so early turned to prose, it is not easy to say.  The verse of his early days rests upon the conviction, fundamental to his later philosophy, that all the new ideas concerning men and the world are a revelation of God.  Wordsworth seems never consciously to have broken with the current theology.  His view of the natural glory and goodness of humanity, especially among the poor and simple, has not much relation to that theology.  His view of nature, not as created of God. in the conventional sense, but as itself filled with God, of God as conscious of himself at every point of nature’s being, has still less.  Man and nature are but different manifestations of the one soul of all.  Byron’s contribution to Christian thought, we need hardly say, was of a negative sort.  It was destructive rather than constructive.  Among the conventions and hypocrisies of society there were none which he more utterly despised than those of religion and the Church as he saw these.  There is something volcanic, Voltairean in his outbreaks.  But there is a difference.  Both Voltaire and Byron knew that they had not the current religion.  Voltaire thought, nevertheless, that he had a religion.  Posterity has esteemed that he had little.  Byron thought he had none.  Posterity has felt that he had much.  His attack was made in a reckless bitterness which lessened its effect.  Yet the truth of many things which he said is now overwhelmingly obvious.  Shelley began with being what he called an atheist.  He ended with being what we call an agnostic, whose pure poetic spirit carried him far into the realm of the highest idealism.  The existence of a conscious will within the universe is not quite thinkable.  Yet immortal love pervades the whole.  Immortality is improbable, but his highest flights continually imply it.  He is sure that when any theology violates the primary human affections, it tramples into the dust all thoughts and feelings by which men may become good.  The men who, about 1840, stood paralysed between what Strauss later called ‘the old faith and the new,’ or, as Arnold phrased it, were ‘between two worlds, one dead, the other powerless to be born,’ found their inmost thoughts written broad for them in Arthur Clough.  From the time of the opening of Tennyson’s work, the poets, not by destruction but by construction, not in opposition to religion but in harmony with it, have built up new doctrines of God and man and aided incalculably in preparing the way for a new and nobler theology.  In the latter part of the nineteenth century there was perhaps no one man in England who did more to read all of the vast advance of knowledge in the light of higher faith, and to fill such a faith with the spirit of the glad advance of knowledge, than did Browning.  Even Arnold has voiced in his poetry not a little of the noblest conviction of the age.  And what shall one say of Mrs. Browning, of the Rossettis and William Morris, of Emerson and Lowell, of Lanier and Whitman, who have spoken, often with consummate power and beauty, that which one never says at all without faith and rarely says well without art?