# Tennyson's doubt ends in a stronger faith

Commentary on Orthodoxy by G. K. Chesterton.

On [CH08.P006](https://glosses.org/orthodoxy/pg16769-r1/CH08.P006/#char=2194,2231): "there was faith in their honest doubt"

Tennyson's *In Memoriam* (1850) says, 'There lives more faith in honest doubt, / Believe me, than in half the creeds.' In the first-edition transcription inspected here, the passage is canto XCIV. It answers someone who calls doubt diabolical: a morally upright questioner struggles through uncertainty and reaches a stronger faith, accompanied by divine power even in darkness. [Tennyson, canto XCIV](https://en.wikisource.org/wiki/In_Memoriam_(Tennyson)/Canto_94).

Chesterton's paraphrase sets up a deliberate change of meaning. Tennyson's faith is the religious confidence that can emerge through questioning; Chesterton's is the supposedly concealed confidence in an unvarying, godless universe. That inversion is an argument about the assumptions of certain doubters, not a reliable account of the poem's conclusion. Restoring the stanza prevents Tennyson himself from being mistaken for a witness endorsing the materialism Chesterton attacks.

## Sources

- [Alfred Tennyson, In Memoriam (1850), canto XCIV](https://en.wikisource.org/wiki/In_Memoriam_(Tennyson)/Canto_94), Lines 1–28, especially lines 11–17 and the final three stanzas
- [In Memoriam, first-edition transcription](https://en.wikisource.org/wiki/In_Memoriam_(Tennyson)), Edition statement and title page: Edward Moxon, London, 1850

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