detail." 40 To sum up. I have shown how an assembly of administrative officials changed into an oligarchy of Crown vassals; how it extended itself to embrace all tenants-in-chief only to be limited once again: first to the more considerable of the barones, then to the recipients of a special writ of summons. The qualification for membership has altered from 'office' to 'tenure,' from 'tenure' to 'writ,' and the way is now prepared for the title of the modern peer who claims to sit in right of succession to some original recipient of a summons. In this fashion have the Witan of Anglo-Saxon days been converted by lapse of time and force of circumstance into an hereditary parliamentary peerage, which still retains in its customs and characteristics manifold traces of its original source. L. F. RUSHBROOK WILLIAMS. 40 Essays, 4th series, 455-6. SOME ELEMENTS IN THE RELIGIOUS TEACHING OF TENNYSON. Towar bwards the end of his life, Tennyson remarked to a friend, "A poet must teach, but not preach." Yet it is not too much to say that Tennyson was always preaching, and that many of his poems might be called topical sermons. For example, The Palace of Art enforces the sinfulness of human pride, the hatefulness of human selfishness, and the certainty of a terrible retribution; Aylmer's Field denounces in the impassioned language of which the poet was so great a master, The Evils of Worldliness; A Vision of Sin follows the sensualist through his career to his awful fate; and St. Simeon Stylites teaches by its irony and pathos that religion is not fierce and unlovely. In these and many others of his poems Tennyson sought to accomplish the end of every true sermon -to reprove, rebuke, exhort and inspire. Throughout all he wrote there was the refrain: Be Pure, Be Good, Be Dutiful. For the prophet's vocation, he was in great measure fitted by the moral and religious training of his early home. His father was a clergyman, as was also his mother's father; and thus in a literal sense, he was of the sons of the prophets. His mother, with whom until 1850, he was in almost daily contact, was a woman, not only of fine intellectual gifts, but also of a natural, and simple piety. The impression she made on the mind of her son may be seen from the portrait of "Isabel," which is not only his best portrait of women, but also the portrait of the best woman. It was she, too, that inspired the well known lines towards the end of the Princess, beginning: "Yet was there one thro' whom I loved her." With such a father and mother the atmosphere of his early home was one suited to the growth of the moral and religious nature of the young poet. He was further qualified for his long ministry of sixty years by his own religious experiences. It was a simple and evangelical doctrine that was taught in his early home, but also a narrow and severe one. In his father's rectory, as in so many other religious homes, Theology was confounded with Religion, and orthodoxy with personal piety. To believe what the Church taught was to be a Christian; even to doubt and question it, was to be a sinner. Tennyson was still enjoying his "early heaven," when in 1828 he entered Trinity College, Cambridge, as an undergraduate. But his "happy views" were soon to pass away. These were the days when Theology and Science were in death grips, and when, more particularly, Geology was declaring that its facts made fiction in the early chapters of Genesis. Theology, on the other hand, was making frenzied counter attacks, or vainly trying to square the circle by a variety of ingenious, but far-fetched interpretations of the opening pasages of the Bible. Tennyson had a deep sympathy with both sides. The Bible was dear to him from childhood; but "it is man's privilege to doubt," and this privilege the poet never could or would forego. In that little read poem, "The Supposed Confessions of a Second-rate Sensitive Mind," as also in many passages of the "In Memoriam," we have a glimpse of the conflict that raged in his heart, and can see by what bitter experiences he gained that sympathy with doubters which made him a true high priest to many a weary soul to whom the worth of the professional teacher of religion was as sounding brass or a tinkling cymbal. Further, as a religious teacher, Tennyson appeared at the psychological moment. The Church at the time of which we speak, was filled with a great zeal for the form of sound words, but was not distinguished by a strong religious enthusiasm. Both in and out of the National Church, a truly spiritual religion had almost died out, and its ministers had ceased to tend the fire upon the alter. But a revival was at hand-a revival issuing in a double movement-the High Church Party, and the Broad Church Party, with their respective leaders, Newman, who became a cardinal in the Roman Church, and Maurice, to whom, even yet, the Anglican Church has done but faint justice. Now, while Tennyson sympathised deeply with Newman's veneration for the past, Maurice was his master, and he continued to preach the doctrines of this great and liberal-minded Theologian, though of course, not in a dogmatic form, in those melodious pages in which many a reader found the bread and the water of spiritual life. We are now ready to ask, What are the specific contents of Tennyson's religious teaching ? First of all it may be said that his teaching was distinctively Protestant-that he was a sturdy and uncompromising Protestant. Tennyson, of course, was not blind to the beauty of some types of Roman Catholic saintliness. Never, perhaps, was the witchery and the glamour of Roman religion and worship more beautifully and more persuasively wrought into verse than in the throbbing lines of St. Agnes' Eve; and never was the religious idealism of chivalry more winsomely portrayed than in the exalted verses of Sir Galahad. But while he venerated the pure heart of the Roman saint that gave the vision of God, he had no toleration for the peculiar and distinctive tenets of the Roman Church. The utter foolishness of the ascetic idea, stands out clear in St. Simeon Stylites. The doctrine of the Mass and of Transubstantiation are denounced in Queen Mary, through the mouth of Cranmer, in language often more vigorous than poetical: "It is but a Communion, not a mass; A holy supper, not a sacrifice; No man can make his Maker." The Pope, too, comes in for a share of his denunciation: "As for the pope, I count him Anti-Christ, With all his devil's doctrines, and refuse, But it is in the noble drama of Becket that we have, perhaps, the best, certainly the most temperate, exposition of his steady opposition to the claims of Rome, or rather to one of her foremost claims. The two contrasted characters, Becket and Henry, the Churchman and the King, are splendidly drawn. Many a time as we read the thrilling pages our heart is with Becket, so calm, so grand, so fearless, even in the hour of his tragic death, so loyal to his church, and so full, too, of human feeling of the longing for what might have been. Tennyson's Becket is in every way worthy of being put beside Shakespeare's Wolsey; and when one has said that, one can say no more. But while we are drawn to Becket, both by the winsomeness and the strength of his character, Tennyson never allows us to forget that the claims of Rome were impossible in a free country, and to a free King, that Henry had reason and justice on his side in contending for the secular control of clerics, and that to grant the claims of the Churchman would be to make the priest supreme over all persons and over all causes, and to make England a fief of Rome. The foundation of Tennyson's personal creed was a belief in God-in a personal God, not in an impersonal Force, or Law, or Principle, or stream of tendency-a belief that God is He, and not It. Tennyson was not ignorant of the arguments for a self sufficient universe, nor was he one to underrate their strength, but he put the whole Theistic argument in a sentence when he said, that difficult though it is to believe in God, it is still more difficult, not to believe in Him. "Nothing worthy proving can be proven"-proven to satisfy the requirements of the mere logician; but Tennyson found the old reasons for Theistic belief sufficiently valid. own blameless King, he could say: I found Him in the shining of the stars, I marked Him in the flowering of the field. Like his Still more certainly did he find Him in the highest emotions of the Soul and in the hidden man of the heart. If e'er when faith had fallen asleep, I heard a voice, "Believe no more." A warmth within the breast would melt Believing in a personal God, Tennyson also believed in the providence of God. In his early days, he cried, as a young man will, "Man is master of his fate." and later, when taught otherwise by experience, "Man can half control his doom"; but last of all, "There is a hand that guides"; "He that made it will guide." In his dramas especially, he reveals his belief in a providence in history. Throughout them all, "The idea of providence in history is the veiling idea in Tennyson's mind -a providence that shapes the nation's ends, let kings and statesmen rough hew them as they will." Faith in God involves also belief in prayer to God. Tennyson's references to the help one can get from prayer are |