Tennyson's doubt ends in a stronger faith
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/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.
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