road."1 "Pure faith indeed," says Bishop Blougram, to Gigadibs, the literary man, you know not what you ask! naked belief in God the Omnipotent, Omniscient, Omnipresent, sears too much the sense of conscious creatures, to be borne. It were the seeing him, no flesh shall dare. Some think, Creation's meant to show him forth: I say, it's meant to hide him all it can, and that's what all the blessed Evil's for. Its use in time is to environ us, our breath, our drop of dew, with shield enough against that sight till we can bear its stress. Under a vertical sun, the exposed brain and lidless eye and disimprisoned heart less certainly would wither up at once, than mind, confronted with the truth of Him. But time and earth case-harden us to live; the feeblest sense is trusted most the child feels God a moment, ichors o'er the place, plays on and grows to be a man like us. With me, faith means perpetual unbelief kept quiet like the snake 'neath Michael's foot, who stands calm just because he feels it writhe.""

There is a remarkable passage to the same effect in 'Paracelsus,' in which Paracelsus expatiates on the "just so much of doubt as bade him plant a surer foot upon the sun-road."

And in Easter Day': —

66

You must mix some uncertainty

With faith, if you would have faith be.”

And the good Pope in "The Ring and the Book,' alluding to the absence of true Christian soldiership, which is revealed by Pompilia's case, says: "Is it not this ignoble confidence, cowardly hardihood, that dulls and damps, makes the old heroism impossible? Unless . . . what whispers me of times to come? What if it be the mission of that age my death will usher into life, to shake this torpor of assurance from our creed, reintroduce the doubt discarded, bring the formidable danger back we drove long ago to the distance and the dark?"

1 'Bishop Blougram's Apology,' vv. 198, 199.
2 Bishop Blougram's Apology,' vv. 650-671.

Mere

True healthy doubt means, in Browning, that the spiritual nature is sufficiently quickened not to submit to the conclusions of the insulated intellect. It will reach out beyond them, and assert itself, whatever be the resistance offered by the intellect. doubt, without any resistance from the intuitive, non-discursive side of our nature, is the dry-rot of the soul. The spiritual functions are "smothered in surmise." (Faith is not a matter of blind belief, of slavish assent and acceptance, as many no-faith people seem to regard it. It is what Wordsworth calls it, "a passionate intuition," and springs out of quickened and refined sentiment, out of inborn instincts which are as cultivable as are any other elements of our complex nature, and which, too, may be blunted beyond a consciousness of their possession.) And when one in this latter state denies the reality of faith, he is not unlike one born blind denying the reality of sight.

A reiterated lesson in Browning's poetry, and one that results from his spiritual theory, is, that the present life is a tabernaclelife, and that it can be truly lived only as a tabernacle-life; for only such a life is compatible with the ever-continued aspiration and endeavor which is a condition of, and inseparable from, spiritual vitality.

Domizia, in the tragedy of 'Luria,' is made to say: —

"How inexhaustibly the spirit grows!

One object, she seemed erewhile born to reach

With her whole energies and die content,

So like a wall at the world's edge it stood,

With naught beyond to live for, — is that reached? —
Already are new undream'd energies

Outgrowing under, and extending farther

To a new object; - there's another world!"

The dying John in ‘A Death in the Desert,' is made to say:

1

66 say that man was made to grow, not stop;

That help he needed once, and needs no more,
Having grown up but an inch by, is withdrawn:

For he hath new needs, and new helps to these.'
This imports solely, man should mount on each
New height in view; the help whereby he mounts,
The ladder-rung his foot has left, may fall,
Since all things suffer change save God the Truth.
Man apprehends him newly at each stage

Whereat earth's ladder drops, its service done;
And nothing shall prove twice what once was proved."

And again :

"Man knows partly but conceives beside,

Creeps ever on from fancies to the fact,
And in this striving, this converting air
Into a solid he may grasp and use,

Finds progress, man's distinctive mark alone,
Not God's, and not the beasts': God is, they are,

Man partly is and wholly hopes to be.

Such progress could no more attend his soul

Were all it struggles after found at first
And guesses changed to knowledge absolute,
Than motion wait his body, were all else
Than it the solid earth on every side,

Where now through space he moves from rest to rest.
Man, therefore, thus conditioned, must expect
He could not, what he knows now, know at first;

What he considers that he knows to-day,

Come but to-morrow, he will find misknown;
Getting increase of knowledge, since he learns
Because he lives, which is to be a man,
Set to instruct himself by his past self:
First, like the brute, obliged by facts to learn,
Next, as man may, obliged by his own mind,
Bent, habit, nature, knowledge turned to law.
God's gift was that man should conceive of truth
And yearn to gain it, catching at mistake,
As midway help till he reach fact indeed.
The statuary ere he mould a shape
Boasts a like gift, the shape's idea, and next
The aspiration to produce the same;

So, taking clay, he calls his shape thereout,
Cries ever, 'Now I have the thing I see':
Yet all the while goes changing what was wrougnt,
From falsehood like the truth, to truth itself.
How were it had he cried, 'I see no face,
No breast, no feet i' the ineffectual clay'?
Rather commend him that he clapped his hands,
And laughed, 'It is my shape and lives again!'.
Enjoyed the falsehood, touched it on to truth,
Until yourselves applaud the flesh indeed
In what is still flesh-imitating clay.

Right in you, right in him, such way be man's!
God only makes the live shape at a jet.
Will ye renounce this fact of creatureship?
The pattern on the Mount subsists no more,
Seemed awhile, then returned to nothingness,
But copies, Moses strove to make thereby
Serve still and are replaced as time requires:
By these make newest vessels, reach the type!
If ye demur, this judgment on your head,
Never to reach the ultimate, angels' law,
Indulging every instinct of the soul

There where law, life, joy, impulse are one thing."

Browning has given varied and beautiful expressions to these ideas thoughout his poetry.

The soul must rest in nothing this side of the infinite. If it does rest in anything, however relatively noble that thing may be, whether art, or literature, or science, or theology, even, it declines in vitality it torpifies. However great a conquest the combatant may achieve in any of these arenas, "striding away from the huge gratitude, his club shouldered, lion-fleece round loin and flank," he must be "bound on the next new labour, height o'er height ever surmounting destiny's decree!"

"Rejoice that man is hurled From change to change unceasingly, His soul's wings never furled!" 2

1' Aristophanes' Apology,' p. 31, English ed. 2' James Lee's Wife,' sect. 6.

But this tabernacle-life, which should ever look ahead, has its claims which must not be ignored, and its standards which must not be too much above present conditions. Man must "fit to the finite his infinity" ('Sordello'). Life may be over-spiritual as well as over-worldly. "Let us cry, 'All good things are ours, nor soul helps flesh more, now, than flesh helps soul!'"1 The figure the poet employs in 'The Ring and the Book' to illustrate the art process, may be as aptly applied to life itself—the greatest of all arts. The life-artist must know how to secure the proper degree of malleability in this mixture of flesh and soul. He must mingle gold with gold's alloy, and duly tempering both effect a manageable mass.

too much

There may be too little of alloy in earth-life as well as

too little to work the gold and fashion it, not into a ring, but ring-ward. "On the earth the broken arcs; in the heaven a perfect round" ('Abt. Vogler'). "Oh, if we draw a circle premature, heedless of far gain, greedy for quick returns of profit, sure, bad is our bargain" ('A Grammarian's Funeral ').

'An Epistle containing the Strange Medical Experiences of Karshish, the Arab Physician,' is one of Browning's most remarkable psychological studies. It may be said to polarize the idea, so often presented in his poetry, that doubt is a condition of the vitality of faith. In this poem, the poet has treated a supposed case of a spiritual knowledge "increased beyond the fleshly faculty heaven opened to a soul while yet on earth, earth forced on a soul's use while seeing heaven," a spiritual state, less desirable and far less favorable to the true fulfilment of the purposes of earthlife, than that expressed in the following lines from Easter Day': :

"A world of spirit as of sense

Was plain to him, yet not too plain,
Which he could traverse, not remain

A guest in: - else were permanent

Heaven on earth, which its gleams were meant
To sting with hunger for full light," etc.

1'Rabbi Ben Ezra.'

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