deny the deity of Christ and strongly dissent from many time-honored
Christian teachings.

Tennyson most assuredly revolted against the brutalities of
Christianity; which, by the way, are countenanced by very explicit texts
in the New Testament. He did not approve the text, "Great is your reward
in heaven." He was above such huckstering. He sang of Virtue--

She desires no isles of the blest, no quiet seats of the just,
To rest in a golden grove, or to bask in a summer sky.
Give her the wages of going on, and not to die.

A noble petition! though in the teeth of a too patent destiny.

The doctrine of eternal Hell he first turned from, then denounced, and
finally despised. It was for wavering as to this hideous dogma that the
Rev. F. D. Maurice got into trouble with his College. He was godfather
to Tennyson's little boy, and the poet invited him, in exquisitely
charming verse, to share his hospitality.

For, being of that honest few,
Who give the Fiend himself his due,
Should eighty-thousand college-councils
Thunder "Anathema," friend, at you;

Should all our churchmen foam in spite
At you, so careful of the right,
Yet one lay-hearth would give you welcome
(Take it and come) to the Isle of Wight.

Tennyson had already, in "In Memoriam," proclaimed himself a
Universalist, as Browning did afterwards in his powerful lines on the
old Morgue at Paris. He had expressed the hope

That nothing walks with aimless feet;
That not one life should be destroyed,
Or cast as rubbish to the void,
When God hath made the pile complete;
That not a worm is cloven in vain;
That not a moth with vain desire
Is shrivelled in a fruitless fire,
Or but subserves another's gain.

Such, a poet could never see the divinity of the wicked, awful words,
"Depart from me, ye cursed, into everlasting fire." He denounced it in
"Despair," a poem of his old age. Well does he make the Agnostic cry out
to the minister--

What! I should call on that
Infinite Love that has served us so well?
Infinite cruelty rather that made everlasting Hell,
Made us, foreknew us, foredoomed us, and does what he will with his own;
Better our dead brute mother who never has heard us groan!

This is fierce denunciation, but it pales before the attack on Hell in
"Rizpah"; that splendid poem, which is perhaps the very noblest effort
of Tennyson's genius; outwei