ABSTRACT
An age, in short, which dispenses with the revelation written on the stony tables of authority, and which has outgrown the legal swaddlingbands of its historic and dogmatic parchment, and yet is hardly prepared to accept, without some guarantee outside itself, that ever abiding revelation written not on stone but on the fleshy tables of the human heart and conscience. If in the poetical genius of Mr. Arnold (his prose works are not here taken into consideration) we have the regretful exponent of a tottering theological system, the Jeremiah of a decadent Israel, in Mr. Tennyson as reflected at the height of his power in the pages of ‘In Memoriam,’ we have the prophet of the wider faith to come. For it is hardly too much to say that from the shadow projected from that divine poem, we have a more certain indication of what the theological future will be, in those questions it sets itself to solve, than in all the volumes of theology proper the century has produced.
