t are men better than sheep or goats
That nourish a blind life within the brain,
If knowing God, they lift not hands of prayer,
Both for themselves and those that call them friend?
For so the whole round world is every way
Bound by gold chains about the feet of God."

No wonder is there if King Arthur was upheld: such faith makes
impotence giant-strengthed. He does not tremble. The earth may know
perturbations, but not he. To tournament or battle, or to death, he
goes with smiling face. His trust upholds him. So good is faith. "In
Memoriam" is the biography of doubt and faith at war. The battle waxes
sore, but the day is God's. The battle ebbs to quiet. Calm after
tempest. Tennyson could not stay in doubt. 'T is not a goodly land.
If trepidation has white lip and cheek, 't is not forever. Living
through an age of doubt, Tennyson, so sensitive to every current of
thought as that he felt them all, and in that feeling and
interpretation and strife for mastery over the doubt that kills, made
his book, as Milton has it, "The precious life-blood of a master
spirit;" and ends with:

"Sunset and evening star,
And one clear call for me.

For though from out our bourn of Time and Place
The flood may bear me far,
I hope to see my Pilot face to face,
When I have cross'd the bar."

"In Memoriam" is thought, King Arthur is action; and action is antidote
for doubt. Charles Kingsley's advice,

"Do noble deeds, not dream them all day long,"

is always pertinent and reasonable. This is explanation of that
profound saying of Jesus, "If any man will do my will, he shall know of
the doctrine." Life is exegesis of Scripture. Who do God's will catch
sight of God's face, and their hearts are helped. Lowell's "Sir
Launfal" urges this same truth. He who, for weary and painful years,
had haunted the world, seeking the Holy Grail and finding not the thing
he sought, comes home discouraged to find in winter his castle had
forgotten him, and he was left a wreck of what he had been in his
better days; yet finds, in giving alms to a leprous beggar at his
castle gate to whom he had denied alms in the spirit of alms when he
set out to hunt the Holy Grail, that in so giving he found the Christ.
Action helps God into the heart. Doubts are, many of them, brain-born
and academical; and such, service helps to dispel. To Arthur, God was
vital fact. To Him he held as tenaciously as to his sword;