tower, not that of the schoolman amid his syllogisms. Tennyson falls back upon faith, which is as essential a quality of the soul as reason, and declares that we must interpret the world in terms of those primary laws of human life by which men are distinguished from the brute creation.

This point is so important and so essential for an understanding of the poem, that we must pause here to ask the question, How far is it justifiable to answer the riddle of the world by the "truths deep-seated in our mystic frame "? Are we, as some suggest, guilty of any abrogation of reason by a final acceptance, through an act of faith, of those moral and spiritual laws which are so interwoven with our own personal life? Tennyson declared, "I believe in God not from what I see in Nature but from what I find in man." The Nature to which he referred is that which is portrayed in scientific text-books as a system of mechanical forces, acting and reacting within a fixed system. How far that study might lead us into faith in an unseen Power it is not necessary for us to determine. The fact is, that Nature does not complete itself in this material organisation. Out of its central mystery life has emerged, and

through life, at last, the human soul. To attempt to form any theory of the world without recognising human personality as a fact, would be like offering a criticism of some drama after witnessing only the opening scene.* The mind of man is as real and as essential a part of the nature of things as is the sun or the law of gravitation. Two spectacles filled the mind of Immanuel Kant with awe; the first, that of the starry skies, almost annihilating man by the sense of their vastness; the other, the moral law within the soul, raising him to an infinite dignity. Everything must be taken into account in our our interpretation of Nature. Here, within the mind, we find certain instincts, intuitions, aspirations-men have used different terms to denote them-which have no meaning upon the material plane. They derive their significance from some unseen world, but they are none the less real. Wherever man exists, these inward movements of the soul appear. What then do we make of them? If there is no spiritual world transcending our life of sense and time, and yet within reach of that life, then per

*This point has been very powerfully presented in Prof. D. S. Cairns's "The Reasonableness of the Christian Faith," Chap. II.

sonality is the supreme illusion, and falsehood exists at the very heart of things. Nature ends in irrationality and futility. "If the religious instincts of humanity," declared Romanes in his Thoughts on Religion," "point out no reality as their object, they are out of analogy with other instinctive endowments. Elsewhere in the animal world there is no such thing as an instinct pointing aimlessly." If, however, there is such a world, then the human powers that seek it and discern it and relate us to it are the significant and illuminating powers of the universe.

We ask ourselves, therefore, "Are these inward laws real? Are these voices of the soul rightly heard by us? Do these roots of life bed themselves in the spiritual world?" It is immensely significant that the world's seers, those who have had power to look most deeply into the mysterious depths of human personality, have answered these questions in the affirmative. They have said: This is how man is constituted. However they have come to pass, these things are so. great story of Nature ends in man, and therefore must be interpreted through man. The Mind behind everything has expressed itself in the human

The

soul." That is the faith which delivers them and us from what would otherwise be a supreme mockery. The cry, the hunger, the restlessness, the longing of the soul, have been produced out of Nature but cannot be satisfied by Nature. The whole system has emerged in one greater than itself—greater in obedience, greater in moral choice, greater in selfsacrificing surrender to duty and to love-so that looking upon the whole process, we understand afresh the great words: "For the earnest expectation of the creature waiteth for the revealing of the sons of God."

That is the answer of the poet. He stands upon his watch-tower, and proclaims the final laws and certainties of Nature, made manifest in the human spirit. He had seen the wonderful panorama of unfolding worlds, the coming and going of almost endless forms and types of life; the terror and the beauty of the world now dizzied and now entranced his mind-and, he wonders what it all means. When Hallam died it seemed as if no one cared, as if this beautiful Nature had no heart, or else one that was false and cruel. Then he looked again and this time with a truer, deeper, steadier vision, until the soul of man became

luminous to him, and new depths of reality stood revealed. Hallam's love for him, and his love for Hallam, led Tennyson to revise all his hasty judgments. That friend of his had appeared in the midst of so much that was perplexing-his chivalry, his splendid purposes, his prayerful heart, his spiritual faith, his power to love and to evoke love, and all that he was to those who knew him best. And musing upon this manifestation of what must have been implicit in creation's purpose from the beginning, the fire kindled in his mind and he became a prophet to his age.

"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.”

In the old Greek legend, those who looked upon the hideous face of Medusa were turned to stone, and the forests about her cave were full of men who had been petrified by her glance. When Perseus went out to slay the awful Gorgon, he