"
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.
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