"meagre thread

Which runs across some vast, distracting orb

Of glory."

Faith has passed into sight, and the human will is effaced in the Divine. "Indeed the special marking of the man,

Is prone submission to the heavenly will—
Seeing it, what it is, and why it is."

But therefore is the moral discipline of life over for him; he can will only God's will. But in the order of God's education it is necessary we should walk first by faith, afterwards by sight; should work out the moral law ere we recognize it as Divine, else we could not know God as good, and there could be no personal life, only the absorption of the human will in the infinite. Virtue can take root only in the darkness; we need to live in a world opaque for us. If, whilst enduring the agony, we could see the joy set before us, how could our spiritual nature attain its full growth! No; we must utter the cry "lama sabachthani" ere we can say, "It is finished." "Clouds and darkness must be round about Him," that we may learn that "righteousness and judgment are the habitation of His seat." We must do right not only because we know God wills it, but we must know that God wills it because it is right. We are to yield not a "prone submission," a satisfied assent, but the gladness of a full consent. There may be submission to the Almighty, but there can be concord only with the All-good.

And it seems that Lazarus has lost his characteristics as a man, because for him the work of this life is over; he has anticipated the next stage of existence ere he has entered on it, and so there is discord.

"The law of that is known to him as this,

His heart and brain move there, his feet stay here,
So is the man perplext.

'It should be' baulked by 'here it cannot be.""

This life, too, has lost with its educative power its interest; for to enjoy we must ever be seeking the unattained, ever advancing.

Sayeth he will wait patient to the last

For that same death, which must restore his being

To equilibrium, body loosening soul,

Divorced even now by premature full growth."

And he is no longer able to help others. We must feel their difficulties ere we can meet them; there must be a measure of stupidity in

us; one may be too clever to be a teacher.

He despairs of unfolding

spiritual realities, as we of explaining sight to the blind.

"How can he give his neighbour the real ground,

His own conviction."

"Hence I perceive not he affects to preach

The doctrine of his sect."

In conclusion the poet leads us to feel that we must learn by degrees to use the heavenly treasure, not demand our inheritance ere we have attained our majority; that the all-sufficient gospel is this-to know that the heart of God beats in sympathy with the heart of man. "So All-great were the All-loving too—

So, through the thunder comes a human voice,
Saying, 'O heart I made, a heart beats here!
Face My hands fashioned, see it in Myself!

Thou hast no power, nor may'st conceive of Mine :

But love I gave thee, with Myself to love,

And thou must love Me who have died for thee!'"

We have said that Browning deals especially with the problems which force themselves most upon our age, and answers them as a poet, by appealing to our deepest consciousness, to our sense of what must be, to our moral intuitions.

Perhaps in none are we made more conscious of his deep spiritual sympathies than in the companion poems, Easter Day and Christmas Eve. Browning knows people better than they know themselves. Which of us has not at some time professed to hold a creed, and thought perhaps we did believe, what in the depths of our hearts we abhorred? So he faces the superficial thinker, and makes him know himself. Does the agnostic approach with a smiling countenance, saying, "I am content with this world's beauty, with science and art and law;" Browning leads him to an earthly paradise, where no voice of God is heard among the trees of the garden; he casts at his feet all the gifts of beauty, but they are gifts from no one; he places him in a tabernacle vast and glorious, and it becomes to him a prison-house, because there is no escape from it into a larger life; and as for human love, this too dies in the desert, it has no root, it is cut off from all that can feed its life; and at last the soul is made to feel the utter desolation of a life without God, to know what is eternal death, to understand that deepest utterance of man's heart, "This is life eternal, to know Thee;" to understand that the resurrection for man is this—to come into the full consciousness of union with God. Without it we pine and die amidst all the earth has to give; but, if we know it, streams water the desert, it rejoices and blossoms as the rose, the mountains and hills break forth into singing, and everything that hath breath praises God. And Christmas Eve is complementary to Easter Day. That has dealt

trouble. Are we oppressed with pessimism, discontented with all that is? He tells us this is the witness to our own nobility, and to a future immortality.

"Progress is man's distinctive mark alone,

Not God's, and not the beasts': God is, they are,

Man partly is, and wholly hopes to be." (Death in the Desert.)

"'Tis not what Man Does which exalts him, but what man Would do." (Saul.) "for mankind springs

Salvation by each hindrance interposed;

They climb." (Sordello.)

"They are perfect-how else? they shall never change;

We are faulty-why not? we have time in store." (Pictures in Florence.) "He said, 'What's time? Leave Now for dogs and apes!

Man has Forever.'" (Grammarian's Funeral.)

Do we cry out that we are tired of battling with the waves, and does it seem a weary quest ever to be following the light, never reaching it? He tells us that gradual development is the condition of our spiritual health, i. e. of life.

66 -this gift of truth

Once grasped, were this our soul's gain safe, and sure

To prosper as the body's gain is wont,

Why man's probation would conclude."

Do we complain of error? He tells us this is partial truth, that the imperfect must precede the perfect, that disappointment and darkness is an earnest of real success.

"God's gift was that man should conceive of truth

And yearn to gain it, catching at mistake." (Death in the Desert.)

66 'Imperfection means perfection hid,

Reserved in part, to grace the after time." (Cleon.)

"And what is our failure here but a triumph's evidence

For the fulness of the days? Have we withered or agonized?

Why else was the pause prolonged, but that singing might issue thence?
Why rushed the discords in, but that harmony should be prized?"
(Abt Vogler.)

"If I stoop

Do we doubt the goodness of God when we see some hideous evil? He tells us that only through the contest with evil can man pass to power and glory.

"Why comes temptation, but for man to meet

And master, and make crouch beneath his foot;
And so be pedestalled in triumph? Pray,
'Lead us into no such temptations, Lord'?
Yea, but, O thou, whose servants are the bold,
Lead such temptations by the head and hair,
Reluctant dragons, up to who dares fight,
That so he may do battle, and have praise."

(The Ring and the Book.)

Do we find in old age the sights and sounds by which the soul learned truth fading in the darkness, the active powers failing? This is an earnest not of death, but of life. God is taking away the earthly sight that the "celestial light" may so much the more shine inward. He is withdrawing us into some quiet retreat, that we may "ponder on the entire past"; the evening shades are gathering that we may sleep and wake refreshed.

"Lie bare, to the universal prick of light!

Is it for nothing we grow old and weak,

We whom God loves?" (Death in the Desert.)

"Ponder on the entire past

Laid together thus at last,

When the twilight helps to fuse

The first fresh with the faded hues,

And the outline of the whole,

As round eve's shades their framework roll,

Grandly fronts for once thy soul.

And then, as 'mid the dark, a gleam
Of yet another morning breaks,

And, like the hand which ends a dream,
Death, with the might of his sunbeam,
Touches the flesh, and the soul awakes,
Then- -" (Flight of the Duchess.)

"So, still within this life,

Though lifted o'er its strife,

Let me discern, compare, pronounce at last.

*

So, better, age, exempt

From strife, should know than tempt

Further. Thou waitedst age: wait death nor be afraid."

(Rabbi Ben Ezra.)

"And stung by straitness of our life made strait

On purpose to make sweet the life at large,

Freed by the throbbing impulse we call death,

We burst there, as the worm into the fly,

Who, while a worm still, wants his wings." (Cleon.)

The lovers of Browning's poetry wonder that any one can ask the question, Is he a religious poet? True, he has not written religious epics

as Dante and Milton, and there are but few poems which are definitely on religious subjects, but the unseen is ever present to him. He is ever seeking to interpret the seen by the unseen, to justify the ways of God to man. He is ever conscious of the double life, of a Divine presence,

"The spiritual life around the earthly life :
Which runs across some vast distracting orb

Of glory on either side that meagre thread." (An Epistle.)
"God glows above

With scarce an intervention presses close

And palpitatingly His soul o'er ours!

We feel Him, nor by painful reason know." (Luria.)

So we are never shut in by the visible universe; it is to us the veil, the sacrament of the invisible, the infinite, the кaλóv Kayalòv. Yet is the Infinite no mere pantheistic presence, but the Father of spirits, manifested first and pre-eminently in the soul of man, His child, who, because he is a son, is heir of all things. Thus does the Christian teaching interpenetrate all his thoughts. Yet to the religious consciousness of some Browning does not speak. There are childlike souls who have ever looked up to God in simple loving faith, over whose being the storms of doubt have never swept, who have not known what it is to sit in the midst of a thick darkness, a darkness that may be felt; an unquestioning faith is theirs, and they have never had to wrestle with the problems of life. To such Browning may appear non-religious, yes, even irreligious, as did Job to his friends, because he cannot receive truth from the outside; it must be looked at from his deepest consciousness, an external revelation is not enough; it is not put in the forefront, because to him it is the outcome, the complement of that which is known by the intuitions of the soul; for though we may believe a person, we cannot believe in a person because some one tells us he did wonderful works—we must be united by inward sympathies, "Whereby truth, deadened of its absolute blaze,

Might need love's eye to pierce the o'erstretched doubt." (Death in the Desert.) We know the Divine through the Spirit bearing witness with our spirit; in other words, the kingdom of heaven is within.

Thus Browning seems to me a prophet whom God has given to our storm-tost age, a pilot who has learnt by long experience the hidden rocks and sandbanks on which the vessel of faith may be wrecked, now that the old anchor chains are burst asunder. An infallible Church, an infallible Book, an infallible Pope, all these have failed us—failed us that, rejecting the stones of the desert, we may learn that man doth not live by bread alone, but by the word of God doth man live. I will take a few typical poems familiar to most of us, to establish my position.