white-robed throng bending at this moment, in adoring love, in perfect happiness, in unbroken peace before Him? It is the one secret of His beautiful life on earth; it was absolutely unselfish. When He was hungry He did not work a miracle, but when others were hungry He did. He did good to people, not only by taking away their sins, but by taking away their sorrows too. Strive to be like Him in this. It will make all around you happy. It will be better for the souls of those who see you than a hundred sermons. Life will be happy to you if you make it rich in the smiles of those whom you have loved and served. And it will be said perhaps of you, as it was of one of England's famous sons, that in your whole life there was

"A sweet, attractive kind of grace,
A full assurance given by looks,
Continual comfort in a face,

The lineament of Gospel-books;
For sure that count'nance cannot lie,
Whose thoughts are written in the eye."

THE POETRY OF DOUBT.

BY W. DAVENPORT ADAMS.

ONE of the most remarkable characteristics of nineteenth-century poetry is the manner in which it represents for modern readers. the religious hopes and fears of the best modern minds. Especially characteristic of that poetry is the mode in which those fears are brought before us. Of religious hope English poetry has been always full. The English have been an essentially Godloving people, and their poets have over and over again put into verse the deepest feelings and aspirations of their souls. Since the Reformation there has always been, of course, a body of thinkers noticeable for scepticism of the reverent and irreverent sort; but, until within the last half-century or so, the doubts and fears of thoughtful and earnest men have hardly found an echo in the poetry of the time. Shelley and Byron may be said to have written the poetry of pure revolt; but that is hardly what is meant. Shelley revolted against God as he conceived Him; Byron's quarrel was more, perhaps, with Society than anything else, and with its fashionable forms rather than with mankind in general. Shelley was the Don Quixote of his art, tilting against a windmill of his own imagination. Byron's gibes and sneers were not those of an intellectual doubter; it seems clear that if Byron was, religiously, anything at all, he was a Calvinist, who struggled hard against the repulsive phases of his creed. It has been reserved till recent years for the poetry of doubt to find its way into our literature. In the eighteenth century, widely spread as were the views of Voltaire and his English imitators and successors, and saturated as was even a portion of the Church with views which, if not atheistic, were assuredly theistic and materialistic, there were no laureates of the questioning spirit. The questioning spirit, as we now understand it, did not exist. The scepticism of the time was wholly intellectual, and was by no means general among the masses. It was a quality of the educated classes, and even in their case did not touch them very nearly. It was more the fruit of over-study of philosophy than of quickened feeling, matured in melancholy meditation.

It was reserved, I repeat, for the latter portion of the nineteenth century to produce the race of doubters pure and simple-the men of genuine religious aspirations, who, if they reject or only half-accept the creed handed down to them through eighteen centuries, do so with a regret, if not a misery, which is wholly sincere, and gives an added pathos to their poetic utterances. There may be one or two modern singers who actually glory in their unbelief, exhibiting a fondness for the ideas of paganism which shows that Christianity could never have had any real or genuine charm for them; but these men are few. For the most part, the poetic doubt of to-day is reverent and regretful in its tone. There is no rejoicing over vanished illusions and beliefs. There is not even an exultant acceptance of the theories of unbelief. It is characteristic of the doubters of our time that, if they wholly disavow the creed of their forefathers, they declare no other: they do not rush from one side to the other; they may be disposed to rest upon conscience or morality, but they do not espouse the many creed-alternatives which are offered to them. Some, again, can hardly be said wholly to reject the doctrines of the past. They doubt them, but they are equally doubtful of the nostrums proffered in their stead. Their attitude is one rather of suspension than of rejection. They stand like Sir Bedivere in the poem, and like Æneas before him, "this way and that dividing the swift mind." Or perchance, a farther step is taken. There are those who may be said to have passed through all the varieties of doubt, and to have got into a region where, if they cannot take up again all their old beliefs, they can at least select from them enough to stand by. Such men, while unable to subscribe to the formulas of particular denominations, are at least able to say that they are Christians-that they have faith in some one and in something, though in detail their views be as unorthodox or heterodox as those of other doubters. It is, in fact, easy to divide the doubters of the day into the three classes of the negative, the wavering, and the positive, and the poetry of doubt may be divided in exactly the same manner.

Of the negative section of these doubters it is not unfair, perhaps, to take Mr. Matthew Arnold as the most prominent example. His attitude towards the creeds and no-creeds of the day may be described and summed up in these four lines from "The Grande Chartreuse":

Wandering between two worlds, one dead,
The other powerless to be born,
With nowhere yet to rest my head,

Like these, on earth I wait forlorn.

For him, Christianity is practically dead. Christ has reigned, but his empire is now broken. As Obermann is made to say: Ay, ages long endured his span

Of life 'tis true received

That gracious Child, that thorn-crown'd Man!
-He lived while we believed.

While we believed, on earth he went,

And open stood his grave;

Men called from chamber, church, and tent,

And Christ was by to save.

Now he is dead! Far hence he lies

In the lone Syrian town;

And on his grave, with shining eyes,

The Syrian stars look down.

Elsewhere we read:

The sea of faith

Was once, too, at the full, and round earth's shore

Lay like the folds of a bright girdle furl'd;

But now I only hear

Its melancholy, long, withdrawing roar,

Retreating to the breath

Of the night wind down the vast edges drear

And naked shingles of the world.

To be sure, Mr. Arnold has a "basis of faith" sufficient, at any rate, for himself. His standpoint in this respect may perhaps be gathered best from the sonnet which he calls "The Better Part":

Long fed on boundless hopes, O race of man,
How angrily thou spurn'st all simpler fare!

"Christ," some one says, 66 was human as we are;
No judge eyes us from Heaven, our sin to scan;

We live no more when we have done our span.'

"Well, then, for Christ," thou answerest, "who can care?
From sin, which Heaven records not, why forbear?

Live we like brutes our life without a plan!"

So answerest thou; but why not rather say:
"Hath man no second life?-Pitch this one high!
Sits there no judge in Heaven our sin to see?
More strictly, then, the inward judge obey!
Was Christ a man like us ?-Ah, let us try
If we, then, too, can be such men as he!"

Here we have, condensed, what may be termed Mr. Arnold's

religious system; but "religious" is an expression which many would refuse to use in such connection, and, actually, in reference to Christianity, Mr. Arnold's position must be regarded as one of pure negation.

With Clough, on the other hand, it was altogether different. Mr. Arnold knows, at any rate, what he does not believe; Clough, it is hardly too much to say, knew neither what he believed nor what he did not believe. He may be taken as a representative of the waverers-of the men whose doubt is universal, extending as much to the new nostrums as to the old beliefs. As he says, in one of his most characteristic pieces :

"Old things need not be therefore true,

O brother men, nor yet the new;

Ah! still awhile the old thought retain,
And yet consider it again!

The souls of now two thousand years
Have laid up here their toils and fears,
And all the earnings of their pain,-
Ah, yet consider it again!

We! what do we see? Each a space

Of some few yards before his face;
Does that the whole wide plan explain?

Ah, yet consider it again!

In somewhat the same mood, we may say, was written the double poem, "Easter Day," in which the poet throws equal fervour into the declarations that "Christ is not risen" and On the one hand, we have him

"Christ is yet risen."

saying:

Eat, drink, and play, and think that this is bliss:
There is no Heaven but this;

There is no hell,

Save earth, which serves the purpose doubly well,
Seeing it visits still

With equalest apportionment of ill

Both good and bad alike, and brings to one same dust

The unjust and the just

With Christ, who is not risen.

On the other, he declares :

Though dead, not dead;

Not gone, though fled;

Not lost, though vanished.

In the great gospel, and true creed,

He is yet risen indeed;

Christ is yet risen.