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the English Church and nation at four representative periods of the national life, to sketch the teaching of four representative English poets in regard to the Personality of Christ and the spirit of His teaching.

That at any rate is the subject which I am proposing to discuss with you in the four lectures which it is my duty to deliver in this place. I shall hope that such an investigation will prove, not, as Matthew Arnold once said, that "Poetry is the strongest part of our religion to-day," but that the English poets have been among the strongest witnesses to the faith of Christ in this land, and to that "truth and excellency of Christianity" which Mr. Hulse in his will stated to be the object which his lecturer should endeavour to demonstrate.

In the growth of English literature it is, of course, possible to trace a definite law of progress, and indeed to group its phenomena of intellectual ebb and flow into certain well-marked periods of special activity. The national sowing of great deeds is, as of necessity, followed by a national harvest of great thoughts. Each act, as it were, of the drama of England's life and story seems always to end in an epilogue of lyric song and praise, as the mental exaltation of the nation aroused by some great movement demands its adequate expression.

There are, it seems to me, four such representative periods in the national life, which we may conveniently take as the field of our present inquiry.

I. First, then, there is the period, consequent upon the settlement, in the eighth and ninth centuries of the old English kingdoms, of that national seething time,

when the many and various elements, which were afterwards to make the mighty England of the generations yet to be, were still struggling under the inspiration of the working unity of the one English Church into the unity of the one English nation; and the monastic school of York, gathering in, on the one hand, the harvest of Irish learning, and, on the other, of the barbarised Latin culture of the Franco-Gallican monasteries, was gradually becoming the literary centre of Western Europe. Of this period I propose to take Cynewulf as the representative poet.

II. Again, there is the period, at the close of the fourteenth century, when the two great principles upon which English society in the Middle Ages, Monasticism. and Chivalry, had rested reached their grand climacteric, and sank into decay-when the scene of all those feelings which, since the time of King John, had been working in the conscience of the English people, found its most vivid poetic reflection in the "Vision of Piers Plowman," by William Langland.

III. Thirdly, there is the period, following upon the disruption in England of the great social fabric of Catholicism and of Feudalism, when in the sixteenth century, under the influence, on the one hand, of the New Learning, and, on the other, of the spiritual principle of equal freedom and individual liberty, the old traditional order gave place to that emancipation of faith and morals, which in the realm of letters we know by the magic name of the Renaissance, and in the realm of religion of the Reformation.

And of this period I dare hardly take as the representative poet of his age any other than he who is "not for an age, but for all time."

IV. Lastly, there is our own period, which in the early part of the last century witnessed the revival of Romanticism, both in letters and religion, and at a later date has endeavoured to co-ordinate in both spheres the latest revelations of philosophy and faith by the refocussing, on the one hand, of the old doctrine of the early Greek Christian Fathers, concerning the Immanence of the Divine in Man, which is the essential truth of the Incarnation; and, on the other, by the application of the modern scientific theory of evolution to all the great problems of human destiny and origin—a theory which alone appears to make possible to our modern age the thought of the Church of Christ as a sovereign society embracing in one comprehensive unity all realms of human thought or action.

And for this period the most representative poet-the poet of keenest spiritual insight, who shall best interpret for us in the light of modern knowledge the Person and the Spirit of Jesus Christ-I believe to be Robert Browning.

I begin, then, to-day with an early English monastic ideal, as set forth in "The Christ" of Cynewulf.

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In the library of Exeter Cathedral there is an old book, or rather a roll of manuscript, known by the name of "The Exeter Book" (Codex Exonensis), containing probably the noblest product of early English genius. The book has lain in the cathedral library ever

since the day when it was placed there, in the year 1071, by Leofric, the first Bishop of Exeter and tenth of Crediton, Chancellor of England, the friend and counsellor of Edward the Confessor. In Leofric's catalogue (prefixed to this MS.) of the books he placed in the library, the entry of this book, written in a contemporary Anglo-Saxon hand, runs thus: "A mickle English book on all sorts of things wrought in verse." The first place in the Codex is held by the remarkable poem-the oldest Christiad of modern Europe-Cynewulf's "Christ."

Of Cynewulf himself we know very little. He is like the greatest of all our poets at least in this, that we know less of his life than of his character. From the fact that the scenery of his poems closely resembles the coast scenery of Northumbria — - the storm-lashed cliffs, the wintry tempestuous seas, often weltering with ice-it has been conjectured that he belonged to one or other of the towns of that regionWhitby, Jarrow, Lindisfarne, Tynemouth - all centres of learning in touch with the great monastery school at York, and all places with which a poet would breathe that atmosphere of the sea which is so characteristic of all his poems. Other scholars, however, have conjectured, and the conjecture is not without some show of probability, that the poet may be identified with a certain Cynewulf, priest of Dunwich, whose signature follows that of Bishop Tidfrith in the Canons of the Synod of Cloveshoo held in 803. Dunwich, as you remember, was that chief seaport on the East Anglian coast-now swallowed up by the ocean-which

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in the middle of the seventh century had become the seat of Felix, the first East Anglian bishop. There, under the influence of Felix, a school of learning had sprung up, whose traditions, at any rate, were considered in the Middle Ages to be of sufficient importance to lend authority to the legendary stories of the ancient origin of this University, traditions which are still recognised, I believe, by the recital, in our Commemoration Service of Benefactors, of the name of Sigebert, King of the East Angles, and uncle of S. Etheldreda of Ely, as our first University founder.

But however that may be, whether the poet Cynewulf belonged to the Northern School of York, or to the East Anglian School of Dunwich, one thing is quite certain, that he must have had a scholastic training, for on no other hypothesis can we account for his familiarity with liturgical lore or for the ripeness of his scholarship, facts which are so prominent in his poetry. Obviously he was a zealous student of the Bible, and quite as obviously a student of the poetry or poetical prose of Augustine, of Prudentius, of Gregory the Great, of Bede, of Alcuin; and also of the Latin Creeds, Antiphons, and Hymns of the Church. So familiar indeed is he with the scholar's vernacular that Latin words slip, as it were, unobserved into his own. English lines. That in mature life he became a priest seems fairly probable. That he was a monk also, and had therefore been trained as such, does not seem quite so likely. For he speaks of himself in early life as having received guerdon gold in the mead-hall, and a

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