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CHRIST IN THE REALM OF POETRY

'And an Angel of the Lord stood by them, and the glory of the Lord shone round about them. And suddenly there was with the Angel a multitude of the Heavenly Host praising God.'-ST. LUKE ii. 9, 13.

'Jesus took with Him Peter and John and James, and went up into a mountain to pray. And as He prayed, the fashion of His countenance was altered, and His raiment became white and dazzling. And there came a bright cloud and overshadowed them, and as they entered the cloud they were afraid.'-ST. LUKE ix. 28, 34-35.

ON any other night than this I think I should have wished to take the second only of these verses as the keyword of what I have to say to you. But to speak of Christ in the Realm of Poetry' on a Sunday night, which is also Christmas Eve, I could not well begin elsewhere than here, with these words, which tell of the first of all Christmas carols, the holy song of the angels at the birth of Jesus. For here, surely, in the prelude to St. Luke's Gospel, if anywhere in all the Bible, we are in the Realm of Poetry.

The Incarnation of the Son of Man is the most beautiful of all the manifestations of God. And the story of the Incarnation, as told by St. Luke, is one of idyllic beauty. The Gospel of St. Luke has indeed been well called the Poet's Gospel. It opens with a lyric cry of joy and happiness in the Idyll of Bethlehem. It closes with the solemn, pathetic silence of the Idyll of the Ascension. 'Behold, I bring you good tidings of great joy' is the keynote struck by the Angel of the Annunciation on the first Christmas Eve. And as the record begins, so it ends: 'They worshipped Him, and returned to Jerusalem with great joy!'

'The whole Gospel-I quote the words of the Poet-Bishop of our Church-' is like a noble drama, which has a chorus to meet from time to time the splendour or the pathos or the majesty of its development, now wailing, now triumphing; or we seem to be walking in the sacred cloister, not knowing when some hand will "rip up the organ with its thunder stroke," and fill the place with music.' 1

I regard Poetry as a great gift of vision and utterance bestowed upon humanity in order that life may not be rendered intolerable by the perplex1 Cf. Bishop Alexander's Leading Ideas of the Gospel, p. 140.

ing enigmas of the universe, by the horrid practicalities of everyday humdrum existence; that the hopefulness of the race may from time to time be made sure by the perception of a divine harmony pervading the great round of creation. To me, as I say, Poetry is the transfigurator of life. Among the many strange and intricate groups of the tragicomedy of time, Poetry-like Pippa in Browning's lyric-passing, walks the world, singing words whose power she often herself knows not of; and by some indefinable charm, at the sound of her voice, the whole aspect of life changes, evil stands abashed, light looks in on despair, the solution of the dark enigmas of sin and pain and death is flashed upon our hearts:

'God's in His Heaven,
All's right with the world.'

You will not wonder, therefore, that with this conception of the place and mission of the Poet in the world, I should have placed in the list of subjects of this course of sermons that of Christ in the Realm of Poetry.'

And I have done so not merely because I believe that the Incarnation of the Son of God has sanctified all human life, and that, therefore, every sphere of human thought and action is a channel, or ought to

be a channel, through which the Imperial Christ is acting, and that there is no subject which does not in the end run up into theology, and may be made the vehicle of religious teaching. This is true. But there is more than this in speaking of the Poets as interpreters of Christ in Christianity. I agree, indeed, in this matter with Shelley.

Some of you will remember his words. I have quoted them before from this place. I allude to that magnificent prose fragment of his on The Defence of Poetry,' in which he compares the function of the Poet with that of the prophet of old, showing how the latter is in reality the preacher of righteousness rather than the predicter of future events, the man of insight rather than of foresight, the forth-teller of eternal truths rather than the foreteller of things which are to come to pass; and how the inspiration of the true Poet is in fact the same as that of the prophet-there are not two inspirations, for there is but one Holy Spirit-for he too 'not only beholds the present as it is, and discovers those laws according to which present things ought to be ordered, but he beholds the future in the present, and his thoughts are the germs of the flower and fruit of latest time.'

I agree, then, in this matter with Shelley that the

Poets of Christendom are among the true prophets of God in the present dispensation; that it is to their writings rather than to the writings of the theologians that you must go if you would know what real spiritual insight is, if you would feel the true warm religious emotion of men's hearts rather than the cold conventional thoughts of their minds -nay, if you would distinguish often between the religion of Christ and the religion of Christians—in a word, if you would find the Very Christ Himself, as He has been known and worshipped from age to age.

We have not, of course, the time now for the full historical retrospect which would make that position clear. The witness of the Poets to Christ' is a subject in itself which would justify a course of many sermons. I must be satisfied, in the time that remains to me to-night, with a much humbler task.

Let me try to illustrate just one aspect of this wide subject by an appeal to three only of the great Christian Poets of our own land. I will take my illustrations from widely different epochs.

It has been, as you know, the underlying thought of all these sermons that Christ is the supreme Personality of all history, the most potent factor of all civilised change and progress. Now, the question I want to ask is this-what witness do the Poets

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