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Hope, Faith, Suffering, Ugliness, and Seeming Indifference

Hope, Faith, Suffering, Ugliness, and Seeming Indifference

Last updated on: June 21, 2026 at 8:34 pm by Dan Peterson

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Hope, Faith, Suffering, Ugliness, and Seeming Indifference 2026-06-21T20:34:49-06:00 Dan Peterson

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In my former missionary tracting area, Lauterbrunnen in the Berner Oberland of Switzerland — perhaps, in my judgment, the most beautiful landscape on Planet Earth. (Wikimedia Commons public domain image)

At the beginning of my ward’s sacrament meeting this morning, we sang words that have evidently been included in the various hymnals of the Church of Jesus Christ of Latter-day Saints since the very first one was compiled by Emma Smith, the wife of the Prophet Joseph. These words were penned by Thomas R. Taylor (1807-1835), an English clergyman who died tragically young, at the age of only twenty-seven:

Earth, with her ten thousand flow’rs,

Air, with all its beams and show’rs,

Heaven’s infinite expanse,

Sea’s resplendent countenance—

All around and all above

Bear this record: God is love.

Sounds among the vales and hills,
In the woods and by the rills,,
Of the breeze and of the bird,
By the gentle murmur stirred—
Sacred songs, beneath, above,
Have one chorus: God is love.

All the hopes that sweetly start

From the fountain of the heart,

All the bliss that ever comes

To our earthly human homes,

All the voices from above

Sweetly whisper: God is love.

It’s certainly possible, in many places and in particular moods, to resonate with the sentiment that Rev. Taylor was expressing in his lyrics. (See, for example, this rendition of the hymn by the Tabernacle Choir and the images that accompany it online.) But, as his own sadly brief life suggests, it’s also easy to view the world quite differently.

Alfred, Lord Tennyson (1809-1892), poet laureate of England
(Wikimedia Commons public domain image)

In 1850, Alfred, Lord Tennyson, published a lengthy elegy entitled In Memoriam A.H.H. (1850) for Arthur Henry Hallam, a friend from his student days at Cambridge University who had died suddenly from a cerebral haemorrhage in Vienna in 1833, at the age of only twenty-two years. In the poem, Lord Tennyson reflects not only on Hallam’s death but more broadly on the seemingly random cruelty of nature as seen from the conflicting perspectives of Christian faith, which was already declining in early Victorian Britain, and of increasingly materialist science. (Charles Darwin’s classic On the Origin of Species would be published just nine years later, in 1859). Accordingly, as has been observed, In Memoriam A.H.H. is not only an elegy for a friend but a kind of requiem or dirge for an earlier time and worldview.

At one point in his elegy, Lord Tennyson asks,

Are God and Nature then at strife,
That Nature lends such evil dreams?
So careful of the type she seems,
So careless of the single life;

Here, Lord Tennyson writes of nature’s seeming indifference to “single lives” (e.g., that of Arthur Hallam) as contrasted with its concern for species or “types.” Where is divine providence in all of this? Where is any sign of a concern for individual human lives?

That I, considering everywhere
Her secret meaning in her deeds,
And finding that of fifty seeds
She often brings but one to bear,

I falter where I firmly trod,
And falling with my weight of cares
Upon the great world’s altar-stairs
That slope thro’ darkness up to God,

I stretch lame hands of faith, and grope,
And gather dust and chaff, and call
To what I feel is Lord of all,
And faintly trust the larger hope.

And yet, as Charles Darwin’s unjustly neglected co-discoverer of evolution, Alfred Russel Wallace, evidently also did but as Darwin apparently could not, Tennyson continues to assert his (rather wan) hope against what nature seems to show.

Tennyson was aware of the fossil evidence that had begun to be systematically noticed and studied in the British Isles and on the continent of Europe — paleontological finds in France and Switzerland’s Jura Mountains give us the Jurassic Period; the Cambrian Period comes from Cambria, a Latin name for Wales; ancient Celtic tribes (the Ordovices and the Silures) that once inhabited Wales give us the Ordovician and Silurian periods; the Devonian Period is named after the county of Devon — and he knew that nature hasn’t even really concerned itself with “types” or species:

So careful of the type?” but no.
From scarped cliff and quarried stone
She cries, “A thousand types are gone:
I care for nothing, all shall go.

“Thou makest thine appeal to me:
I bring to life, I bring to death:
The spirit does but mean the breath:
I know no more.” And he, shall he,

Man, her last work, who seem’d so fair,
Such splendid purpose in his eyes,
Who roll’d the psalm to wintry skies,
Who built him fanes of fruitless prayer,

Who trusted God was love indeed
And love Creation’s final law —
Tho’ Nature, red in tooth and claw
With ravine, shriek’d against his creed —

Who loved, who suffer’d countless ills,
Who battled for the True, the Just,
Be blown about the desert dust,
Or seal’d within the iron hills?

Will humans, too, end up as nothing more than scattered fossils? Lord Tennyson seems almost to be replaying directly to Thomas Taylor. (By the way, the word ravine, above, is not to be understood in the sense of a small and narrow valley but, rather, in connection with terms like ravenous and ravening — as, e.g., of a wolf.) Pretty plainly, Darwin and Wallace were drawing for their formulation of the idea of natural selection (and, eventually, Herbert Spencer’s notion of “the survival of the fittest”) on ideas that were already common to the culture of their time. In a very real sense, Tennyson had already been there before they published their much more elaborate and more scientific works.

Through all of this, though, Lord Tennyson asserts his faith, because of what he has “felt,” and he yearns for God’s voice, for revelation, though he recognizes that final answer aren’t likely to come until after death:

O life as futile, then, as frail!
O for thy voice to soothe and bless!
What hope of answer, or redress?
Behind the veil, behind the veil. . . .

If e’er when faith had fallen asleep,
I hear a voice ‘believe no more’
And heard an ever-breaking shore
That tumbled in the Godless deep;

A warmth within the breast would melt
The freezing reason’s colder part,
And like a man in wrath the heart
Stood up and answer’d ‘I have felt.’

No, like a child in doubt and fear:
But that blind clamour made me wise;
Then was I as a child that cries,
But, crying knows his father near.

It must be remembered that this is how his poem opens:

Strong Son of God, immortal Love,
Whom we, that have not seen thy face,
By faith, and faith alone, embrace,
Believing where we cannot prove;

Thine are these orbs of light and shade;
Thou madest Life in man and brute;
Thou madest Death; and lo, thy foot
Is on the skull which thou hast made.

Thou wilt not leave us in the dust:
Thou madest man, he knows not why,
He thinks he was not made to die;
And thou hast made him: thou art just.

Thou seemest human and divine,
The highest, holiest manhood, thou.
Our wills are ours, we know not how;
Our wills are ours, to make them thine.

Our little systems have their day;
They have their day and cease to be:
They are but broken lights of thee,
And thou, O Lord, art more than they.

We have but faith: we cannot know;
For knowledge is of things we see
And yet we trust it comes from thee,
A beam in darkness: let it grow.

Let knowledge grow from more to more,
But more of reverence in us dwell;
That mind and soul, according well,
May make one music as before,

And, thinking here of his friend Arthur Hallam and, no doubt, of others whom he had lost before and since, Lord Tennyson concludes his lengthy poem with these famous lines:

I hold it true, whate’er befall;
I feel it, when I sorrow most;
’Tis better to have loved and lost
Than never to have loved at all.

Alfred, Lord Tennyson, wrote at the beginning of the melancholy period (famously described in Matthew Arnold’s great poem Dover Beach) when Europe’s religious faith began to crumble. I can’t help but think that he would have been heartened to see what I regard as the return of scientific arguments for design, which we’re beginning to see in such areas as the cosmic anthropic principle, apparent cosmic fine tuning, irreducible complexity, the astonishing intricacy of the cell, and the like.

The iconic view of the Jungfrau in the Berner Oberland of Switzerland. (Public domain image from Wikimedia Commons.) Having served in Interlaken for seven months of my mission and having visited the area more times than I can count during the years since, I came to love this mountain and this view of it.

Finally, rather irrelevantly but with complete sincerity, I wish everybody out there a slightly late Happy Father’s Day!

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