Eternal God as a child is with a father. God was our nearest relation; the relationship was a personal one, and could never be untied. In that, our immortal continuance, our immortal personality, our immortal goodness, were necessarily contained. The declaration of immortality was not in itself new, but this ground of it-the Fatherhood of God and the childhood to Him of every man so that each soul was felt by God, in Himself, as a special person to whom He was in a special relation-this, and the universality of its application,

were new.

This was Tennyson's position. It might be proved up to the hilt from his poetry, and it makes him clearly Christian. Owing to the circumstances of his time, it

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.

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