"Such minds are truly from the Deity, For they are Powers; and hence the highest bliss That flesh can know is theirs,--the consciousness Of whom they are, habitually infused Through every image and through every thought, And all affections by communion raised From earth to heaven, from human to divine." The mystical faith by which man is united to God can have no clearer confession. And in the great poem of "Tintern Abbey" this truth received an expression which has become classical;--it must be counted one of the greatest words of that continuing revelation by which the truths of religion are given permanent form: "For I have learned To look on nature, not as in the hour Of thoughtless youth; but hearing oftentimes The still, sad music of humanity, Nor harsh nor grating, though of ample power To chasten and subdue. And I have felt A presence that disturbs me with the joy Of elevated thoughts; a sense sublime Of something far more deeply interfused, Whose dwelling is the light of setting suns, And the round ocean, and the living air, And the blue sky, and in the mind of man: A motion and a spirit, that impels All thinking things, all objects of all thought, And rolls through all things." We can hardly imagine that the religious experience of mankind will ever suffer these words to drop into forgetfulness; and it would seem that every passing generation must deepen their significance. 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."