he moral law, the eternal sanction crowning the
right, inborn in rational man, the very soul of reason within him,
inborn in things--the law which no man ever invented, which never had
beginning, which can know no end, because it is the Divine order
revealed to earth. It is the necessary nature of the one essential
Being, and we recognise it because "we are his offspring," because like
him we are Divine.

"Unknown God!" Yes, but not here. As long as I have the instinct of
ethics, as long as I feel myself constrained to bow down in the dust
before goodness, to deem myself unworthy to tie the latchet of the
shoes of the hero or the saint; so long as I see the course of the
world steadily, undeniably, ascending the sacred hill of progress, so
long must I confess that the Power behind the veil, behind the world,
is a moral Power, that that Power recognises the validity of moral
distinctions as I do, that the ethic law is his law, that when I live
by that law I _see God_--

The God on whom I ever gaze,
The God I never once behold,
Above the cloud, beneath the clod,
The Unseen God, the Unseen God.

[1] These words were written during the opening days of the late
Spanish-American war.

[2] _Recessional_, Rudyard Kipling.

[3] Herbert Spencer, _First Principles, passim_.

[4] Mrs. Barbauld's fine hymn, "As once upon Athenian ground".

XVI.

"A CHAPEL IN THE INFINITE."

Our little systems have their day;
They have their day and cease to be;
They are but broken lights of Thee,
And Thou, O Lord, art more than they,
--TENNYSON, In Memoriam.

The supreme value of the two great poets of the Victorian era is this,
that they have attuned their song to the expression of modern thought
concerning those transcendent realities which must ever possess an
inexhaustible interest for mankind. Thus we see, in an age which
acknowledges the complete emancipation of the human reason, the
supremacy of conscience, the inviolable rights of private judgment,
Tennyson has sung of an "honest doubt" wherein there "lives more faith"
than "in half the creeds" and councils of ecclesiasticism. Browning
has faced the riddle of the universe, the bewildering mystery of a
world of pain and sorrow, with unconquerable courage and hope. His
musician, _Abt Vogler_, believes in eternal harmony, with Plato and
Carlyle:--

There shall never be one lost good! What was, shall live as before;
The evil is nu