The same great testimony to the divine Presence in our lives is borne by many other
witnesses in memorable words. Lowell's voice is clear:
"No man can think, nor in himself perceive,
Sometimes at waking, in the street sometimes,
Or on the hillside, always unforwarned,
A grace of being finer than himself,
That beckons and is gone,—a larger life
Upon his own impinging, with swift glimpse
Of spacious circles, luminous with mind,
To which the ethereal substance of his own
Seems but gross cloud to make that visible,
Touched to a sudden glory round the edge."
If to this central truth of religion,—the reality of the communion of the human spirit with
the divine—the poets have borne such impressive testimony, not less positively have they
asserted many other of the great things of the spirit. Sometimes they have helped us to
believe, by identifying themselves with us in our struggles with the doubts that loosen our
hold on the great realities. No man of the last century has done more for Christian belief
than Alfred Tennyson, albeit he has been a confessed doubter. But what he said of Arthur
Hallam is quite as true of himself:
"He fought his doubts, and gathered strength,
He would not make his judgment blind,
He faced the spectres of the mind
And laid them; thus he came at length,
To find a stronger faith his own,
And Power was with him in the night,
Which makes the darkness and the light,
And dwells not in the light alone."
Those words of his, so often quoted, are often sadly misused:
"There lives more faith in honest doubt,
Believe me, than in half the creeds."
When men make these words an excuse for an attitude of habitual negation and denial,
assuming that it is better to doubt everything than to believe anything, they grossly
pervert the poet's meaning. It is the faith that lives in honest doubt that his heart applauds.
He is thinking of the fact that it is real faith in God which leads men to doubt the dogmas
which misrepresent God. But conscious as he is of the shadow that lies upon our field of
vision, he is always insisting that it is in the light and not in the shadow that we must
walk. Therefore, although demonstration is impossible, faith is rational. So do those great
words of "The Ancient Sage" admonish us: