Thou waitest for the spark from heaven: and we,
Light half-believers of our casual creeds,
Who never deeply felt, nor clearly willed…
Who hesitate and falter life away,
And lose tomorrow the ground won today—
Ah! do not we, wanderer! await it too?

These lines come from Matthew Arnold’s dramatic poem “Stanzas from the Grande Chartreuse” (1855), written after his visit to the Carthusian monastery of La Grande Chartreuse in the French Alps. Arnold contrasts the monk’s religious certainty and disciplined withdrawal with the spiritual unease of modern educated society. Mid-Victorian England was marked by intellectual and religious strain—historical criticism of the Bible, scientific developments, and shifting social conditions—leaving many, like Arnold, feeling suspended between inherited faith and skeptical modernity. The speaker addresses a “wanderer” (the monk/ascetic figure) and then turns the question back on himself and his contemporaries.

Arnold frames modern spiritual life as a condition of paralysis: people hold “casual creeds,” feel only half-conviction, and lack the depth of will needed for decisive moral or religious commitment. The “spark from heaven” suggests a hoped-for moment of divine illumination or renewed faith. Yet the speaker admits that the modern doubter also waits for such a spark—longing for certainty while unable to generate it through feeling or action. The passage captures Arnold’s recurring theme: the modern mind’s loss of sustaining belief and the resulting drift, where each day’s small gains in purpose or conviction are undone by hesitation and fatigue.