^ We must avoid the mistakes frequently made by poets who have sought to personify nature and find in it a response to the varying moods of human life, and by theologians who have found in it an analogy of the ways of God, Nature is not like God. Her laws disclose no moral standards. When these are intro- duced she appears full not only of contradictions but of cruelties, and the God whose character we could induce from a consideration of the laws of nature would be as immoral as the pagan divinities. We need something nearer, more human and considerate, a God who can understand and suffer and love. Indeed we are so far from the poets who seek in nature an echo of their own inner life as to feel that it is in offering us an escape from ourselves that nature is most helpful to man. There she lies inscrutable, placid, expansive ; now wrapped in mists and clouds, now sun-smitten or attacked by the furious onset of the thunderstorm. The craving for sympathy from her is morbid; we must find health in her unresponsiveness, her healing want of sympathy with morbid souls.*
* J. Eelman, Ephemera Etemitatis, 224.
42 HELP FROM BEYOND THE HILLS
^ Tennyson's outlook on the universe could not ignore the dark and dismaying facts of existence, and his faith, which rose above the shriek of Nature, was not based upon arguments derived from any survey of external, physical Nature. When he confined his outlook to this, he could see power and mechanism, but he could not from these derive faith. His vision must go beyond the mere physical universe ; he must see life and see it whole; he must include that which is highest in Nature, even man, and only then could he find the resting-place of faith. He thus summed up the matter once when we had been walking up and down the " Ball-room " at Farringford : " It is hard," he said, "it is hard to believe in God; but it is harder not to believe. I believe in God, not from what I see in Nature, but from what I find in man." I took him to mean that the witness of Nature was only complete when it included all that was in Nature, and that the effort to draw conclusions from Nature when man, the highest-known factor in Nature, was excluded, could only lead to mistake. I do not think he meant, however, that external Nature gave no hints of a superintending wisdom or even' love, for his own writings show, I think, that such hints had been whispered to him by flower and star ; I think he meant that faith did not find her platform finally secure beneath her feet till she had taken count of man. The response to all that is highest in Nature is found in the heart of man, and man cannot deny this highest, because it is latent in himself already. But I must continue Tennyson's own words : " It is hard to believe in God, but it is harder not to believe in Him. I don't believe in His goodness from what I see in Nature. In Nature I see the mechanician ; I believe in His goodness from what I find in my own breast." *
III.
The Faith of a True Israelite.
"My help cometh from the Lord, which made heaven and earth."
Here is the mark rather of a Babylonian than of a home- abiding Jew. This way of describing God — " which made heaven and earth " — is not usual by any means in the Psalms or elsewhere in the Scriptures. It occurs three times in these Pilgrim Songs, and only once in all the Psalms besides, and that Psalm (the 115th) seems to have been written after the Captivity. This * Bishop Boyd Carpenter, in Tennyson and His Friends, 303.
PSALM cxxi. I, 2 43
large thought of God did not come naturally to the mind of an Israelite, The truth indeed he did accept. It was an item of his creed that the Lord of his worship did make heaven and earth, all visible and invisible things : but it was not his spontaneous thought about God. " Thou that walkest in the camp of Israel" " Thou that sittest between the cheruhims, shine forth." There was the localizing of God in the heart of a Jew : one holy place for the tabernacles of the Most High. "Walk about Zion, and go round about her: tell the towers thereof. Mark ye well her bulwarks, consider her palaces ; that ye may tell it to the genera- tion following. For this God is our God for ever and ever." The King, yes the King of all the earth, but especially our God. But the exiled Jew has the one advantage at least, that he escaped this narrowness of thought. The Jew born in Babylon (and almost all of those who returned from the Captivity were born in Babylon; the ancient men who had seen the first Temple, and wept because of the poverty of the second Temple, were very few indeed) — the Jew born in Babylon could hardly fail to take broad views of life. There was a tendency in all surrounding things to uncramp the thoughts. He lived in the midst of vastness. The mighty town itself more than fifty miles in circuit ; the palace of the kings within it more than twice as large as the whole city of Jerusalem: and then those boundless plains spread forth under the great heavens, and losing themselves on all sides in the distant horizon — they that lived in the midst of these scenes took an impress from them. The sign of it appears in these children of the Captivity, whose eyes were lifted towards the hills of the sacred land, and who, looking forth over the months of its weariness and hazards, asked, one on behalf of all, " From whence Cometh my help ? " and answered, one on behalf of all, " My help Cometh from the Lord." Not the God of Jacob or of Israel, or of Him that sitteth between the cheruhims; the teaching of Babylon has erased those barriers and exalted God above the universe. "My help cometh from the Lord, which made heaven and earth."