To this final confession of faith, worked out through Sorrow by the
sustaining help of Love, the prefatory Poem is merely a pendant.
"Strong Son of God, immortal Love,"
is addressed to Christ, God Himself upon earth.[88] George Herbert had
before called our Saviour
"Immortal Love, author of this great frame;"
and our Poet says, though we have not seen His face, we embrace Him by
faith,
"Believing where we cannot prove."
He acknowledges Him as the great Creator, and through all surrounding
mysteries and disappointments, is satisfied with this conclusion as to the
future,
"Thou art just."
This conviction is enough.
"Thou seemest human and divine,
The highest, holiest manhood, thou"--
God incarnate, to whom we must become spiritually united,
"Our wills are ours, to make them thine,"
as expressed in Poem cxxxi., stanza 1.
"Our little systems" "are but broken lights of thee," even as the colours
of the rainbow are the broken lights of the sun.
"We have but faith: we cannot know;
For knowledge is of things we see."
Faith apprehends things which are spiritual, and do not come within the
range of our senses; whilst knowledge accepts only what can be seen and
understood.
Hence, the Poet would have knowledge advance and increase to the utmost,
"a beam in darkness" ever growing. But reverence must grow with it; so
that mind which accumulates knowledge, and soul which is the
dwelling-place of faith, according well with each other, may make one
music--be in harmony "as before," that is, I presume, as at first; but
now "vaster" in their compass owing to the greater reach of modern thought
and research.
This warning against scientific assumptions, in opposition to spiritual
truths, is repeated from Poem cxiv.
The concluding humble prayer, contained in the three last stanzas, has the
true ring of devout piety.
"Forgive what seem'd my sin in me;
What seem'd my worth since I began;
For merit lives from man to man,
And not from man, O Lord, to thee.
"Forgive my grief for one removed,
Thy creature, whom I found so fair.
I trust he lives in thee, and there
I find him worthier to be loved.
"Forgive these wild and wandering cries,
Confusions of a wasted youth;
Forgive them where they fail in truth,
And in thy wisdom make me wise."
"What seem'd my sin," would be the Poet's excessive grief for Hallam's
death: for he elsewhere says,
"I count it crime
To mourn for any overmuch."[89]
"What seem'd my worth," would be his devoted love for his friend, which he
felt had ennobled his own life; and so he says,
"To breathe my loss is more than fame,
To utter love more sweet than praise."
But this worth was only comparative,
"from man to man,
And not from man, O Lord, to thee;"
since no human goodness can be counted as merit in the sight of God.