1 E. L. Hull, Sermons, i. 155.
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consciousness found constant expression in Tennyson's works and conversation. Perhaps its clearest expression is to be found in his instructions to his son : " Remember, I want ' Crossing the Bar ' to be always at the end of all my works."
I hope to see my Pilot face to face When I have crossed the Bar.
When in answer to the question, What was his deepest desire of all ? he said, " A clearer vision of God," it exactly expressed the continued strivings of his spirit for more light upon every possible question, which so constantly appear in his poems.1
Is not the Vision He ? tho' He be not that which He
seems ? Dreams are true while they last, and do we not live in
dreams ?
Earth, these solid stars, this weight of body and limb, Are they not sign and symbol of thy division from Him ?
Dark is the world to thee : thyself art the reason why ; For is He not all but that which has power to feel " I am I"?
Glory about thee, without thee; and thou fulfillest thy doom, Making Him broken gleams, and a stifled splendour and gloom.
And the ear of man cannot hear, and the eye of man can- not see;
But if we could see and hear, this Vision — were it not He?2
2. To see God is to be admitted into His immediate presence and friendship. In the court language of ancient Oriental despotisms, where the Sovereign was revered as if he were the vicegerent of Heaven, to " see the king's face " stood for the highest felicity of the most favoured subjects. It was the petition of the disgraced prince Absalom, after he had for two full years resided in the capital without being received at his father's palace : " Now therefore let me see the king's face ; and if there be iniquity in
1 Tennyson and His Friends, 305.
2 Tennyson, The Higher Pantheism.
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me, let him kill me!" "Happy are these thy servants," said the African queen to Solomon ; happy in this, that they " stand continually before thee." So the seven chief princes of the Medo- Fersian Empire who sat first in the kingdom of Ahasuerus were they " which saw the king's face." The same magnificent phrase- ology passed from the court to the temple. In the Hebrew State, Jehovah was the national Sovereign; and the reigning king was, in no flattering hyperbole, but in constitutional law, His elected vicegerent. The temple was His palace, the most holy place His chamber of presence and of audience ; and the one thing desired by His devout and favoured servants was to behold His beauty ; their prayer, that His face would shine on them ; their hope, to see His face in righteousness, and one day to be satisfied with His likeness.
TI In prayer there would sometimes come upon me such a sense of the Presence of God that I seemed to be all engulfed in God. I think the learned call this mystical experience ; at any rate, it so suspends the ordinary operations of the soul that she seems to be wholly taken out of herself. This tenderness, this sweetness, this regale is nothing else but the Presence of God in the praying soul. God places the soul in His immediate Presence, and in an instant bestows Himself upon the soul in a way she could never of herself attain to. He manifests something of His greatness to the soul at such times : something of His beauty, something of His special and particular grace. And the soul enjoys God without dialectically understanding just how she so enjoys Him. She burns with love without knowing what she has done to deserve or to prepare herself for such a rapture. It is the gift of God, and He gives His gifts to whomsoever and when- soever He will.1
3. The theophany, or visible discovery of the Divine Being, which was given to the best period of Hebrew history, was a prefigure of the Incarnation — the chief theophany of all time — in which, through a human character and life, there has been discovered to us all the ethical beauty and splendour of the God- head. To " see God " must now for ever mean nothing else than this : to see His " truth and grace " mirrored in the face of that Man, who alone of all men on earth " is of God, and hath seen the Father."
1 Saint Teresa.
ST. MATTHEW v. 8 89
Tj We are in the world to see God. That is the final spiritual purpose of life. Across the cradle of the babe and the playtime of the girls and boys this purpose ever falls. It can be forgotten and frustrated, but as life's highest possibility and truest destiny it is always with us. It follows the prodigal in his wandering, the fool in his folly, the strong man in his wilfulness. It is all- inclusive. It waits men in the quiet places of thought, and in the clangour of the world's work. The student, the book-writer, the weaver at his loom, the buyer and seller, the woman mid her household cares — the vision is close to them all. It is before us in the sunlight and the green earth, it is about us in all the grace and trust and intimacy of home life. In youth and age, in gladness and in grieving, the vision waits. And most of all the vision draws near to us in the life of Him who said, " He that hath seen me hath seen the Father." x