Jesus. He proclaimed truths which He believed to be universal God's Fatherhood, man's brotherhood, love as the absolute life of God and of man, personal immortality in God, the forgiveness of sin -but He never put these into any fixed intellectual form; He never attempted to prove them by argument; He never limited them by a prosaic statement of their import; He never took them out of the realm of love and faith; He never gave them a special shape or organised them into a body of belief. He left them free, left them as spirit and life; and as to their form, every nation and kindred and tongue, every kind of society, nay, every person, could give them whatever intellectual shape each of them pleased. If they were loved

and felt, and the love at the root of them expressed

NG! In the action of a life, I do not believe that Jesus

cared at all what form they took in the understand

Rooke ing, or how they were organised into ritual and

Jorma

creed-provided only the form or the organisation did not contradict the universality of the love of God, or the universality of the love between man and man which was contained in them. Theological creeds were nothing to Jesus, but their limitations which produced hatreds and cruelties and quarrels, these, to this hour, He looks upon with the pity and the indignation of love. The absence then of definite opinions about infinite truths, which is the necessary position of the poet, which was the position of Tennyson in his poetry, is the position of Christ Himself.

Again, Christianity does not take the same ground as ethics, nor was Christ, primarily, a moral teacher. "This do and thou shalt live," the moralist says,

and it is a good thing to say. "When you have done all," says Jesus, carrying the whole matter of life into boundless aspiration, say, We are unprofitable servants, we have done only what it was our duty to do." "Lord, how oft shall I forgive my brother? Unto seven times? Surely there

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must be some definition." "Unto seven times ?" answered Christ, in astonishment at any limit to forgiveness 'nay, any number of times - to seventy times seven!" "All these things," cried the young moralist, "all these duties, I have kept from my youth up. What lack I yet?" That was the cry of the ideal in him: the inward longing for something more than conduct for the unknown perfection. And Jesus, answering this aspiration to the ideal, to those unreached summits of love which transcend duty-said, "Sell what thou hast, and give to the poor, and come and follow me." "Whom shall I love," they asked; "my relations, my friends, my own nation, the members of my Church? Where is the limit?"

There is no limit, was the teaching of Jesus; the infinitude of God's love is your true aim. "Love your enemies, do good to them that hate you; so will you be like your Father in heaven, whose sun shines on the evil and good alike." "Shall I be content with the duties which I can do, with the love I can certainly give to my fellow men, with the plain things which lie before me in this world, with the possible in conduct ?" No, thought Jesus, that is not my teaching, nor the ground I take. You must aspire to the impossible, strive to be equal to the infinite love, love far beyond anything you can understand. It is not the possible,

but the perfect, for which you must live.

"Be

ye perfect in love, even as your Father is perfect in love." Union with the infinite Love by loving; that is the aim of man, an illimitable aim.

At every point this position of Christ is in the strictest analogy to that which the artist takes up with regard to beauty. Love, not duty, is the

first thing with Jesus; the teaching of loving, not the teaching of morality. If love be secured, morality is secured. If a man love God, that is, if he love the living source of love, righteousness, justice and truth; he is absolutely certain to secure noble conduct. Morality then is not neglected, it is taken in the stride of love. And that is the root of Jesus. Love fulfils the law; and all the poets, and every artist (whether nominally a Christian or not), take a similar position. Love, in its tireless outgoings towards infinite beautythe seen suggesting for ever the unseen beauty, and that which is conceived of it opening out a vision of new loveliness as yet unconceived-is the artists' root; and whatever morality they teach is the secondary matter, comes as a necessary result of love having its perfect work-love which, when we have reached the farthest horizon we first saw of it, opens out another equally far, and when we have attained that, another, and again another, always and for ever.

This is the Christian position, and it is the position Tennyson preserves all through his poetry. There is no one, it is true, from whose work better lessons can be drawn for the conduct of life, for morals in their higher ranges, than can be drawn from Tennyson. But below all conduct,

as its foundation impulse, lies in this poet's work the love of the infinite Love, the passion of unending effort for it, and the conviction of an eternity of life in which to pursue after it. This eternal con

tinuance in us of the conscious life of love; in other words, of incessant action towards greater nearness to the illimitable Love which is God, is the position of Christ; and it is the position of one who believes in a personal immortality. One of the foundation faiths of Jesus was that every man and woman was as unbrokenly connected with the Eternal God as a child is with a father. God was our nearest relation; the relationship was a personal one, and could never be untied. In that, our immortal continuance, our immortal personality, our immortal goodness, were necessarily contained. The declaration of immortality was not in itself new, but this ground of it-the Fatherhood of God and the childhood to Him of every man so that each soul was felt by God, in Himself, as a special person to whom He was in a special relation-this, and the universality of its application, were new.

It might be

This was Tennyson's position. proved up to the hilt from his poetry, and it makes him clearly Christian. Owing to the circumstances of his time, it was especially round this question of immortality that Tennyson, in his relation to Christianity, concentrated himself. Its truth held in it for him the Fatherhood of God, the salvation of man, the brotherhood of man, the worth of human life. If it were not true, Christianity in his eyes was not truethere was

no God in the universe for man; there was no

true union possible between man and man; there was no religion-nothing to bind men together; there was no explanation of the pain of earth, and the whole history of man was a dreadful tragedy. That was his view, and he maintained it with all a poet's fervour.

But it would not be true to say that Tennyson had not to fight for it against thoughts within which endeavoured to betray it, and against doubts which besieged it from without. He did not always repose in it; he had to fight for it sword in hand, and many a troublous wound he took. He was a poet, sensitive to all the movements of the world around him, and it fell to his lot to live at a time when the faith in immortality has had to run the gauntlet between foes or seeming friends, of a greater variety and of a greater skill than ever before in the history of man. He felt every form of this attack in himself; he battled with himself as he felt them; he battled with them outside himself; and he won his personal victory, having sympathised thus, throughout the course of sixty years, with those who have had to fight the same battle. Of what worth his contribution is to the problem is not the question here. I only state the fact, and the manner in which it was done. It was done in the manner of a poet-never by argument as such, rarely from the intellectual point of viewbut by an appeal to the the necessities of love. he would have, at that poet, ceased to rest the faith in that unprovable conviction that there was a

emotions, by an appeal to Had he done otherwise, point, ceased to be the truth of immortality on