In similar strain are his poems, "Despondency," "Self-Deception," and "Dover Beach." In this last poem he seems to chant the requiem of his own earlier faith, as he sings,

So in his

The Sea of Faith

Was once, too, at the full, and round earth's shore

Lay like the folds of a bright girdle furl'd.

But now I only hear

Its melancholy, long, withdrawing roar,

Retreating, to the breath

Of the night wind, down the vast edges drear

And naked shingles of the world.

... for the world, which seems

To lie before us like a land of dreams,

So various, so beautiful, so new,

Hath really neither joy, nor love, nor light,

Nor certitude, nor peace, nor help for pain;

And we are here as on a darkling plain

Swept with confused alarms of struggle and flight,

Where ignorant armies clash by night.

poem,

"Geist's Grave," he sings in almost a de

spairing key of human life and hope and destiny,

Stern law of every mortal lot!

Which man, proud man, finds hard to bear,

And builds himself I know not what

Of second life I know not where.

Thus the prevailing tone is that of dejection and often of dismay, summoning the attention of the reader to no wider outlook than that which earth affords, and awakening in him more and more doubt the nearer he approaches the sphere of supernatural truth and reality. In one of his earlier poems, "To a Friend," he writes of one

Who saw life steadily, and saw it whole.

Mr. Arnold did neither, his view of human life being disturbed and partial, and hence the occasion of unrest to himself and others. One of the grounds of his attachment to Clough, as he expresses it in "Thyrsis," is found in this dispiriting view of life common to them as men and poets.

One of the grounds also of Mr. Arnold's limitations as a poet is found in the fact that he never had any cheerful, hopeful, message for men in their struggles and disappointments, but left all questions of life and duty as unsettled as he found

them, if, indeed, not more perplexing than ever. A few of his poems, such as "Thyrsis," "Rugby Chapel," "Heine's Grave," and "Haworth Churchyard," are properly called "Elegiac." There is a sense in which two thirds of his verse is elegiac-a somber contemplation of vanished ambitions, a tribute given perforce to a something lost out of his life, he scarcely knew what. It is at this point, as much as at any other, that the superior moral personality of his father appears, a superiority which the son himself was not slow to discern, as he wrote in "Rugby Chapel,"

Such, as we

To us thou wast still

Cheerful, and helpful, and firm!
Therefore to thee it was given
Many to save with thyself;
And, at the end of thy day,
O faithful shepherd, to come,
Bringing thy sheep in thy hand.

And through thee I believe

In the noble and great who are gone.

estimate them, are the salient features in the poetic work of Mr. Arnold, nor are we far astray when we summarize his merits and demerits in the statement that he had high ideals as a poet which he had not the gifts fully to realize. He had the "vision divine," though not the "faculty divine;" while no careful reader of his verse can fail to note the evidence on almost every page of this despairing struggle to make poetic conception and poetic execution accordant. Visible as this feature is in his shorter poems, it is especially apparent in his three longer narrative poems and in his two specific attempts at dramatic writing, in no one of which poems has he approximated to Miltonic or Shakespearian effects.

Conceding as he does in one of his poems,*

The seeds of godlike power are in us still;

Gods are we, bards, saints, heroes, if we will,

the implanted seeds never developed to full maturity, nor did the will to become a master bard prove sufficient to effect so great a result. In his poem, "Self-Deception," he would almost seem to have conceded this limitation, as he writes,

*Written in Emerson's Essays.

Ah, whose hand that day through heaven guided
Man's new spirit, since it was not we?

Ah, who swayed our choice, and who decided
What our gifts, and what our wants should be?
For, alas! he left us each retaining

Shreds of gifts which he refused in full.
Still these waste us with their hopeless straining,
Still the attempt to use them proves them null.
And on earth we wander, groping, reeling;
Powers stir in us, stir and disappear.
Ah! and he who placed our master-feeling,
Fail'd to place that master-feeling clear.
We but dream we have our wish'd-for powers,
Ends we seek we never shall attain.

Ah! some power exists there, which is ours?
Some end is there, we indeed may gain.

Here is an acknowledgment of gift and inability in one and an almost pitiful lament over the chasm discovered by the poet himself between ambition and ability. A poet of classic culture and intellectual merit; a poet of unique personality and high poetic dignity, of marked ethical purpose and lofty ideal-he still with all his merits falls far short of masterliness in verse. Adopting his own favorite phrase he is an "interesting," though not a great, poet. He is interesting only because not inspiring, and he is not inspiring because not inspired.

With some superb lines and passages at distant intervals in his verse there is no extended and even flow of high poetic form in which mind and soul and art are fused in the unity of great effect and the reader is carried aloft to the vision of truth and goodness and beauty and love. It is the constant presence of this vain endeavor to be as a poet what he longed to be that is the explanation of that dominant feature of sadness that is so clearly seen in the thoughtful face of Matthew Arnold.

J. W. Hunt

ART. VII.-THE OPEN CHURCH AND THE CLOSED CHURCH.

THE so-called open Church of our day is not at all a new thing under the sun. It belongs properly to an earlier age when all Churches were institutional and did work on a scale which would compel the most elaborate institutional Church of to-day to hide its diminished head. There were no county poorhouses in medieval times, but the Church took exclusive care of the poor; there were no hospitals, except Church hospitals, no correctional or penal institutions, no schools, no public libraries, nor even a water supply or drainage system except those provided by the Church. "Indeed," as Mr. Stead says, "if any of the great saints who a thousand years ago Christianized and civilized Europe were to come to Chicago, they would, after surveying the whole scene, decide that three fourths at least of the work which they did was in the hands either of the city council, the mayor, or the county commissioners, and that not more than one fourth remained in the hands of the clergy or their so-called Church." But we are none the worse for the change. Even Mr. Stead would not regard a return to the open Church as a forward movement, but as a backward movement. He thinks it "right enough" that the State, or rather the city, has become executor of the Church for three fourths of the work which the Church was instituted to accomplish. The only unfortunate feature is the following:

No sooner does the Church rid itself of the onerous responsibility with which it was formerly saddled than it seems to abandon all care or interest in what used to be its own special work, and what was heretofore regarded as distinctively Christian work is often handed over to men who have not the slightest trace of Christian principle. In this respect the Church behaves not unlike the unfortunate mother of an illegitimate child, who, finding it irksome any longer to maintain her offspring, hands it over to a baby farmer, and thanks God she is well quit of the brat.

The only reason for the rehabilitation of the open Church is the lamentable fact that in our great cities there has been a reversion toward the socio-economic conditions of earlier ages.

The Church is left down town with Lazarus, with the alternative either of going to the dogs with Lazarus or else saving itself and Lazarus by acting the part of the good Samaritan. It very wisely and religiously chooses the latter course. It goes about doing good; it increases in favor with God and man; it becomes the steward of the rich man's bounty; it degenerates. History repeats itself. The fact is notorious that the Church of the Middle Ages broke down utterly as an institution for the relief of the poor, and the State was actually obliged to interfere with its work in order to protect the community from the spreading disease of pauperism. After all has been said the one thing remains true that the unhappy condition of the people of the Middle Ages was not made materially better by the open Church; we might almost say it was made worse. Social and economic salvation came in the fullness of time, in spite of the open Church, and through the instrumentality of what we may properly call the "closed Church." The Church of the Reformation was not open or institutional. Like the Church of the apostles it was for a long time without even houses of public worship. It had no organized membership, no staff of paid workers, no educational, reformatory, or philanthropic schemes. It had nothing—but the foolishness of preaching. But it had the manhood of Europe, young and old.

What then is the utility of the open Church? And how much have we a right to expect from it? First, it may serve as a training school for students of religious and social life. In this respect it may be likened to the free clinic of a college of medicine and surgery; its object incidentally is to relieve the sick and suffering, but the prime object is to become acquainted first-hand with the diseases and dislocations of social life, their causes, and the methods of treatment. Again, the Church should become a part of the charity organization of the city. The disastrous results of ecclesiastical almsgiving in the past ought to teach it wisdom for the future. The perversity of some Churches in persistently dispensing free bread and free soup at so-called Gospel meetings and exchanging shoes and clothing for a certain number of attendance tickets is a subtle form of bribery of the poor which amounts almost to a crime