, they would appear to feel the presumption of individualising,
the great Soul of the worlds by even so much as naming him.

Who dare name him, and who confess I believe him!

There is a reverent as well as an irreverent impatience of forms
associated with the Formless and the Infinite; and because of it one
never yet heard or read of a man truly great who had not the
profoundest reverence for religion. But, however that may be, it is
plain that we are justified in speaking of a poet's religion, and in
discussing the religious conceptions which took shape in the soul of
one of the two great poets of the Victorian era.

Five years ago Tennyson passed hence, "crossing the bar" on that
tideless sea, still as the silent life which left its worn-out frame to
"turn again home". So much as the great poet desired that the world
should know of his own aspirations, his hopes and fears of the great
Hereafter, has been given to us in his own sweet singing, and a memoir
written by his son. It turns out that Tennyson was no exception to his
noble order. Like all the great singers he was a man of faith--a man
penetrated to his heart's core with the sense of the indestructible
character of the religious instinct, and of man's deep need of
communion with the Great Life which is within and beyond him--the Soul
of souls whom men call God.

The significance of this fact is not to be lost upon reflective minds.
In an age when positive science has made a progress which borders
almost on the miraculous; when discoveries of the innermost secrets of
nature, coupled with astounding combinations of her elements and
forces, which supply us with the chemical contrivances and implements
for further research surpassing the wildest dreams of astrologers and
alchemists of old, there has been an unmistakable tendency to push the
Divine agency farther and farther back in the chain of phenomenal
causation, until it would appear that it had been finally thrust out of
the world altogether. "I have swept the heavens with my telescope,"
said Lalande, "and I have not found your God." "The heavens are
telling no more the glory of God," said Auguste Comte, "but that of
Herschel and Laplace." Is it indeed so? The past has done all in its
power to make it so, and Lalande and Comte represent the inevitable and
natural reaction against the incredible puerilities, the stupid,
obstinate opposition to all science not in conformity with the Nicene
and At