"Unknown God!" Yes, but not here. As long as I have the instinct of ethics, as long as I feel myself constrained to bow down in the dust before goodness, to deem myself unworthy to tie the latchet of the shoes of the hero or the saint; so long as I see the course of the world steadily, undeniably, ascending the sacred hill of progress, so long must I confess that the Power behind the veil, behind the world, is a moral Power, that that Power recognises the validity of moral distinctions as I do, that the ethic law is his law, that when I live by that law I _see God_-- The God on whom I ever gaze, The God I never once behold, Above the cloud, beneath the clod, The Unseen God, the Unseen God. [1] These words were written during the opening days of the late Spanish-American war. [2] _Recessional_, Rudyard Kipling. [3] Herbert Spencer, _First Principles, passim_. [4] Mrs. Barbauld's fine hymn, "As once upon Athenian ground". XVI. "A CHAPEL IN THE INFINITE." Our little systems have their day; They have their day and cease to be; They are but broken lights of Thee, And Thou, O Lord, art more than they, --TENNYSON, In Memoriam. The supreme value of the two great poets of the Victorian era is this, that they have attuned their song to the expression of modern thought concerning those transcendent realities which must ever possess an inexhaustible interest for mankind. Thus we see, in an age which acknowledges the complete emancipation of the human reason, the supremacy of conscience, the inviolable rights of private judgment, Tennyson has sung of an "honest doubt" wherein there "lives more faith" than "in half the creeds" and councils of ecclesiasticism. Browning has faced the riddle of the universe, the bewildering mystery of a world of pain and sorrow, with unconquerable courage and hope. His musician, _Abt Vogler_, believes in eternal harmony, with Plato and Carlyle:-- There shall never be one lost good! What was, shall live as before; The evil is null, is nought, is silence implying sound; What was good shall be good, with for evil so much good more; On the earth the broken arcs; in the heaven a perfect round. And, being no dreamer or pessimist, seeing reason at the heart of things, and good the final goal of ill, he At least believes in soul, and is very sure of God. Here are the three imperishable realities--God, Soul, Hereafter. Of all the rest is it ultimately true which the weary preacher said: "Vanity of vanities; all is vanity," or, as the modern Ecclesiastes has it: _Tout passe, tout lasse, tout casse_.