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