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I




Guidance. from
ROBERxT BROWVNING
in M~atters ofFaith




I
I
I




Guidance from
ROBERT BROWNING


in Matters


of Faith


BY
JOHN A. HUTTON, M.A.
Edinburgh and London
OLIPHANT, ANDERSON & FERRIER
1903




PRINTED BY
TURNBULL AND SPEARS,
EDINBURGH
/




MY WIFE




I.




Prefatory Note
THE four lectures which appear here as four
chapters, were given by the writer to a considerable class which met on Sunday evenings
during a winter.   Each lecture served as an
introduction to a detailed study of Browning's
work from the point of view of that particular
lecture.  This may explain something in the
literary manner of the book-a certain intimacy
and, in Chapter IV., an undue (as it may be
thought) personal note.
Those   who   are  themselves  indebted  to
Browning for a solid or sufficient footing in
the deeper things of life will not consider any
book superfluous which, however poorly executed it may be, has as its one sincere idea
and reason, not to estimate the poet or to
admire him, but simply to urge his message
as offering in these days of ours a basis
and motive for faith and hope and love.
J. A. H.


1903.




The quotation from Browning's Poems are made by permission of Messrs Smith, Elder W  Co. on behalf of the
owner of the copyright,




Contents


THE CASE FOR BELIEF.
THE SOUL'S LEAP TO GOD
THE MYSTERY OF EVIL.
THE INCARNATION..


PAGE
9
45...    83
* * * 83




II
I




The Casefor Belief




I




The Case for Belief


LET me say a word or two, at the outset,
on the general title-" Guidance from Robert
Browning in Matters of Faith." In matters
of faith, the utmost that any one can do for
us, is to give us guidance.  No man can
give his faith to another, any more than he
can give another his imagination or his private
history. Faith-the faith of which alone we
wish to think, is in every case a personal
thing and rests upon reasons which reach
down to the hidden and unfathomable things
of a man's own life. The region where
belief sits upon the throne or where the
throne is empty, lies far from the frontier
and circumference of our life; it is the last
recess and solitude of our spirit. Into that
region none can intrude. It is a man's own
home. There he lives with himself and can
II




he Case for Belief


have no companion-unless it be God. In
all the deep things we are strangers to each
other. I cannot, therefore, thrust my faith
upon you. I cannot compel you to believe
for reasons which satisfy me.    Strictly
speaking, I cannot give you my very reasons
for believing: for after all had been said
that I might say, I could not give you my
own point of view. I cannot tell you of all
the subtle movements in my interior life, the
play of circumstances, the formation of personal events, the kind of assault they make
upon me, the lights and the shadows which
pass over my soul, and which mean something quite clear to me. I cannot tell you
of the very things-the voices and the
silences-which make me sure of God.
Even if I could make these quite plain to
myself and if I were to speak of them to
you, they would lose in the telling the very
qualities-the hiddenness and the personalness-which make them irresistible for me.
And then, when all was said, I might not
I2




The Case for Belief
have touched you; I might not have said
anything which had any real meaning for
you. For, it is the very essence of belief that
it must be your own. It must be born within
you, and, like a true child, must spring from
the very stuff your life is made of.
That is all true, and it seems to mean that
we can do nothing for each other in this
great matter. But it is not so. I only wish
to make plain, at the outset, that one cannot
compel faith in another, that, even when the
argument for belief has pushed its way into
the very citadel of the soul, there a man is
still impregnable. He is still secure within
an inviolable shrine.  He must choose to
yield, he must consent to believe. The door
of that innermost stronghold opens only at
his own touch from  within.  Nevertheless
we can do a great deal for each other in
these most personal matters. We can speak
humbly to others about such difficulties as
we ourselves may have passed through. If
we are indebted to some great or good man
13




The Case for Belief
for giving us a new point of view, a way of
looking at things which confirmed our faith
when it had been disturbed, we can do our
best to make others see as we see now. In
any case, we can try to feel together the
seriousness and mystery of this life of ours,
so that if we do not attain to a clear and
final faith in God, we may at least lose our
flippancy and boldness as we come within
sight of the stern facts of life and the forebodings which they stir. Anything, of course,
that one may say by way of guidance is of
no value except to those who are in earnest.
We cannot compel, the proverbial horse to
drink;-we always knew that; but if the
horse determines to be rebellious, we cannot
even lead him to the well.
I have been saying that belief can never
be thrust into a life by force of argument or
discussion, that in the last resort belief rests
upon certain personal secrets which lead a
man to embrace such proofs as are offered.
In the same way, the denial of God-for
14




The Case for Belief
denial and not doubt is the true contrary to
belief-(the denial of God) arises in nearly
every case-if you inquired carefully, or if
you could see below the surface-from a
certain stiffness and rebelliousness, and this
attitude has been brought about by the
events of the man's own personal history.
We make a serious mistake if we suppose
that unbelief comes about in a majority of
cases, as the result of intellectual difficulties.
The most and worst that such difficulties
can produce in an ingenuous mind is doubt or
prayer. But denial-the harsh and dogged
opposition to the ideal or spiritual view of
human existence-arises within a man, I
must believe, because of certain experiences,
e.g. in the region of his emotions. Perhaps,
in his youth, he dreamed a dream; but the
world mocked him, and so he determined to
dream no more. Or he aimed at something,
and he missed it; or he trusted a friend,
and was betrayed. Or he loved a woman,
and she broke her word or he broke his.


15




The Case for Belief
Or death snatched his young wife from his
newly-lighted home and the light that was in
him became darkness. It is life, it is experience which inclines the heart to faith or
to denial, and those are some of the bitter
things which-unless we take pains-poison
the roots of a life, so that the man needs to
be born again, the hard crust of atheism
needs to be broken up by some still more
acute distress, or by some amazingly good
thing before he can believe in God.
Now, I should say, it is my personal testimony, that Robert Browning is never of such
value as just in those days when something
bitter has befallen us, and we are on the
point of angrily blowing out our light. He is a
real friend to any one who has been defeated,
or who has been left behind in the race. He
can in a wonderful way lay his hand upon
your shoulder when you have failed. If at
such a time you listen to his words, the milk
of human kindness within you will not turn
sour.  When you would like " to    curse




The Case for Belief
God," Browning can break in upon your
narrow passion, with a strong, hopeful word;
and behold the narrow walls fall flat as did
the walls of Jericho, and you see the things
that compensate. He would like to come
near you in the dark and dizzy moments of
your life, to sit beside you, and wait till you
are well.  He will discover to you "the
light which is in the midst of your cloud,"
or, at the worst, he will promise you a day
when the " wind will come and cleanse your
sky."  That is one level-I mean the
emotional life-on which Robert Browning
meets a man and helps him on or helps him
back to faith in God. Browning knew that
the incidents of our life-the silent defeats,
disillusionments, betrayals-give a man his
point of view, his way of looking at things;
that these sow the seeds of what may become harsh and hopeless unbelief.
Therefore he tries to get alongside a man
in all the various discomfitures of life. He
would fain sing him a song to heal his wound.


B


I7




The Casefor Belief
He appeals to us not to give way to rash
decisions because of any private shock, to
remember that the soul is greater than its
mere circumstances, that even in the last
push and stress of evil fortune a man may
call upon his soul and be supreme. It is
perhaps here more than anywhere else that
Browning best serves the cause of faith, by
going up and down the ranks, putting new
heart into men, calling upon the brave still
to be brave and braver yet, rebuking the
cowardly with a lash of contempt, whispering
something to the faint, and pleading with
those who have sunk to the rear.    This
service, however, great as it is, and directly
on the side of belief-I mean his bracing
treatment of the human soul in all its nineteenth-century moods-is not what readers
of Browning have come to look upon as his
peculiar guidance in matters of faith. When
one uses the phrase, "' Guidance from Robert
Browning in matters of faith," he means and
is understood to mean, the help which in
18




The Casefor Belief
his works generally Browning gives to those
who feel the difficulty of believing.  He
means the light which Browning sheds upon
the peculiar questions of our time, his interpretation of those facts in the human situation
which seem inconsistent with the Sovereignty
of a Just and Loving God.    And, above
every other distinction, that is Browning's
value for us. He is the great Apologist of
these last days, the man of God to our
peculiar age. He has ranged through the
vast world of nature, and the vaster world of
-the human soul, in his vigorous contention
with unbelief.  He is splendidly equipped
for the long and intricate battle.  "When
British literature," said Carlyle of Scott and
Cobbett, "lay all puking and sprawling in
Wertherism, Byronism, and other sentimentalisms, nature was kind enough to send us
two healthy men." Browning is a healthy
man, a man of boundless spirits and untiring
energy. He takes a ditch at a leap, and the
momentum of his rush carries him to the top
'9




Tlhe Case for Belief
of any hill of difficulty. There he takes
breath, and gazes on the grand horizon, and
in a moment is pressing forward on some
further toil. That is one side of Browning's
qualification to be the prophet of our time.
But a fund of good spirits is not faith.
Faith-and certainly, the only kind of faith
which will satisfy us now-faith must be
aware of all the difficulties. Faith must be
able to maintain itself in the face of all the
grimness and sordidness of the human situation. Now Browning's faith is of that kind.
His is not the faith of a man who shuts his
eyes and deceives himself: belief, in his case,
is the strenuous search for and discovery of
God in all and through all and over all.
Browning saw the things that make faith
hard to hold. He eyed those things all his
days. His very finest words have no meaning unless you remember the dark things to
which they were given as an answer or a
challenge.  But he never sat down and
lamented the human lot. He took off his
20.




The Case for Belief
coat and wrestled with the enemy till the
breaking of the day. " Does anyone suppose
that faith is an easy thing for me?" he seems
to ask.   "Nay; it is a long victory, i.e. a
long battle."
" With me, faith means perpetual unbelief
Kept quiet, like the snake 'neath Michael's foot
Who stands calmjust because hefeels it writhe."
(Blougram.)
" All's doubt in me! (where then is my faith?)
It is the idea, the feeling and the love
God means mankind should strive for and show
forth."                  (Blougram.)
" This is the glory-that in all conceived,
Or felt or known, I recognised a mind,
Not mine but like mine-for the double joyMaking all things for me, and me for Him."
(Prince Hohenstiel Schwangan.)
And now I wish to work my way through
a statement according to Robert Browning, a
mature and deliberate statement as I hold, of
the case for belief. I wish you to face with
me certain difficulties in the way of belief,
21




The Case for Belief
and to consider what Browning has to say to
them.   Browning was engaged throughout
his whole life on this subject, contending for
belief in the face of every perplexing thing.
The difficulty, therefore, which presents itself
to one in my position is to make a selection
from the wealth of materials.
It would be an easy and pleasant exercise
for me to bring together passages from
Browning-first and last, which literally
stagger with the joy and fulness of faith,
passages which, like the soul of Caponsacchi,
are " drunk with truth." I wish, however,
to avoid that. For one thing, the pith of
any quotation from a serious writer lies in
the context. This is notably true of Robert
Browning. In his case, it is the process that
is characteristic and illumines. He says his
best things by the way.    But further, it
brings little help to one who is really in
trouble about faith to hear a firm voice from
afar. Such an one is not yet ready for victorious words or for conclusions. He knows
21




The Case for Belief
that, for himself, he has a battle to fight.
Caught in a morass it may only dishearten
him to hear another celebrate the firm
footing on the ridge.  What most people
need to-day who are wrestling in any fundamental way with life, is some idea which will
make the hardest battle seem worth while, an
access of energy which will urge them to be
faithful to their own personal problem, a
revival and reinforcement of that instinct to
live, which for reasons has been bruised.
In short, they do not want a conclusion but a
task.
I have decided to devote myself in what
follows of this chapter to one work which
represents  very  fairly  Browning's chief
positions and his general attitude towards
unbelief.  Students of the poet know
that I might, for this purpose, have chosen
" Paracelsus " or "Christmas Eve and Easter
Day," or " A Death in the Desert," or
"Ferishtah's Fancies," and made any one
of these a basis of a defence of faith. I


23




The Casefor Belief
have  chosen the argument in    "Bishop
Blougram's Apology." There may be those
who know Browning and who think that
" Bishop Blougram's Apology " was not meant
to be taken seriously, that the Bishop who
is speaking is a contemptible character, and
that the whole poem is a cynical defence of
compromise and hypocrisy. I must simply
say that I take an entirely different view. I
hold that in "Blougram," Browning is in
terrible earnest, despite the humour which
never forsook him. In "Blougram," I see
Browning refusing to take a man more
seriously than the man takes himself.  He
chaffs Mr Gigadibs, not for his unbelief, but
for his shallowness, for his ignorance of
what his denial involved. But behind those
twinkling eyes of Blougram, I see a convinced
and genuine soul. In " Blougram's Apology,"
Browning utters sentiments which he repeats,
almost without change, in what is admitted
to be his most sober work, e.g. in the
"Pope," and in "Ferishtah."  Are there
24




The Case for Belief
not, too, sudden solemnities in Blougram's
talk, such as are possible only to a man who
is in the habit, when he is alone, of facing
the ultimate things-God, the soul, the
future? Blougram knew very well what he
had to look for from God if he were nothing
but a hypocrite. You remember the grim
story with which he begins his defence.... how some actor on a stage played Death,
With pasteboard crown, sham orb, and tinsell'd
dart,
And called himself the monarch of the world;
Then, going in the tire-room afterward,
Because the play was done, to shift himself,
Got touched upon the sleeve familiarly
The moment he had shut the closet door,
By Death Himself. Thus God might touch a
Pope
At unawares, ask what his baubles mean,
And whose part he presumed to play just now.
Best be yourself, imperial, plain and true."
(Blougram, 240, I.)
I cannot think that the man who was haunted
at the moment by such a terrible thought,
25




The Casefor Belief


sat down there and then deliberately to play
the knave. Therefore, and for many reasons
in addition, I believe "Bishop Blougram's
Apology" to be-though the pure gold, as
was Browning's manner, is here mixed with
much alloy-a serious defence of faith, a
serious statement of the case for belief;
that in   Blougram" we have in germ
the deepest thoughts that Browning ever
uttered.
Mr Gigadibs, a literary man and a sceptic,
is seated at table with Bishop Blougram in
the Bishop's house. The moment supper is
over, the Bishop plunges into a discussion
on matters of faith. He may have been irritated by some magazine article of Gigadibs.
Certainly he is very angry, but restrains
himself, knowing that he has his man well in
hand, and can crush him whenever he cares
to. He begins: 'So, Mr Gigadibs, you
would reconstruct the world?  You are not
satisfied with things as they are?  You see
flaws and inconveniences which might have
26




The Case for Belief


been prevented.  Life puts cruel burdens
upon a man -and so forth.      In short,
things might have been otherwise arranged.
No doubt that is quite true; at least let us
say so for a moment. One could conceive a
world much different from this one, and at
first sight, more kind. We might have had
less snow about the poles.  The Arctic
regions are perhaps a little overdone.  And
then the torrid zone-how hot and intolerable it is! Then there is the loathsome
world of creeping things, all so objectionable
and, as it seems, so useless! Yes; truly, life
might have been laid out upon a different
plan. And yet, are you sure it would have
been a better world? You cannot say. The
Arctic regions, after all, give us our cool
fresh winds, and how welcome they are in
June! - It may be the same with all those
other circumstances which we think unfortunate or evil. We cannot now conceive of
life without them. If you change one real
fact in this world, you must make the whole
27




T'he Casefor Belief
world, and make man, anew.     We have
grown up amongst things as they are, and
now they are the best surroundings we
could have. They make the very demands
upon us which we need if we are to realise
our true life. We need hard facts if we are
to have brave souls.  No, friend, I see now
that you would need to know everything,
and know how one thing affected another
right on to the limits of creation, before you
could say that things as they are, might,
with advantage, have been otherwise. But
apart from that, the question is not how we
should think and feel if we were in another
kind of world; if we lived in Mars or in the
Moon. The fact is, we are here.
"The common problem, yours-mine, every
one's
Is-not to fancy what were fair in life,
Provided it could be-but finding first
What may be, then find how to make it fair
Up to our means; a very different thing."
"An illustration. We mortals must cross




The Case for Belief


the ocean of this life.  We cannot choose
but cross. We are already out upon the
deep when we are born. To each of us is
allotted a certain space in the great ship-no
more. How then are we to prepare for the
voyage?   An India-screen, a piano, some
sets of books, a marble bath, some pictures and other comforts? But you have
only six feet square! What will you do?
Will you stand sulking on the pier and refuse
to go on board with some well-selected and
well-packed necessaries, because you cannot
have your piano and bath? It looks distinguished, no doubt, to protest against what
others are trying to make the most of.
Nevertheless you must get on board, and if
you will not be sensible and take some
things you are sure to need, you will have to
endure the long voyage in torment. You see
what Im driving at?  You and I were not
consulted at the making of the world. We
awoke and found ourselves here; but we
know some plain things which we must do.
29




The Casefor Belief
We begin our existence here under the
shadow and influence of instincts which were
given to us, as it were, in our sleep."
"And now" (we may suppose Blougram
continuing as he warmed to his case) "we
are agreed that we must take the world as
we find it. We are not in Mars or in the
Moon, we are here. The question is-Shall
we believe in God or shall we not believe?
rou do not believe. Well, let me also try
not to believe. Let us banish belief entirely
-not half-heartedly, mind you, or in certain
special cases, but absolutely."
Here, let me say, we are coming to a stroke
which Browning practises very frequently. It
is a playful stroke, as he performed it, but
deadly always at the last. He accepts his
opponent's position, and then shows him that
it is untenable. Browning, as Father Ogniben
in " A Soul's Tragedy " puts it, tries to help
a man on to his own conclusions.  "I have
no objection," said that guileless and nimble
father, " to agreeing with any man that two
3~




The Case for Belief
and two make five, if he will go a little
further and agree with me that four and four
make ten."  And so, Browning never pursues
an opponent so ruthlessly as when he begins
by agreeing with him, and then showing him
what both have committed themselves to.
Another stroke of his, and one very like this,
is to answer a man's question by asking him
another; but we have reached an example of
both.
"Let us together," continued Blougram,
"banish belief and refuse to see even one
solitary hint of God in the world, or in history,
or in the spirit of man. Let us agree that
the world is so much stone and lime, and
that things happen without reason or meaning. But can you promise me that you and I
shall be able to keep ourselves in this fixed
state of unbelief? I, on my part, am quite
ready to confess that there are circumstances
in life, such as the existence of evil, the
apparent drowsiness of justice and absence
of retribution, pain, sickness, and the moral
3'




Tlhe Case for Belief
squalor, which disturb my faith in God, and
pull me up suddenly. But, if we decide not
to believe, can you promise me that our
unbelief will never be disturbed, that we shall
never be pulled up suddenly in our atheism
by something which suggests-God? Ah!
you cannot promise me that I shall be safe in
my unbelief. Suppose I stand, some evening,
by the sea-shore alone. I watch the rise and
fall of the vast waters, until I seem to see
the heaving bosom of a tired world asleep.
The sun goes down behind the sea, and in
the dusky sky the quiet stars begin to be
born. Ah, Gigadibs, can you promise me
that I shall not feel the pathos of such a
scene, that I shall not drift away into thinking
of God and of myself? No, you cannot
promise me that. For I am so made that I
cannot but feel strange meanings amid such
solemn scenes, and hear again the siren voice
of faith,-that this world which we hold to
be crass matter, and without divinity, is none
other than the house of God, and the gate.
32




T'he Case for Belief
of heaven. Can you promise me that I shall
never hear one speaking to me, when 1 am
alone, recalling to me my past foolishness
and the things I would fain forget? Confess that you cannot, confess that the soul
lies open for ever to all manner of disquieting
and convulsive thoughts, that
"Just when we're safest, there's a sunset
touch,
A fancy from a flower-bell, some one's death,
A chorus-ending from EuripidesAnd that's enough for fifty hopes and fears
As old and new at once as nature's self,
To rap and knock and enter in our soul,
Take hands and dance there, a fantastic ring
Round the ancient Idol, on his base again,
The grand Perhaps! We look on helplessly.
There the Old misgivings, crooked questions
areThis good God-what He could do if He
would,
Would if He could-then must have done long
since.
If so, when, where, and how? Some way must
be,

c


33




The Case for Belief
Once feel about and soon or late you hit
Some sense in which it might be after all,
Why not, "THE WAY, THE TRUTH, THE
LIFE?
Thus, you see, unbelief is not more secure
than belief. Admit that in the human situation, there are circumstances which seem to
urge you to unbelief, there are also circumstances which assuredly urge you to belief.
When I set out with my belief, I agree with
you for the moment that my belief may
get many a shake as I pass through life and
look about me. But when you set out with
your unbelief, you must agree with me that
your unbelief also gets many a shake; so that,
in short, you are no more secure in your
unbelief than I am in my belief.
"All that we have gained by our unbelief,
Is a life of doubt diversified by faith,
For one of faith diversified by doubt.
We called the chess-board white; we call it
black."
Having made good this point, Blougram,
34




The Case for Belief


we may suppose, was silent awaiting an
answer from the other. Students of philosophy will recall-when I mention it-a
remarkable corroboration of what Browning,
by the mouth of Blougram, has just said,
that a man's theory of life may be overturned and shown to be inadequate by some
new experience in the man's own life; how
the human heart may refuse to be treated
as a negligible thing, but may start up and
claim its share. They will remember how
Auguste Comte had completed his "Positive Philosophy "-a system which assumed
that man is guided and ought to be guided
by the chill voice of reason and exact knowledge; and how he fell in love with Madame
Clotilde de Vaux, and thereupon revised his
system, leaving room for the human heart.
Truly, as Blougram says" Just when we are safest there's a sunset touch
And that's enough...."
Gigadibs has his reply, and it is the reply
35




The Case for Belief


of many.   "You agree with me," he says,
" that the facts of human life may lead to
unbelief as naturally as to belief. Unbelief,
therefore, is at least quite as proper an
attitude for a man to take up as belief?"
"No! " Blougram   breaks in triumphantly,
"I have you there. You forget that we
must embark on the sea of life. We must
work hard and bear burdens. Supposing the
reasons for belief and against it were equal
(they are not), a man must choose the one
which makes the best of him. Now, I hold
that belief does this; unbelief, not at all."
Belief means for him who has it, that life,
and his particular life, has a purpose which
embraces and needs all the peculiar events,
trials, lights, shadows which come to him.
If a man truly believes, he will march breastforward as to a land of promise.    With
belief in his heart, the details of his life
lose all their pettiness and acquire dignity;
his sorrows and pains are no longer torture,
but discipline, and they point onwards to a
36




TZhe Case for Belief


day and to a state of being when there shall
be no more need of them. Whereas unbelief-how does it bear upon life? Why
should a man who denies God go on toiling
and moiling here? If a man is living to no
purpose, why should he go on living at all?
Why has he not the courage to make plain
to himself what thorough unbelief means?
It means that he is living, as Emerson put
it,-simply to wear out his boots.   No!
unbelief should a  xas be accompanied by
inaction, and shpul-L wekoxne and indeedA
hasten towards death. If a man thoroughly
denies that there is any purpose, or use, or
final meaning in this human scene, if he
sincerely holds that there is no reason for
his doing anything, then, says Blougram
with a slash, "to be consistent he should
keep in bed."
A man's belief is the thing the man is
living by. Beneath every life, there is consciously or unconsciously, a personal belief.
"And now, if we are agreed that life needs
37




The Case for Belief


belief, we must hold to that as a fixed
dogma in all weathers. We must apply it
to the minutest as well as to the vastest
issues.  We must not only believe when
we are inclined to; we must determine to
believe. We must rebuke ourselves as often
as we find ourselves cynical or unbelieving.
We must say, this is my infirmity, my weakness, the result of moral indolence, anything;
but it is not the truth. It may be that
there is a mist in my eyes, or that there
are clouds overhead; but it can never be
that there is no eternal blue and eternal
sun. Once have I felt the awful need of
God, and in that moment I seemed to find
Him. I must believe forever that He is.
Further, if we must believe at all, we
must believe the best. If there is a purpose
running through all things, it can only be
the holiest purpose.  If God is, He must
be good beyond all our measures of goodness. If man is indeed going home, then
eye hath not seen nor ear heard, neither
38




The Casefor Belief
hath it entered the mind of man, the glorious
things that wait to welcome him."
If I am right in what I read between the
lines, Blougram by this time had made a
real impression on behalf of belief in the
mind of the sceptic.  Gigadibs seems to
have said, "Yes, I see now that belief is
necessary if a man is ever to do his part
in life. But why is faith not easier? Why
cannot we see the signs of God more unmistakably? If one could only see some
amazing and undeniable proof, how much
more easy faith would be?"   "Not so! "
says Blougram, "in that case it would not
be faith; it would be sight. Besides, you
know not what you ask. As surely as a
man's body would shrivel up in agony if his
eyes were without lids and his brain were
without a pan and the vertical sun were
beating upon him, so surely would the
mind faint and lose its own identity if
suddenly a man were brought face to face
with God. 'That were the seeing God,
39




2ihe Case for Belief
no flesh shall dare.' You think you would
like to have lived in the Middle Ages, when
everybody believed-when a traveller coming
home from the East would tell you how
he had seen the ark lying on the shoulder
of Mt. Ararat, though he did not go to
the top of the mountain as it was getting
dark and there were robbers about. You
think faith would have been easier then.
Once more, not so; at least not so, the
faith I mean. For faith with me is not the
easy acceptance of hearsays. Faith is the
vivid control by God of my whole life, body,
soul and spirit, and such a state is hard to
attain and to keep alike in every age.
" ' Friend, such view
Is but man's wonderful and wide mistake.
Man lumps his kind i' the wars: God singles
thence
Unit by unit. Thou and God existSo think-for certain: think the mass-mankindDisparts, disperses, leaves thyself alone!
Ask thy lone soul what laws are plain to thee,
Thee and no other-stand or fall by them!
40




The Case for Belief
That is the part for thee: regard all else
For what it may be-Time's illusion..."
(FJerishtah, A Camel Driver.)
"'What think ye of Christ, friend, when all's
done and said?
Like you this Christianity or not?
It may be false, but would you have it true?
Has it your vote to be so if it can?
Once own the use of faith, I'll find your faith:
We're back on Christian ground."'
(Blougram.)
Such, in very bare outline, and stripped
of innumerable gems of truth that thrust
and shine and burn, is Bishop Blougram's
Apology, his statement of "the Case for
Belief." We read that the sceptic, to whom
he addressed all this and more, was, if not
convinced, at least made sober; that he
wrote no more articles against faith; that
he began to be less sure of his own ground,
like a man who is standing on thin ice.
He went abroad, where, Browning hopes,
4I




The Case for Belief
amongst the quiet and solemn things of
nature, he may study the last chapter of S.
John, and learn how even one who, like
Peter, had blasphemed, may come to himself
and live and die for the Lord whom once he
denied.
I do not know whether I have helped any
of you in anything I have written. I wanted
to leave certain things on your minds.  I
wanted, for one thing, to show that the
thorough-going denial of God has its own
serious difficulties, and that these are more
obstinate than the difficulties of believing.
I wanted also to help anyone who had taken
up a definite position of denial (to help him)
to carry his unbelief to some of its conclusions; in short, to point out that if two
and two are to count five, four and four
must be allowed to count ten; which is more
serious. -
But I have been wishing in all that I have
said to remove an impression which seems to
42




The Case for Belief


be common. There are many who think
that belief is an easy thing to attain to, and
to hold. I think, on the contrary, that unbelief is the easy thing, the thing that
requires no thought at all, or only surface
thought.  S. Paul has a deep saying to
this effect. " No man," he affirms, " can say
that Jesus is the Lord except by the Holy
Ghost." S. Paul's Master said, "The pure
in heart shall see God." These two sayings
express one and the same thought. It is
this; the vision of God falls only upon those
who believe in the soul, only upon those who
treat life seriously, and who obey at every
step the highest that they know.
If an artist fifty years ago had wished to
paint a figure which expressed the ideas
underlying the word " belief," he would have
drawn the figure of a man, armed most likely
to the teeth, his enemies struggling about
his feet, and in the distance, but not too far
ahead, the sure gates of the Heavenly City.
But how does an artist of our day, who
43




The Case for Belief
has heard the voices of our time, symbolise
the great ideas which we name when we say
" I believe in God."
Take Watts' fine picture, called "Hope."
It is the figure of a woman, sitting on the
circle of the earth. She is blindfolded. She
holds a stringed instrument to her ear. She
has struck one chord and it has broken at
her touch; she has struck another, and it
too has given way. And now there is but
one string remaining.  From   it must the
music come-else there is no music in the
world.   But she does not shrink before
the awful possibility.  She prepares to
strike once more, never doubting that the
last string will be true, and from it will
come forth the clear, full note. That is
faith: "to be very sure of God."


44




The Soul's Leap to God




I




II


The Soul's Leap to God
I READ in the newspaper the other day of a
wonderful invention to be used in war. It
was a bomb, with such materials inside the
shell, and so contrived as to explode at the
touch of a ray of light! The bomb might
be placed anywhere and do no harm; but let
a ray of light fall upon it in particular, and
on the instant, at the summons of the light,
the thing would awake and burst. Well,
that is a very exact summary of Robert
Browning's teaching on the conversion of the
soul, or the soul's discovery of God. His
books teem with lines which tell of the
tremendous forces that lie coiled up within
the soul, ready to burst out and tear open a
way of escape for that divine thing which,
according to Browning, is the last analysis of
47




The Soul's Leap to God


a man. He loves to watch these explosions;
to show you a light coming towards a man
until it shines upon his face. Suddenly there
is blaze and crash and dust and smoke; but
when these have passed, you see the man
sitting at the feet of God, " Clothed and in
his right mind," while Browning chants a
psalm.  Browning makes these bombs of
every degree of intensity. He is always
indeed practising with this principle of his,
that light can burst every bondage of the
soul. He loads one man's soul with some
small secret, some light sin, but still a secret
and a sin; something that gnaws within him
and brings clouds into his sky.  Then he
will turn a gentle light upon that man's face,
which shakes the man but sets him free.
Again, he will put more of the explosive
material into a soul, deeper and more
obstinate sinning, and within a harder shell.
Once more, he will turn the ray of light, the
mild eye of God, upon the man, and then
you have a crash and a cry; but this man
48




The Soul's Leap to God


too comes out of the fire free and clean. At
last he will construct a hideous soul as a final
test for his theory and faith. He will load
this soul to the neck with the stuff of hell;
he will bind it round and round with bands
of steel. As you look at the impenetrable
case in which this foulness is sealed, with no
chink or weakness in its brazenness, you
wonder whether the quiet light will ever
reach and stir that blackness into flame.
The Great Chemist-the poet himselfseems to doubt. But once more he turns a
light upon the black ball, until it glows.
For one moment there is silence. And for
another! The light seems to call in vain.
But it still beats upon the encased iniquity,
growing whiter with impatience, until the iron
wrappings grow hot and the mass bursts like
all the others, and Guido, the infernal, rushes
out of life with a cry which the good God
may hear.
I regard Browning's teaching on Conversion as his supreme message to our time. It
D             49




The Soul's Leap to God
is that teaching, as it seems to me, which ranks
him with the prophets. Valuable as is the
light which he sheds upon those problems of
life and experience which are as old as man,
or at least, as old as the days of reflection;
splendid as is the courage with which he
girds his loins, and faces the darkness and
the doubt; yet more solitary and distinguished is his teaching on the soul of
man, his impassioned confidence that the
soul may, in one grand moment, leap sheer
out of any depth of shame or subtle bondage,
and leap to the breast of God.
We do not go far wrong if we define a
prophet as a man who, in the name of God,
boldly contradicts the spirit of his time. A man
who knows very well what people are saying,
and how they have reached their conclusions,
but who himself has a hold of the great fact
of God, which, for him, makes all things
different-that is, often, how we become
aware that there is a prophet in our midst.
Well; in these days of ours, we have become
50




The Soul's Leap to God
conscious of certain words which, unless we
take care to keep them in subjection, will
shut out God and hope. There is the word
"1heredity," for we always had the thing
itself. We have learned now that we all
begin life with a bias, that we are not free,
but bound. We are the children of our
parents; we inherit their form and features,
their voice and manner. Aye, but more
than that, we inherit their history and, in a
very real sense, we in our life merely continue
theirs. There is no reason to suppose that
the likeness is confined to externals merely.
If thought, and feeling and desire, and the
will itself are bound up inextricably with our
physical frame, then-so materialistic science
must go on to affirm-even in the region of
our most personal life, we must be content
to dwell under the shadow and bondage of
the past, under the tyranny and threatening
of old deeds and passions and weaknesses
which were never properly our own. And
further, we have become vividly aware in
SI




The Soul's Leap to God
these days of the law that " whatsoever a man
soweth, that shall he also reap," we see now
very clearly that this is a law-abiding world,
and that consequences are inevitable. That
having once admitted a sin into our life,
thereafter " the worm dieth not, and the fire
is not quenched." That therefore there is
nothing left for us except to " dree our
weird," to fulfil our destiny, which in fact is
our doom. And so on and on! Now, it is
the distinction of Robert Browning that he
breaks in upon this gloomy teaching and
cries out a thousand times, that it is false
and worse-a blasphemy. It is quite true,
but it is not the whole truth-for it omits
God.   It is true that the moral life is continuous and inevitable, and that as a man
has begun, so he must go on. But it is also
true-and this overcomes the other, as a tide
will overcome the wind and compel the waters
its way, (it is also true), that there is a living
God who is ever pressing in upon us with
His hidden resources to interrupt and turn
52




The Soul's Leap to God
the fatal drift. It was Robert Browning's
great opportunity and genius to declare this
Gospel, which is just the Gospel, to our
time; to tell out by word and parable, that,
in spite of the increment of generations
bearing down upon one's soul, in spite
of inherited weakness and liabilities, in
spite of the burdens which the soul may
have taken upon itself, and the entanglements in the    midst of which    it may
now  be writhing-it was his to declare
that it is possible for the soul to meet
the light, to see, as it were, the face of
God, and then would the hoariest mountains
be removed and cast into the depths of
the sea.
" Oh, we're sunk enough here God knows!
But not quite so sunk that moments
Sure tho' seldom are denied us,
When the spirit's true endowments
Stand out plainly from its false ones,
And apprise it, if pursuing
Or the right way, or the wrong way
To its triumph or undoing.
53




The Soul's Leap to God


There are flashes struck from midnights,
There are fire-flames noon-days kindle,
Whereby piled-up honours perish,
Whereby swollen ambitions dwindle.
While just this or that poor impulse,
Which for once had play unstifled,
Seems the whole work of a life-time,
That away the rest have trifled."
There, in those lines from " Cristina," you
have one expression among a thousand of
Browning's exultant belief in what the
Church calls Conversion.  In those lines, at
the same time, you have the manner in
which, according to the poet, the great
change invariably happens. Suddenly a light
falls upon a man, some message from the
pure world of spirit strays into his soul, and
in that moment the world shakes beneath
him. He sees himself, his sin, his shame,
his awful peril in one amazing flash, and by
the compulsion of a power which he cannot
resist, he breaks away from it all. The past
falls from him so thoroughly that the man
can look at it now as if it were some horrid
54




The Soul's Leap to God
snake which had twined itself about him, and
which now lies dead at his feet. The ray of
light has burst the fetters of brass, and
scattered the iron  in  pieces.  The man
stands breathless as if from a struggle, but
stands for the moment free and clean, a
soul new-born and made alive unto God.
Browning never wearies telling us of the
power of splendid moments to lift a man
sheer out of his sin or weakness or unbelief.
"I crossed a moor with a name of its own,
And a certain use in the world no doubt;
Yet a hand's-breadth of it shines alone
'Mid the blank miles round about;
" For there I picked up on the heather,
And there I put inside my breast
A moulted feather, an eagle-feather!
Well, I forget the rest."
A moulted, eagle feather! Something, i.e.
falls out of the blue sky at a man's feet, as
he goes on through life. Well, let him put
it inside his breast. For moments like these
decide our destiny. These, the
55




The Soul's Leap to God


" Shifting fancies and celestial lights
With all the grand orchestral silences
To keep the pauses of the rhythmic sounds,"
-these are the only moments worth treasuring.  They make us forget all that is best
forgotten.  They lift us far above the
common ways, and give us glimpses of a
vast, fair world which ever abides, though
for long days we often see it not.
" In man's self arise,
August anticipations, symbols, types,
Of a dim splendour, ever on before,
In that eternal circle run by life."
Those moments of illumination, when a light
from another place, like the finger of God,
touches the soul, may spring from every
kind of circumstance. They are possible at
all, indeed, because there is an ultimate
sympathy between God and every man. But
any kind of incident, if it only happen at the
right moment, may become the medium of a
whisper from God which stirs and unmakes
56




The Soul's Leap to God
and remakes the soul.  "The wind bloweth
where it listeth," said Jesus, " and  thou
hearest the sound thereof; but canst not
tell whence it cometh, or whither it goeth,
so is every one that is born of the Spirit."
It may be the discovery that you love someone, or that someone loves you-it may be
this that lifts you out of yourself and introduces you in the moment, and for ever to the
spiritual life. It may be the passing of a
sweet, sad face. It may be a white flower.
It may be a chord of music or an old song
heard by you after long sore years. It may
be that someone has forgiven you a cruel
wrong. Or it may come to you-the quiet
ray of light, the glance of God's calm eyeit may come in the pause of sickness, or in
the keen solitude before death.  Anything
may serve to let in the holy, purging fire of
God and truth, and thus make all things
new.
"I was a friend in darkness chained for ever
Within some ocean-cave; and ages rolled
57




The Soul's Leap to God
Till through the cleft rock, like a moonbeam,
came
A white swan to remain with me: and ages
Rolled, yet I tired not of my first free joy
In gazing on the peace of its pure wings."
Even a dream may convey a true message to
the soul, and the man may, when he awakes,
thank God for the vision, and live by the
light of it for ever.
" One dream came to a pale poet's sleep,
And he said, ' I am singled out by God;
No sin must touch me."'
But whatever the occasion through which
this breath of God finds its way into the
soul, the thing itself has always one quality.
It is always "a moulted feather, an eagle
feather," always something from an unworldly
place, something that falls out of the sky,
something that comes out of a pure world,
which seems to bend over and embrace this
world of ours. In fact, it is always the
whisper of God Himself. " For God is in all,
and through all, and over all." The human




The Soul's Leap to God
love, the sweet, sad face, the chord of music,
the snatch of the old song, were only, so to
speak, the messengers who knocked at the
heart of the man; when the door opened,
it was always God Himself who entered.
There is a fine passage 1 in " Paracelsus,"
where Browning tries to account for this
fact which he saw on every side, that the
soul, at the touch of a certain light, can shake
itself free and break away from its bondage
as an imprisoned eagle might escape and
sweep the heavens in sheer defiance.
"Truth is within ourselves: it takes no rise
From outward things, whate'er you may believe;
There is an inmost centre in us all,
Where truth abides in fulness; and around,
Wall upon wall the gross flesh hems it in,
This perfect, clear perception-which is truth,
A baffling and perverting carnal mesh
Binds it, and makes all error: and to KNOW
Rather consists in opening out a way
Whence the imprisoned splendour may escape.
Vol. ii., P. 34.
59




The Soul's Leap to God
Hence may not truth be lodged alike in all
The lowest as the highest? Some slight film
The interposing bar which binds a soul
And makes the idiot; just as makes the sage
Some film removed, the happy outlet whence
Truth issues proudly?
Oh, not alone when life flows still do truth
And power emerge, but also when strange
chance
Ruffles its current; in unused conjuncture
When sickness breaks the body-hunger, watching,
Excess or languor, oftenest death's approach,
Peril, deep joy, or woe.
Therefore set free the soul alike in all."
The substance of such teaching is just this:
man is made in the image of God, and is
made for God.   Any other kind of life does
violence to a man, and is unnatural to him.
If a man wanders from his way, if he forgets
what he is, then it is as if he was compressing
the divine spirit within him. That is why
sin brings pain, and why the ways of transgressors are hard. It is because the spirit
of God is resisting the pressure, the true
60




T'he Soul's Leap to God
man is struggling to dethrone the false man.
When through some chink or momentary
pause, the spirit within sees the face of God,
when the hand of God reaches and grasps
the hand of the man within, then there comes
such a reinforcement to the soul that it can
throw off the incubus of years and the misery
of countless deeds, and can stand erect above
all the ruins. " When he came to himself,
he said I will arise and go to my Father.
And he arose and came to his Father." Man
is for ever the prodigal son, with his history
and his hope.
And now, let me give you some illustrations of Browning's teaching on Conversion,
which up to this point I have been trying to
isolate and to define. The locus classicus for
this side of his message is, as students of
Browning are aware, the drama entitled
" Pippa Passes "-a work which for delicacy
and charm, and, at the same time for strength
and insight, Browning surely never surpassed.
There you have the story of how a little
6i




The Soul's Leap to God
orphan girl, Pippa, spent her one holiday.
She set out in the early morning of the New
Year's Day, with no aim except to walk in
the sunshine and sing out the joy she felt.
But all the while, she was to be God's own
sunshine that day, looking in upon certain
lives, interrupting them, rebuking them, inspiring them, but bringing them one and all
face to face with God.
First she passed the unholy house of
Ottima and her lover Sebald.     Already
Sebald's conscience had been aroused, as he
saw the sun rising grandly that morning over
the fresh good world. But his temptation was
too near him. The good spirit which for a
moment had been stirred, was just about to
fall into a deeper sleep, and Sebald to fling
himself into the abyss of sin, when Pippa
passed, singing, singing about God.
The year's at the spring, and day's at the morn;
Morning's at seven; the hillside's dew-pearled;
The lark's on the wing, the snail's on the thorn;
God's in His heaven; all's right with the world."
62




The Souls Leap to God
And Pippa passed. Aye: but not before
a shaft of light had pierced as with an arrow
the inmost soul of Sebald.  "God's in His
heaven!" he muttered, like one awakening from a horrid dream.    "God's in His
heaven! Do you hear that, Ottima? " And
in the moment the world of sin appeared
in all its ghastliness.  Suddenly, sin lost
all its glamour for him, and in that pure
moment of recoil, he killed himself. But
before he died a wonderful peace seemed
to be coming towards him. He thanked
God that he had been saved so as by fire.
" That little peasant's voice
Has righted all again; though I be lost,
I know which is the better, never fear,
Of vice or virtue, purity or lust,
Nature or trick! I see what I have done,
Entirely now. Oh, I am proud to feel,
Such torments - let the world take credit
thenceI, having done my deed, pay now its price,... God's in His heaven! "
His last words were that he felt all the sin
63




The Soul's Leap to God
and blackness of his life hurrying down,
like waters, into some ghastly pit, leaving
him clean and calm.
I will not stay to tell you now of the
other ministries which little Pippa-God's
ray of light-rendered on that New Year's
Day. How she passed by Jules, the artist's
window, when his soul was in another kind
of toil, when he was nearly giving way to the
spirit of the world; and how her song came
to his rescue and was for him the voice of
God bidding him " to his own self be true."
And then, how she passed by the old tower
where Luigi the patriot had almost consented
to give up the enterprise which was to set
Italy free.  But Pippa's song made him
dash to the earth the cup that would have
sent his soul to sleep, and he hurried down
the hill to his high  task.  "i'Tis God's
voice calls: how could I stay? Farewell! "
And last, and late at night, how  Pippa
passed beneath the bishop's window just as
the bishop was being lured into a diabolical
64




Th~ Soul's Leap to God


plot. But the bishop heard the innocent song,
and in a moment shrank shuddering from the
abyss where last moment he stood trifling with
his soul. " Gag this villain who tempts me.
Remove him! 0 Lord, have mercy upon me! "
Thus in one day, the little child, Pippa,
became in God's hand, a ray of light which
burst the bondage of four souls at least.
Take another story, in which you find
the same account of the burdened soul
when a stream of light pours into it. Take
the story in the poem "Ned Bratts."  On
a hot midsummer's day, their lordships were
conducting the Special Assizes in Bedford
Courthouse. Business was proceeding, when
old Ned Bratts and his wife, hand-in-hand,
tumbled up the passage until they reached
the platform.  Then  they turned  round
and faced the assembled people.   They
pleaded with the judges-in God's nameto let them speak out. And this was what
they said. They had just come from Bedford Jail, where they had met John Bunyan.
E             65




T'he Soul's Leap to God


They had been such sinners all their lives
that their souls were black and hot. But
John Bunyan had spoken to them of God.
He had taken down "the blessed book"
and had read out of it about God, and
Christ, and heaven; about Love and Pity
and Forgiveness; about another world than
this, and another way of looking at things
from what is common. And God's eye had
settled upon them-man and wife. And
now they felt that they must empty their
souls of all their sins, and drag out to the
light all their hidden iniquities so that God
and the daylight might burn them up. In
that open court, in the full light of day,
they poured out their souls, those two, the
one helping the other not to forget even
one foul spot. Murders they confessed and
all manner of evil, and felt, they said, as
they confessed, that they were being eased
and were becoming pure.   At last they
were done; and now they besought the
judges to condemn them quick to death.
66




The Soul's Leap to God
And Ned Bratts and his wife passed swiftly
out of life singing and making melody in
their hearts unto God.
But the illustration of how God and all
holy things rush in upon the soul, which
I love best in Browning, is the story from
the "Ring and the Book" which the priest
Caponsacchi tells of himself. In that story,
you may learn how a passionate and sinful
man became suddenly quiet and gentle and
vividly aware of God-all through    that
angel child, Pompilia-our poet's most delicate and holy work, " the rose he has
gathered for the breast of God."    You
will read there how a careless and wildhearted man met the pure gaze of an
innocent child  who   had   been  cruelly
wronged, and how from that moment God
possessed him utterly. He tells how" That night and next day did the gaze endure,
Burnt to my brain, as sunbeam thro' shut eyes,
And not once changed the beautiful, sad, strange
smile."
67




The Soul's Leap to God
He tells how he wrestled with the new
vision of God, and with the new meaning
which life had taken on,
"The fact is (he says) I am troubled in my mind,
Beset and pressed hard by some novel thoughts.
I will live alone, one does so in a crowd,
And look into my heart a little."
He tells how he used to struggle with himself before he gave himself entirely to the
new leading;
"One evening I was sitting in a muse,
Over the opened ' Summa'; darkened round
By the mid-March twilight, thinking how my
life
Had shaken under me-broke short indeed,
And showed me the gap 'twixt what is, what
should be,
And into what abysm the soul may slip,"
-when one day she of the angel-face spoke
to him and laid a duty on his soul. Then
Caponsacchi awoke: the Caponsacchi God
was striving to bring forth. He awoke and
burst his bands asunder, as all this poet's
68




T'he Soul's Leap to God


heroes do, as we all do, when the ray of
light from God really reaches to our soul.
In page after page of the most stirring
emotion, emotion which infects you as you
read, and makes you long for some great
sacrifice which will put you also to the test,
and burn up all the dross and lurking meanness of your life; in page after page of
burning words he tells his judges-for he is
telling his story in a court of law-of the
earthquake and avalanche and the fires which
unmade and remade his soul:
" Pompilia spoke and I at once received,
Accepted my own fact, my miracle,
Self-authorised and self-explained-she chose
To summon me and dignify her choice.
Afterward..
Listen to the description which follows of
a sinful man's past life, as it appears to him
after God has lifted him out of it.
"Afterward-Oh! I gave a passing glance
To a certain ugly cloud-shape, goblin-shred
Of hell-smoke hurrying past the splendid moon,
69




The Soul's Leap to God


Out now to tolerate no darkness more;
And saw right thro' the thing that tried to pass
For truth and solid, not an empty lie.
"By the invasion I lay passive to
In rushed new things, the old were swept away;
Alike abolished-the imprisonment
Of the outside air, the inside weight o' the world
That pulled me down. Death meant, to spurn
the ground,
Soar to the sky-die well and you do that.
The very immolation made the bliss;
Death was the heart of life, and all the harm
My folly had crouched to avoid, now proved a
veil,
Hiding all gain my wisdom strove to grasp.
"Into another state, under new rule
I knew myself was passing swift and sure;
Whereof the initiatory pang approached,
Felicitous annoy, as bitter-sweet
As when the virgin-band, the victors chaste
Feel at the end the earthly garments drop,
And rise with something of a rosy shame
Into immortal nakedness: so I
Lay, and let come the proper throe would thrill
Into the ecstasy and outthrob pain."
Caponsacchi stops here in the rush of his
70




The Soul's Leap to God
words as if to excuse himself for his vehemence. You must know, said he, that a
man gets drunk with truth, stagnant within
him. (Which, by the way, may explain the
accusation brought against the disciples after
Pentecost, when the long silence and desolation that followed upon Calvary were
suddenly broken up by yon mighty rushing
wind which shook the house.) Caponsacchi's
judges knew, as I hope you who read these
words know, that he was not under the
inspiration of human love in all this vehemence.   No! the revelation of Pompilia's
holiness was indeed the key which opened
the door of Caponsacchi's heart; but it was
God, not Pompilia, who entered.
You know (he cries) this is not love, Sirs! It
is faith,
The feeling that there's God, He reigns and
rules,
Out of this low world."
And now, perhaps, you know something
7I




The Soul's Leap to God
of what Browning has to say on the subject
of Conversion, or how the Fire and Energy
of God rush in upon the soul. I must, in
any case, pass on to notice some things
which follow from this teaching, some principles which Browning strenuously preaches,
and which we shall do well to pay heed to.
Conversion, he says, begins with the. vision
of God. This, as we saw, may come in
countless ways. A light falls upon a man,
and if it really reaches to his soul, and
touches the quick, it will break up the most
obstinate crust of sin and free the man of
every entanglement. Yes; but it is always
within the power of a man to be disobedient
to the heavenly vision. Browning knew this.
Perhaps the most solemn words he writes are
on this very matter - when he warns us
not to trifle with the high impulses which
visit us; not to turn away from any private
call from God.  That to him is the great
Tragedy, when the soul will not be faithful
to what it sees. He has a drama entitled
72




The Soul's Leap to Goa
"A Soul's Tragedy," and this is the subject
of it all: how the poetry sank into prose in
one particular case; how the light that was
in a man became darkness.      It is not
Browning's fault if men slip away from their
own high moments, for he has warned them.
In such a poem as "The Statue and the
Bust,"- he appeals to men to be immediate
and thorough in obedience to their solitary
sense of duty.   And again and again, in
tingling words, he bids us count all things
but loss for the excellency of the knowledge
of God.
"Are there not, Festus, are there not, dear Michal,
Two points in the adventure of the diverOne when- a beggar-he prepares to plunge?
One when-a prince-he rises with his pearl? "
In such a poem as " The Lost Leader " he
pours out his pity and contempt for those
who "just for a handful of silver," or "just
for a riband to stick in their coat," forsake
their high calling, and "sink to the rear
and the slaves." It is like S. Paul's short,
73




The Souls Leap to God


sad saying: "Demas hath forsaken me, having loved this present world." The Pope,
in "The Ring and the Book," says this fills
him with despair-when men come down to
the sea-shore, and you say, "Come and I
will show you where you may find pearls,"
but they go their own way, muttering
"Pearls! We are not wanting pearls; we
are dredging for whelks."
Browning is very well aware, too, what are
the considerations which usually hinder men
from rising at the blast of the trumpet
and going on in strict obedience to God.
He knows the snare of the world, the fear
of its reproach or laughter, the shrinking
on the part of men from clear and decisive
acts of individuality. He knows, too, how a
man who has once tasted the good gift of
God in the form of a call or illumination, a
man who has felt the power of the world to
come, may fall away. He knows, e.g. how
a man may persuade himself that he need
not enter into life by the strait gate, but
74




The Soul's Leap to God


may get to the same end by going on as he
is. Browning knows all the tricks that a
man will play upon himself rather than strike
his tent and go out like Abraham, not
knowing whither, but only that God has
bidden him. You must read for yourselves
that delightful bantering with which Father
Ogniben, in "A Soul's Tragedy," pours
contempt upon Chiappino, who had become
too comfortable to remain the reformer he
once was.
ChiappinQ, since he had got on in the
world (to use the phrase), had changed his
views wofully, and, in spite of himself, was
somewhat uneasy. "Naturally," says he,
trying to reassure himself, "time wears off
asperities. We come to see points of sympathy between ourselves and those whom
we have been accustomed to look upon as
enemies."  "Aye," says Ogniben, " had the
young David but sat first to dine on his
cheeses with the Philistine, he had soon
discovered abundance of such common sym75




The Soul's Leap to God
pathies.  He of Gath, it is recorded, was
born of a father and mother, had brothers
and sisters like another man-they, no more
than the sons of Jesse, were used to eat
each other. But for the sake of one broad
antipathy that had existed from  the beginning, David slung the stone, cut off the
giant's head, made a spoil of it, and after,
ate his cheeses alone, with the better appetite, for all I can learn."
On the whole, however, Browning has
more pity than anger for those who let pass
the fine moments in which God is calling
them, and everything is possible. He is full
of sorrow for those bright mornings which
sink into commonplace and grey-skied afternoons. Such is the spirit of the poem (to
name but one) called "A Toccata of
Galuppi's."  We feel the poet's    great
sorrow, mixed with the feeling that it was
their fate, that while Galuppi should be
playing his fine music, which seemed to move
i amongst the great mysteries and responsi76




The Soul's Leap to God
bilities, the gay company were fooling away
their souls, dancing on the edge of the
abyss.
Browning is forced to face the question
as to what becomes of those who, in the
language of "Hebrews," "were once enlightened and have tasted of the heavenly gift,
and were made partakers of the Holy Ghost,
and have tasted the good word of God, and
have felt the powers of the world to come,"
and who have meanwhile fallen away. Here
and there, in the long course of his teaching, Browning faces this question with the
gravity and sense of the issues which it
deserves. His general answer is that " there
shall never be one lost good." Those visions,
and lights, those tastings of the Holy Ghost,
which have visited a life, cannot surely altogether die. They may be stirred into life
and power again. Sometimes it is only when
a man lies in a fever or has gone mad, and
only from his ravings, that you learn what a
man he was. The inmost deposit of his
77




the Soul's Leap to God


mind and heart becomes exposed. So life
may reduce a man to an extremity in which
the world may lose its hold upon him, and the
pure vision which once blessed him for a day
may resume its sway for ever.
Towards the close of the Pope's musings
in "The Ring and the Book," we find
Browning's most deliberate judgment upon
this solemn matter. Guido, surely the most
abandoned character ever drawn, is just about
to be condemned, and the Pope, who is to
pass sentence upon him, falls into some speculations as to what is likely to become of
Guido hereafter. He knows that in this
region nothing is absolutely certain, but he
has a hope. It is this. Once upon a time,
he says, he was in Naples.   It was the
darkest of nights. He seemed to be standing in the midst of black and empty space.
Suddenly a flash of lightning lit up the
sky, and the city stood out plainly-the
cathedral, and "white, like a shroud," the
sea. Next moment all was black-again. In
78




The Soul's Leap to God
the same way (he closes) it is possible, it is
his faint hope, that sudden death may flash
the truth for one instant into Guido's soul,
and Guide may see God for one moment and
be saved.
"Else I avert my face, nor follow him
Into that sad, obscure, sequestered state
Where God unmakes but to remake the soul,
He else made first in vain; which must not
be."
In the well-known poem " Saul," Browning
tells in his own way the story from i Samuel.
How David played the harp before Saul who
was mad-played and played until "Saul
was refreshed, and was well, and the evil
spirit departed from him." He tells how
David's music kept calling to Saul the man,
away beneath and behind Saul, the mistake
and the failure.  How   David sang and
played of other days, of better days, of
the days when there was no goodlier man in
Israel than Saul, for, from his shoulders and
79




The Soul's Leap to God
upwards he was higher than any man in
Israel. And how, under all the playing,
God was speaking to the soul of Saul,
" alluring him into a quiet place, and speaking comfortably to him, and giving him the
valley of Achor, for a door of hope, that he
might rejoice there as in the days of his
youth." Just so, the poet goes on to say,
God is ever playing to the spirit of man
through all the ages, ever speaking to his
child beneath all the wildness and the madness and disgrace which have gathered about
him in his long absence from Home.  God
is ever speaking, singing, playing, satisfying,
troubling, piercing, healing his soul, if by
any means the evil spirit may at length
depart. And here lies Browning's hope for
the world, right on until the end of the
days. Jesus Christ, God's one harmonious
Son, is now in this world of ours for ever.
He is one of the great facts of History. He
can never, never be unseated now. And all
through the ages, as it hath been it shall be
80




The Souls Leap to God
-wearied men and women, all who are
perplexed, beaten, overborne by the stress
of evil fortune, or by the tumult and bitterness of their own hearts, or by the mystery
and insecurity of our present state of being,
all these, i.e. all living souls, will one by one
in some day or hour of their anguish or
solitude, remember Jesus and think of Him,
and as they think, that pure ray of light,
that mild eye of God, will fall steadily upon
them, and will overturn and overturn until
He comes, whose right it is to occupy the
whole mind of man.
Note:-" I don't see any way out of the up-anddown existence which you describe. I feel more and
more the horrible contrast between rare moments
and my average level of achievement. I know
that it is only a man's self that realises this; to
the outsider you look much of a piece. I do
believe that the moments are the things that give
one what is best, and that they don't really pass,
however much one may fall away from them. In
the greater part of life it seems as if one must
consent; but the naked touch of reality, when it


F


8i




The Souls Leap to God
does come, is like flame through the veins, and
each time it comes it leaves the blood running a
little quicker."-From Nettleship's " Philosophical
Lectures and Remains."


82




T'he Mlystery ofEvil




I
I




III


" The Mystery     of Evil"
THERE is one pregnant line of Browning'sit is in f Old Pictures in Florence "-which,
when we think steadily over it, seems to
gather into itself all that he ever had to
say concerning the problems which we find
in human existence the moment we begin to
reflect. I mean the line-" 'Tis looking
downward that makes one dizzy." It is, he
would say, when we keep our eyes upon the
bare facts of life without the light and
reinforcement of faith; it is when we forget the high end towards which all things
may be moving, towards which therefore
they must be moving-since, according to
Browning, what may be will be, and the best
is just that which shall happen; it is when
we forget all this, when we turn our eyes
away from the sky and the sun, when we




The Mystery of Evil
suspect (instead of trusting) the song and the
dream, that the circumstances of the human
lot seem harsh and dreary and desperate.
But, what if God be! If all life is a journey
and a process! If life, with all its " shade
and shine," means something grand and sure!
If there remaineth a Rest to the people of
God, a crown to each strenuous soul,
"Then welcome each rebuff
That turns earth's smoothness rough,
Each sting that bids nor sit, nor stand, but go!
Be our joys three-parts pain!
Strive and hold cheap the strain!
Learn, nor account the pang; dare, never grudge
the throe."
'Tis looking downward only that makes one
dizzy.  Only to those who omit God and
refuse the instinct of hope, can life appear
ghastly or contemptuous of man. But,
"How soon a smile of God can change the world!
How we are made for happiness-how work
Grows play, adversity a winning fight."
In our time, we have become very conscious
of the dark things that are to be found in
86




'he Mystery of Evil


life-"the things hard to understand." It
need not be that we of to-day are more
sensitive than were our fathers to the vast
amount of suffering that there is in the
world, or more ready to be at pains and
inconveniences for its removal. But certainly
we speak more easily than they did of such
things-of the hardness of life, of the pain,
the poverty and the seeming injustice. It is
not too much to say that we are more
constantly aware of the problem of human
existence than of its solution.  We find
ourselves speaking of "the grimness of the
general human situation," and we fasten on
a phrase like " the pathos of life," and make
much of it-it sounds so true and real.
Reasons might be given why this mood has
overtaken us who belong to this particular
time. For one thing, we have just come
into an enormous wealth of knowledge.
Astronomy, geology, palaeontology-to name
but a few of the ways in which we have
become conscious of the vast spaces that
87




The Mystery of Evil
surround us-these have awakened man to
such a sense of the infinite that he is still
somewhat overwhelmed.    He has not yet
/found courage to feel and to say that all this
vastness and infinitude are only the fitting
circumstances for his vast and infinite spirit.
Meanwhile, he feels weak and almost contemptible in presence of the stupendous
world which he himself has discovered. He
lies open to gloom. The universe, which, as
he will understand when he recovers strength,
is really calling on him to rise to his true
stature, he thinks, is mocking him for his past
presumptuousness. It is arguable, at least,
that this mood of misgiving and despondency
before the vastness of the universe, has come
down from the highest rank of thinkers,
through minds less distinguished, until now
it is present with us all like a shadow,
whenever we think seriously about ourselves.
For, when our strength is low, we refuse to
be comforted; we look about for those facts
in life which seem to corroborate our fears.
88




Tlhe Mystery of Evil
And then, every mood is absolute so long
as it lasts.  When we are suffering from
such a mood, when we are too conscious of
the difficulty and stress of living, when we
have an unhealthy fondness for words like
"pathos" applied to the ordinary incidents
of a life, when we are beginning to carry
our heart on our sleeve, and to sigh over
the universe in public, then we are in great
need of a new and stirring word of faith
from the soul of some healthy man. God
has given to each of us the instinct to live
and to cling to life.  God has given to
each the instinct that somehow  he is fit
to meet life, fit to bear up and to find
a way in spite of all kinds of stress;
the instinct that life itself-to breathe and
to feel-is, above all question, good.  This
is the unconscious faith of children.  But
this instinct or unconscious faith has soon to
meet the challenge of the world. These are
the days of questioning when some grim fact
-the sins of men, or our own sins, or the
89




The Mystery of Evil
seeming triumph of evil here, or the heedlessness of God, or death and the gravewhen some such fact assails our native gaiety
so that we can never be the same. Then for
the first time, we see tired faces in this
world, and life has lost for ever its simplicity.
At such a point "the native hue of resolution is sicklied o'er with the pale cast of
thought." Our most abiding instinct, viz.,
the instinct to live and to hope, is threatened.
It is then that we need and must have faith.
We must find such a way of looking at
things as shall restore those energies which
doubt has numbed and frozen. We must find
some belief which shall transform the world
for us, and reinforce the instinct of our
childhood-to live with our whole strength.
Throughout his entire life Robert Browning
was facing those questions which human
observation and experience put to faith,
those questions which have arisen in every
age that has been led to reflect.   Those
facts and circumstances in life which seem
90




The Mystery of Evil
hard to reconcile with faith in God, we are
accustomed to gather into the phrase "the
mystery of evil." Wordsworth called it "the
burden of unintelligible things." You know
what facts and circumstances are meant.
For example, "we believe in God as the
source and fountain of all things.  How
excellent is this world! How very good and
fair is the face of nature! How pleasant it
is to walk into the green country and to
'meditate in the fields at the eventide!' As
"We look round, we cannot but be persuaded
that God is most good, and loves His
creatures; yet amid all the splendour we see
around us, the question comes to us, 'But
why is there pain in the world?' We see
that the brutes prey on each other, inflicting
violent and unnatural deaths.  And then
think of the pain and misery which show
themselves in the history of man -the
miserable diseases and casualties of human
life, and our sorrows of mind.  Then the
evils we inflict on each other, our sins and
9'




Tihe Mystery of Evil
their awful consequences.  Now, why does
God permit such evil in His own world?
This is the difficulty which we feel whenever
we reflect upon life, and it is a difficulty
which we are quite unable to solve. We see
light here and there upon the mystery, but
that only by faith, only by resolutely and
repeatedly trusting it all, and trusting ourselves to God.  We open the Bible; the
great mystery is acknowledged there, but
after the Scriptures have said all they have
to say, it is left mysterious.  It confesses
that 'now we see through a glass, darkly,'
that 'now we see not all things put under
God.' "1 Now does not all this seem to
contradict the name of God as good and as
supreme?   That is the problem    which,
through all his life, Browning faced for his
own soul's sake, and for all our sakes. That
was the life-long battle which he waged, to
secure and retain for man the right to believe and to hope still and for ever in God.
I J. H. Newman.
92




The Mystery of Evil


Profoundly conscious as Browning is of
the dark cloud of human experience, confessing, as he does, again and again that, if
he had not faith in God, this life, with all it
holds of pain and woe, "with its dread
machinery of sin and sorrow," would confound him; nevertheless he sees very distinctly certain steady lights within the cloud,
certain stars that peep through the blackness,
and stay. He bids us look at these lights,
and believe in those stars against all the
blackness. For is it not true that if we can
find any meaning in the mystery and problem
of our life, then the blackness is past, we
lose from that moment the feeling that there
is no intelligence in the world, no sense, no
purpose? When we see the meaning or any
meaning we can at least bid our souls be
patient.
In the first place, Browning has no
difficulty in showing us that "the evil" in
life is just the necessary opposition to "the
good."  We could not have good as we
93




The Mystery of Evil
know it if evil as we know it did not exist.
For example: virtue is possible -only- in a
world where there is temptation.
"Why comes temptation, but for man to meet
And master and make crouch beneath his foot,
And so be pedestalled in triumph?"
If there were no hardness and pressure in
life, there could not be such qualities of the
soul as patience and heroism. If there were
no sickness, poverty, death, there could be no
sympathy or pity or kindness -" For how
can man love but what he yearns to help? "
If there were no sin in this world, if there
were no sad failures amongst us, then there
could be no forgiveness, and the purest tears
would never have been shed-the tears of
erring children coming home, and the tears
of those at home who go out to meet them
coming. If life were not a place of much
darkness and mystery we had never learned
to kneel and to pray; we had never discovered our need of God. In short, we do
94




T he Mystery of Evil


not see how the soul of man, as we know it,
could have emerged at all, or could even now
remain alive and eager, were it not that we
have been placed in a world which is ever
forcing us in upon ourselves, ever provoking
the things of the Spirit-joy and grief,
patience, faith and prayer. All our peculiar
qualities as men, all the signs we have that
we are something more than mortal, have
appeared within us simply because life is
what it is.
" All to the very end is trial in life;
At this stage is the trial of my soul,
Danger to face or danger to refuse."
This leads to another standpoint from which
Browning sees and interprets "the evil" in
life.
Apart from the question, which really it is
idle to raise, viz., whether human existence
could have been otherwise ordained, eg.
without the possibility of pain or the intrusion of sin, it is certain that life as we
have it is wonderfully contrived for the
95




The Mystery of Evil
stirring up of the soul, and for the perfecting of human character.  "This life is
training and a passage."  "The moral sense
grows but by exercise."  In "Rabbi ben
Ezra," Browning raises an objection to his
own teaching and answers it. A man might
say as he reflected upon the vicissitudes of a
life, thinking how we are hurled from change
to change unceasingly, how we are evidently
in the hands of One who lifts us up and
casts us down-such an observer of the
human lot might say, " who are we; what is
a man that he should have hopes for himself?
He seems to be the victim, not the master of
his fate.  He is the plaything of circumstances; he is like clay in the Potter's hand."
Just so, says Browning, we are like clay in
the Potter's hand.  Life, like the Potter's
wheel, bruises us, sets out as if to make
something of us, then when we have almost
reached the form of that particular thing,
the wheel rolls over us; life beats us down
and unmakes us. All this seems to urge us
96




The Mystery of Evil
to personal despair; it seems to mean that
we are the playthings of our Creator, mere
clay in the Potter's hand. But suppose we
take that rank-clay in the Potter's hand.
Why, it is just there we base our confidence
and build our song. (For we cannot believe
'that the Creator has playthings and least of
all that He plays with souls. A Potter is an
intelligent being. He does not work with
the clay for the mere sake of working. He
works, on the one hand, for the sake of the
clay, and on the other to show his skill and
complete his design. Thus, the great Potter
is making something of us. Look not at the
beginning but at the end. Think not of the
clay which you are, but of the cup which you
will be when the Potter is done with you.
Once more " 'tis looking downward that
makes one dizzy" and desperate. Think of
the dignity that may await a cup. Think
how one day the table may be spread in
heaven, and how the Master of the Feast
may lift the cup-you, that is to say, made


G


97




T'he Mystery of Evil
perfect by the wheel of life! Thus you may
give Him pleasure! Wherefore
''"Look not thou down but up
To uses of a cup,
The festal board, lamps flash and trumpet peal,
The new wine's foaming flow,
The Master's lips aglow!
Thou heaven's consummate cup what needst thou
with earth's wheel?
" So, take and use Thy work
Around what flows may lurk
What strain o' the stuff, what warpings past the
aim!
My times be in Thy hand!
Perfect the cup as planned!
Let age approve of youth, and death complete the
same!"                (Rabbi ben Ezra.)
That is a line of thought to which Browning
comes back and back. Life is a training, an
education of the soul. All the circumstances
which beset man in his mortal passage have
some high reason which the man himself may
98




The Mystery of Evil
even now be aware of, and of which he will
one day be aware.
' Man is not God, but hath God's end to serve,
A Master to obey, a course to take,
Somewhat to cast off, somewhat to become.
Grant this; then man must move from old to
new,
From vain to real, from mistake to fact,
From what once seemed good, to what now
proves best.
How could man have progression otherwise?"
The very burdensomeness of life, its tear and
wear and pressure, is the surest proof to him
that life means something vast and good.
" Is it for nothing?" he asks, " we grow old
and weak, we whom God loves?" And
answers, No! but because, " when pain ends,
gain ends too."
For Browning, then, the whole of human
travail is penetrated with a purpose, and
justified by its blessed consequence. Life is
the pressure which brings the wine from the
grape, the soul from the flesh. Life is the
99.. -.  *.
eee: —




The Mystery of Evil
burden and mystery which discovers to a man
his strange forlornness of spirit, but in that
same moment discovers to him his kinship
with the hidden God.
"Beyond the tale, I reach into the dark,
Feel what I cannot see, and still faith stands.
I can believe this dread machinery
Of sin and sorrow, would confound me else
Devised-all pain at most expenditure
Of pain by Who devised pain-to evolve
By new machinery in counterpart,
The moral qualities of man-how else?
To make him love in turn and be beloved,
Creative and self-sacrificing too,
And thus eventually God-like.
Enable man to wring out of all pain
All pleasure for a common heritage
To all eternity."
(The Pope, I372.)
And so the soul that is sure of God sees
through and accepts the whole scheme of
pain and trial. Such an one-one, that is to
say, who is willing to count all things but
loss for the excellency of the knowledge of
00
e***  oee**!'-* ":** *




The Mystery of Evil
God-will not be borne away from his
centre and fund by any assault of the world.
The more his faith is tried, the deeper will it
hide itself in God. When the soul cannot
see clearly, by reason of the darkness in
things, it will cherish itself and sing and
pray.
There is an old German tale which might
be a parable of the purpose in our life of the
unintelligible things.  The story is told of a
baron who, having grown tired of the gay
and idle life of the Court, asked leave of his
King to withdraw from it. He built for
himself a fort on a rugged rock, beneath
which rolled the Rhine.  There he dwelt
alone. He hung wires from one wing of the
fort to the other, making an ]Eolian harp, on
which the winds might play to solace him.
But many days and nights had passed, and
winds had come and gone, yet never had
there been music from that harp. And the
baron interpreted the silence as the sign of
God's unremoved displeasure. One evening
I0I




The Mystery of Evil


the sky was torn with wild, hurrying clouds,
the sun was borne away with a struggle, and
as night fell a storm broke out which shook
the very earth. The baron walked restlessly
through his rooms in loneliness and disquiet. At length he went out into the night,
but stopped short upon the threshold. He
listened and behold the air was full of music.
His AEolian harp was singing with joy and
passion high above the wildness and the
storm. Then the baron knew. Those wires,
which were too thick to give out music at the
call of common days, had found their voice in
a night of stress and storm. It needed the
uttermost assault of nature to awake the
slumbering song. So may it be with souls
beset by life. All things are for our sakesand we need them all. All things comedifficulty, defeat, disease, pain, old age, death
in order that a man may discover the depths
and secrets of his own nature, and from those
depths cry out. " Strain " is a word which
means stress; but it is likewise a word which
102




T'he Mystery of Evil
means song; and it is only on a strained wire
that the music sleeps. Thus
" In the eye of God
Pain may have purpose and be justified."
At this point we must observe that Browning always treats " the mystery of evil " as a
personal problem. That is to say, he refuses
to speak for others. He will speak only as
he knows. He will only say how the human
lot appears to him, and what he feels to be
its intention. He will speak only for himself.
But it is very evident that in Browning's
opinion, if men were thorough and honest
with themselves, they would speak as he
speaks. They would confess that the experience which each man meets in life fits that
man, body and soul; and that if he would only
yield to its warning and appeal, his particular
lot would make the best possible man of him.
That is all that Browning will claim as certain.
He believes more than that. He has his own
firm hope concerning the things which lie
103




The Mystery of Evil
beyond his knowledge. But he always comes
back from any venture of imagination, back to
the things he knows, because they are within
himself.  In "1 Ferishtah's Fancies," which
is the poet's most mature and deliberate reading of life-and in the poem entitled "A
Bean Stripe," someone asks" Sir, be frank!
A good thing or a bad thing, life is which?
Shine and shade, happiness and misery
Battle it out then; which force beats, I ask?"
To which Ferishtah (who is assuredly
Browning himself)   makes reply, " I will
not answer such a question."    No   man
can answer these ultimate questions for
another.  The answer to such a question is
valid only for him who makes it. A soul's
experience is not transferable. Each man is
the centre of his own circumstances. The
same things are not the same to different
men.  "For example," says Ferishtah, "it is
reported that there are people who live in
i04




The Mystery of Evil
lands far North, where there is snow, and
where the rivers congeal in their beds. To
me, living in Persia, such a thing seems quite
impossible; and yet people do live in such
regions, and find life bearable. It is the same
regarding the general mysteriousness and
difficulty of human existence.  I can speak
only as I know. That is sufficient for me.
I have not, for example, explored the sun;
enough for me to feel its warmth. Let me
thank Him who set the sun in the heavens,
and Who made me so that I can feel the
warmth and be content. Behind all those
conveniences and accommodations which I
find in life, I like to feel the kindness of God
to me personally.  Therefore I praise and
worship Him.
"The sense within me that I owe a debt
Assures me-somewhere must be somebody
Ready to take his due."
But perhaps you may say, " I have no right
to leap to the conclusion that there is a per1o5




iThe Mystery of Evil
sonal God.    Why not worship the sun or
honour the laws of nature?" To which
Ferishtah replies with a stroke which Browning loved. " My friend," he says,
"Suppose thou visit my lord Shalim Shah,
Bringing thy tribute as appointed. Here
Come I to pay my due. Whereat one slave
Obsequious spreads a carpet for thy foot.
His fellow offers sweetmeats, while a third
Prepares a pipe: what thanks or praise have
they?
Such as befit prompt service. Gratitude
Goes past them to the Shah whose gracious
nod
Set all the sweet civility at work!"
Or,"I eat my apple, relish what is ripe.
But, thank an apple! He who made my mouth
To masticate, my palate to approve,
My maw to further the concoction-Him
I thank, but for whose work the orchard's
wealth
Might prove so many gall-nuts - stocks or
stones,
For aught that I should think or know or
care."
io6




The Mystery of Evil


In another of Ferishtah's Fancies-the
one entitled " Cherries "-the poet makes the
same defence of faith, and approaches the
problem of existence from the personal standpoint.  "Suppose," he says, "a stranger
visiting the great palace at Ispahan. He
moves through the spacious halls and corridors, observes the comfort of the place, and
the wonder and the beauty. At last he sees
his name, his very name, on the door of a
room-inviting him to enter.  He looks in
and sees a nook fitted exactly for him, soul
and body-the very colour of slippers that
he likes, lamp, books, and every thing he
would have had. What does the stranger
do? What should he do? Go in, sit down,
put on the slippers? Yes, but that only, or
that first? No!
"Who lives there
That let me wonder at."
Just so, the soul which has become aware of
its private blessings, aware of a touch here
107




IThe Mystery of Evil


and there of the hand of God, cannot be
hindered from calling upon itself to praise
the Great Good God who contrived life as it
is. The great and supreme gift of life to
us who toil and suffer-and the harder our
toil is the greater a blessing is the gift-the
great and supreme gift of life, I say, is just
the thought of God caring for the souls He
made. And none can hinder me who have
felt the goodness of God, from believing
that all the magnificence of nature, the
spacious heavens, the infinite sea, the whole
region of the vast and the beautiful is,
by God's appointment, the fitting pomp
and pageantry of even the least of His
children.
In the poem, "A    Pillar at Sebzevar,"
Browning goes over the same line of proof
once more-as if it were the teaching on
the burden of unintelligible things in which
he himself came to have most confidence.
If you are sure of any blessing in your life,
any real ground of gratitude, hold to it.
Io8




T'he Mystery of Evil
Believe in it. That is for you a star in the
steadfast heavens, although the sky may be
black next moment and no star be seen for
many days. Trust in the star which came
and went. It will shine again.   Cherish
your personal blessings, and by their inspiration meet all that life may bring.
"So let us say-not ' since we know we love,'
But rather, since we love, we know enough."
Suppose you are travelling through the desert
and are athirst. You come upon a hollow in
the sand which holds pure water. There is
only one scoopful.  What will you do?
Will you say, "No! I will not take a drop
of that water until I have dug to, and have
discovered, the source and fountainhead?"
Not so you act. You kneel and take the
scoopful.  Next moment the hollow   fills
again, and again you empty it until your
thirst is slaked. Just so must we do in this
world

lO9




The Mystery of Evil
"Drain the sufficient drop and praise what checks
The drouth that glues thy tongue-what more
would help
A brimful cistern? Ask the cistern's boon
When thou wouldst solace camels: in thy case
Relish the drop and love the loveable.",/To Browning, as he looks into " the mystery
of evil," there is no question or doubt as to
>how all things shall end.  The evil will pass
whenever its use is done. "' The child grown
man, you burn the rod."  So there is coming
a time "when the uses of labour will be
surely done." The very fact that life gives
us the impression that i-is mcomiplee, is
proof that mann carries about with him the
hope of abetter than this; and of a-besf of
all. Somewhere in the course of his journey
man has seen the land of Promise, or he has
dreamed of it. If it was a dream, it was too
good not to be true. Man lives by hopes
"too fair to turn out false." For Browning
cannot believe in a final contradiction between
man and the world as it exists for God.


IIO




The Mystery of Evil


The best is bound to be. Sometimes he
tries to think the dread alternative, to realise
what it would be "if all were error."  But
his mind sickens before the awful prospect,
and the poet rightly takes that sickness, that
first approach of madness, as corroboration of
his instinctive faith in the triumph of God in
the fulness of time.
Students of Browning must have in mind
many glowing passages in which, after pages
and pages of hard thinking maybe, the poet
utters the everlasting hope of man. For
never is Browning's voice so steady and
melodious, never do the words come so
simply and surely as when he is looking away
to the end of the days.
"Therefore to whom turn I but to Thee, the
ineffable Name?
Builder and maker Thou, of houses not made
with hands!
What, have fear of change from Thee who art
ever the same?
Doubt that Thy power can fill the heart that
Thy power expands?
III




The Mystery of Evil
There shall never be one lost good! What
was shall live as before;
The evil is null, is nought, is silence implying
sound,
What was good shall be good, with, for evil, so
much good more:
On the earth the broken arcs; in the heaven
the perfect round."
Or take the lines from the short piece
"Apparent Failures ""My own hope is, a sun will pierce
The thickest cloud earth ever stretched;
That after last returns the first,
Though a wide compass round be fetched,
That what began best, can't end worst,
Nor what God blessed once, prove accurst."
Though, for my own part, best of all I like
the old Pope's stately hope:
"While I see day succeed the deepest night
How can I speak but as I know?-my speech
Must be, throughout the darkness, ' it- will end:
The light that did burn will burn.'
"So, never I miss footing in the maze,
No! I have light nor fear the dark at all."
1 12




T'he Mystery of Evil


You may have gone out on some still clear
night and looked up into the sky. There,
in the west, was the crescent moon. You
know at a glance that that moon will grow.
The broken arc suggests the perfect round.
Nay, more; look again if the night be fine.
Do you not see with your unaided eye the
rest of the circle traced dimly on the azure
sky? Well, that crescent moon is like this
human life of ours.  The shadow which
hides the moon's full face is the mystery
which broods over and solemnises our
passage through this earthly scene.  But
just as when we look at the crescent moon
we feel instinctively that one day it will be
complete, so the very shortcoming and incompleteness of our present life-the pain,
the sin, the reign of death-all these do but
promise a future time of triumphant and
unhindered light. And just as on a clear
still night, our eyes can already see the very
outline of the perfect moon, so when our
own soul is quiet and still, when there is no


H


113




The Mystery of Evil
cloud, no bitterness between our own heart
and God, then even here and now we can see
by faith the tracing of that perfected order,
the walls of the Holy Jerusalem, the fair
fields where " there shall be no more death,
neither sorrow nor crying, neither shall there
be any more pain, for the former things are
passed away."
But the poet utters a warning. As we
have seen, he is very sure of the ultimate
triumph of good. This, however, only on
one condition-the condition, namely, that
every soul which knows the good shall
strive to the uttermost for the eventual
victory.
"God's in His heaven,
All's right with the world!"
may be a craven cry. It may mean nothing
more than that things are bound to end
rightly, that good is bound to prevail, no
matter how   we acquit ourselves.  But,
according to Browning, and according to
114




The Mystery of Evil
the fact, good which is not meanwhile in
arms against evil is a mere name.
"A thing is existent only while it acts,
Does as designed, else a nonentity;: For what is an idea unrealised."
Good will triumph if every soul which knows
the good will hate and strive against the
evil. The only proof that good will prevail
at the last is that it prevails now. Knowing
this, Browning is ever bidding men be faithful to themselves, and to God wherever they
are.   To obey on the instant the holy
impulse.
"Enough, for I may die this very night,
And how should I dare die, this man let live!
Quis pro Domino,
Who is on the Lord's side?"
"I! " cries the old Pope.
Granted this strenuous behaviour on the
part of men, each setting himself against
the enemy at his own door, each defending
the portion of the Kingdom of God which
passes by his feet, each one addressing
115




The Mystery of Evil
himself to the evil and the cruel and the
contradictory which he sees and knows, then
the final triumph of the good is assured.
And besides, it is only such faithful fighters
who are sure of the end. Only to them, to
the earnest toilers, sufferers, doers, does life
feel real and full of promise, for their faith is
helping. to create the very state of things
for which they look and labour.


II6




The Incarnation




II




IV


The Incarnation
ROBERT BROWNING himself would have been
the first to admit that it mattered very little
what he, a solitary man, happened to think
of those questions which human existence
raises, or what he happened to believe
concerning that ultimate Reality which is in
and through and over all things, and in and
through and over man.   He would have
been the first to say-" things are what
they are, and the end will be what it will
be-no matter what you or I may think."
For we do not alter the nature of things
when we happen to look at them. They
are what they are, and we are being borne
on the breast of them-whether we struggle
or consent-towards the untraversed land.
Browning himself would have been the first
to protest against the weakness of paying
I I9




T'he Incarnation


undue respect to any man's particular scheme
of things, or of supposing that what any
man may say concerning such mysteries as
God and the soul, makes these vast names
less mysterious.
For example, the truth about the Incarnation is what it is, regardless of those ventures
of the mind whereby men have tried, through
all ages, to realise the mystery of it. Browning did not invent the Incarnation as an
escape from the difficulties of faith. He
found the Incarnation and Belief in the
Incarnation already in the world, and all
that he has to say can only illuminate or
darken-it cannot threaten or change-the
Fact itself.
Speaking for myself I shall never cease to
be thankful for the guidance which I have
received from Robert Browning in this great
matter of faith.  It was a great blessingin which I wish to see the hand of Godthat just as I reached the age when a man
should begin to think for himself, the age
120




The Incarnation


when he becomes aware, perhaps, of the
apparent contradiction between faith and the
world, when the instinctive confidence of
childhood needs to be reinforced by some
belief which satisfies both mind and heartit was a great blessing that just then I
opened "Browning." He knew my difficulties, and he showed no weakness toward
" my sins and faults of youth."  He taught
me that the pure in heart alone see God.
That God is silent to those who will not
bring heart as well as mind, their whole
emotional and moral life, as well as their
powers of thought to the contemplation of
the Unseen. He made me aware of the
meaning of those words-"by faith we
understand that the worlds were made by
God." That we understand-by faith. It
was a good thing to be compelled to pay the
penalty of thought and intense imagination
before accepting peacefully and for ever
those supernatural facts which rise to our
minds when we think of God-The Father,
121




The Incarnation


Son and Holy Ghost.   It was a good thing
that one was not allowed to receive the
things of faith on mere hearsay, but only
after. the pains of thought and feeling.  It
was a good thing that those supernatural
truths-those truths concerning God which
lie at the heart of the Catholic Creedshould have come home to a man only when
his heart and mind had become alive to the
awful need of God.  Otherwise, one might
have received those great truths as mysteries
altogether remote from our actual life and
not to be embraced by the living heart and
flesh.  All that we believe concerning God
must indeed be full of mystery, but Browning
-I speak for myself-has done much to
make the mystery no more a mystery of
darkness but of light. He helps one not
ony to believe the ultimate matters of faith;
but to imagine them.  Take the doctrine of
the Incarnation.  Christians confess that
Jesus Christ, the Son of God, took on flesh
and became man, that he might bring us to
122




The Incarnation


God. They confess that Jesus Christ came
out from God, and was and is eternally in
the bosom of God. That is what the Church
asserts in the doctrine of the Incarnation.
And now, conceive how hopelessly mysterious
it all is. How our poor minds, however willing,
break down as they try to comprehend all that
such a faith implies! That the Almighty God
has had with Him from all eternity, Another,
His Like and Equal; that in the fulness of
time, He came out from God and walked for
a space upon our earth-how     hard and
impossible to realise it!  Yet such is the
Stupendous Fact which the doctrine of the
Incarnation asserts. Now, I rise from another
long study of Browning, thoroughly convinced
that he for one held that faith in its essence,
with his whole strength.   He may have
taken hold of this belief with the clutch of
despair or of death.  He may have flung
himself into the arms of it only when he
became aware of the abyss which waits for
him and for us all if such a faith be not
123




The Incarnation


true. He may have rushed into belief in sheer
horror of the blank alternative.  But even
were we to admit that, it would not weaken
his testimony. The things of God are never
learned easily; they come to us for the first
time in hours of darkness and necessity.
They come at our cries and prayers, however
mildly they may remain with us in after
years.   They come at first through pain
and a certain solitude of the soul.  It may
well be that Browning was led seriously to
believe in the Incarnation, in the first instance,
because he felt that some such overwhelming
proof of God and of His love was needed to
out-weigh the appalling misery which he
found in the world as it is. He himself confesses more than once that it is only his faith
in God, as God has revealed Himself in Christ,
which stands between him and despair.
"I can believe this dread machinery
Of sin and sorrow would confound me else
Devised-all pain at most expenditure
Of pain by Who devised pain."
I24




The Incarnation


That is to say, the burden which falls upon
his spirit as he beholds the suffering and the
incompleteness here, is relieved and can at
least be borne when he remembers that God
Himself has entered into the region of pain,
" bearing our sins and carrying our sorrows.''
In " A Death in the Desert " we have the
same confession, that all is well if in Jesus
Christ man saw for once the Face of God.
"I say, the acknowledgment of God in Christ
Accepted by thy reason, solved for thee
All questions in the earth and out of it."
In "Paracelsus " he makes Festus cry out, in
an hour of sore darkness"God, Thou art Love! I build my faith on
that."
But, to say that Browning clung to the Incarnation -of God in Christ only as a drowning
man clings to a life-belt, " lest the proud
waters should overwhelm him," is only to
place Browning in this matter by the side of
S. Paul. How are those lines of Browning's
125




The Incarnation


different in their tone or in their philosophy
from those strong cries of the Apostle with
which he swept the midnight from his soul?
How do they differ from  S. Paul's-" He
that spared not His own Son, but freely
gave Him up for us all, how shall He not
with Him also freely give us all things? " or
from that "Quis Separabit" in the eighth
chapter of "Romans," which ended doubtless
some unrecorded battle of the soul?
Leaving the question as to how, in the
first instance, Browning was led to give his
thorough assent to the doctrine of the Incarnation, certain it is that faith in that doctrine
lies at the root of all his thoughts. I know
of no poet who speaks with such consistent
reverence and such ready rapture of Christ
as he.  All the light that lies across his
fields of thought comes from that Sun alone.
Now, just as there are hours in each day,
when, although we do not see the very sun,
we have its light and warmth and by the
help of these, do our work; so there are,
126




The Incarnation


of course, pages upon pages of Browning
in which all that we have of the Incarnation is the daylight which it gives. But
just as there are fine days and exquisite
hours, in which we have not only the daylight
but the sun itself throbbing in the naked
heavens; so there are poems of Browning's
in which he rises from the common daylight,
pursues it to its source, pierces mist and
cloud until he pauses on the threshold of the
Eternal order and looks with adoration towards
the sun, across the blue.
Perhaps I shall best represent Browning's
teaching on the Incarnation and his method
of realising the mystery of it, if I describe
somewhat in detail the two poems in which
he deliberately announces his belief in that
doctrine. I mean the poems, " Christmas
Eve" and "Saul."   There are others, such
as "A   Death in the Desert," passages
from "The Ring and the Book" and from
"Ferishtah's  Fancies," and  one notable
passage  in  "Blougram's  Apology," the
127




The Incarnation


short poem, "An Epistle," also the "Epilogue to Dramatis Persona," in which his
belief in the Incarnation, supported by certain
reasons, emerges. But in the two poems I
have named, "Christmas Eve" and " Saul,"
Browning is engaged entirely and solely with
that doctrine.
In "Christmas Eve " the poet found himself
on a wild winter's night-it was Christmas
Eve, hence the title-at the door of a mean
chapel.  He slipped into the porch for
shelter, and stood there while the worshippers
passed in. After a time, he likewise entered
and sat down. The preaching was crude and
noisy and familiar without any suggestiveness
-at least to the poet-of the deep things of
God.   Hurt by the man's narrowness and
sourness, the poet rose and left the place,
and stood under the night-sky. There was a
scene more suggestive to him of God. At
the invitation of the night and the stars, his
tongue is loosed, and high thoughts, imaginations, praise and prayer hurry from his soulI 28




T/;e Incarnation


"In youth I looked to those very skies
And, probing their immensities,
I found God there, His Visible Power;
Yet felt in my heart, amid all its sense
Of the Power, an equal evidence
That His Love, there too, was the nobler
dower:
For the loving worm within its clod
Were diviner than a loveless God
Amid His worlds, I will dare to say."
"So, gazing up, in my youth, at love
As seen through power, ever above
All modes which make it manifest,
My soul brought all to a single testThat He, the Eternal First and Last
Who, in His Power, had so surpassed
All man conceives of what is MightWhose wisdom, too, showed infinite,
Would prove as infinitely good;
Would never (my soul understood),
With power to work all love desires,
Bestow e'en less than man requires;
That He who endlessly was teaching,
Above my spirit's utmost reaching,
What love can do in the leaf or stone,
(So that, to master this alone,
This done in the stone or leaf or me,
I must go on learning endlessly),


I


129




the Incarnation


Would never need that I, in turn,
Should point Him out defect unheeded,
And show that God had yet to learn
What the meanest human creature needed,
-Not life, to wit, for a few short years
Tracking his way through doubts and fears,
While the stupid earth on which I stay
Suffers no change, but passive adds
Its myriad years to myriads,
Though I, He gave it to, decay,
See death come and choose about me,
And my dearest ones depart without me.
No: love which on earth, amid all the shows
of it
Has ever been seen the sole good of life in it,
The love, ever growing there, spite of the strife
in it,
Shall arise, made perfect, from death's repose
of it,
And I shall behold Thee, face to face,
0 God, and in Thy love retrace
How in all I loved here, still wast Thou!
Whom, pressing to, then, as I fain would now,
I shall find as able to satiate
The love, Thy gift, as my spirit's wonder
Thou art able to quicken and sublimate
With this sky of Thine, that I now walk under
And glory in Thee for, as I gaze
Thus, thus..."
130




The Incarnation


As he gazed in silence upon that huge sky,
this is what he saw. The moon, at the full,
lay resting on a fleecy cloud, " in a triumph
of whitest white." Above it, the high dome
of the night; while yet higher and deeper,
the circle of a rainbow spanning the heaven
of heavens.   As his eye climbed those
terraces of light and paused at the zenith of
the darkness, he felt as if the heavens were
about to open and Some One about to step
out from the place of God upon that highest
ring.
"Oh, whose foot shall I see emerge,
Whose from the straining topmost dark
On to the keystone of that arc? "
Next moment the tempest had returned,
blinding him, and when it cleared he saw the
figure of Christ" He was there,
He Himself with the human air
On the rainbow pathway, just before."
'3'




The Incarnation


But Christ's back was towards him, and
suddenly the poet understood. Christ was
on His way from that mean meeting-house.
He had been there and doubtless was now
angry because the poet had gone away.
Therefore the poet hastened after Him and
begged forgiveness. He pleaded that he
had left the chapel because he thought the
preacher spoke and felt too meanly of God,
too meanly and poorly of His love in Christ;
that it was because he-the poet-placed
Christ higher than those grudging worshippers that he had left them, wishing to be
alone to adore. Whereupon Christ turned
His face full upon Him so that he became
unconscious through the excess of glory.
From this experience the poet learns that
Christ Himself holds it to be His chief glory
that He is the Love of God; and learns also
that those who-in spite of the bareness and
narrowness of their creed-believe somehow
that God in Christ has given Himself in Love to
men, have a hold of the hem of His Garment.
132




The Incarnation


Suddenly the poet finds himself in Rome,
witnessing the great festival of ChristmasEve. He is aware that there is much foolery
and grotesqueness in what he sees; but he
has learned that there too the worshippers
have at least a hold of the hem of Christ's
garment.   They are seeking  to reassure
themselves of the Incarnation, and are bearing witness to their faith before the world.
He will not quarrel with their methods,
though for himself he despises them. He
will rather rejoice that they are doing what
they are doing to the glory of Him,
" Who trod,
Very man and very God,
This earth in weakness, shame and pain."
Once more the scene is changed. The poet
is looking into a class-room in the University
of Gottingen. The professor mounts his
place and proceeds to discuss what he calls
the myth of Christ. He explains away all
that might be thought miraculous or mys133




The Incarnation


terious in the person of Christ, until he
reaches what he says is the naked truth.
And what is the truth about Christ according
to this professor.  This only: that Christ
was a good and high-souled man, who
suffered for righteousness' sake, leaving us
an example. A chill creeps over the poet's
body and seems to settle down on his heart
as he listens. He feels passionately and instinctively that this man has not even the
hem of Christ's garment, that the truth is
not here. The chill at his heart persuades
him. He listens again. The Professor, as
he concludes, bids his students-even though
they can no longer worship Christ or place
their hopes on Him-reverence the myth,
cherish the pure and pathetic story of his life
and death. And here Browning warms to
the controversy, in a bantering way no doubt,
but we know from our past studies that
Browning is never in such dead earnest as
when he banters. He only banters when he
knows that he has the game in his hand.
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The Incarnation


And so he plies the G6ttingen professor with
rapid thrusts; showing him what his advice
-"to reverence the myth"     amounts to.
It is no longer Christ who is to support us;
according to the new style it is we who are
to support Christ, support Him and keep Him
alive by our application and study.  "Well,
well," he says,
"Deduce from this lecture all that eases you;
Nay, call yourselves, if the calling pleases you,
' Christians '-abhor the deist's pravityGo on, you shall no more move my gravity
Than, when I see boys ride a-cockhorse,
I find it in my heart to embarrass them
By hinting that their stick's a mockhorse
And they really carry what they say carries
them."
Next moment he is back in the mean little
chapel, in which indeed he had all the while
been dreaming; and the poem ends with a
warning to those who might suppose from its
jaunty movement that Browning was not
profoundly concerned in the great Matter of
Faith, which has been the subject of it all.
'35




T7he Incarnation


Up to this point we have been engaged
rather in proving that Browning believed -in
the Incarnation, than in recommending that
doctrine to others. It remains to us to discover the method by which Browning realised
the doctrine so that it did not remain as a
merely mysterious truth at an exalted distance
from his mind, but came near to him and
became the basis and power of his daily life
as a man and as a thinker. Although our
first quotation from " Christmas Eve "
the long one-contains the substance of
Browning's teaching on the Incarnation,
we must look more deliberately at those
ideas if we are to feel their full force, and
are to be convinced. I think we shall come
at them most easily if we look at the poem
"Saul," where we find those ideas living and
acting. The poem is based upon the incident
in i Samuel xvi., where we read how when
the evil spirit afflicted King Saul, he sent for
David to play before him, and how when
"David took the harp and played with his
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The Incarnation


hand, Saul was refreshed and was well, and
the- evil spirit departed from him."
Abner meets young David at the door of
the tent, where for three days King Saul had
been sitting in darkness, and with his soul in
darkness. As the old soldier sees the fresh lad,
" with God's dew on his gracious gold hair,"
and the lilies twined round his harp-strings
as if the world held nothing but beauty, he
felt-though he could have given no reason
-that the soul of Saul would be set free,
when all this freshness and innocence had
looked up into his face. David having knelt
and prayed, entered the darkness.  "Here
is David, thy servant." But no voice replied.
Slowly, as his eyes became used to the darkness, he saw the grand figure of the King
standing erect in the centre. David said not
a word, but tuned his harp and played.
First he played the tune that the sheep
know, which calls them home in the evening.
Then the tune which makes the quails follow
the player. Then the wine-song, which the
'37




The Incarnation


reapers sing when standing amid the fulness
of the harvest they feel the joy of life.
Then he played the funeral-dirge when the
dead man is praised on his journey. "Bear,
bear him along," the harp seemed to say,
" with his few faults shut up like dead
flowerets. The land has none left such as
he on the bier. Oh, would we might keep
thee, my brother." And then he played the
marriage hymn. Then he played a battlesong, when strong men forget to fear. Then
the chorus of the priests as they draw near to
the altar. Then David stopped, for there in
the darkness Saul groaned. His head moved,
causing the jewels in his turban to flash.  It
was as if life was coming back to him. Then
David bent over his harp and sang. He sang
of the beauty of God's world, and the good
gift of life. He sang of cool rivers and
shady trees, of the hunt and the welcome
sleep among the bulrushes.  Then he began
to sing the story of King Saul-the story as
it might have been, as it still was, beyond
I38




The Incarnation


the walls of the poor king's dismal mind. He
sang of Saul's father, and of the early days,
of Saul's boyhood, that boyhood of wonder
and hope; of the marvellous ways of God,
by which Saul was now become king. He
sang of Saul's brave deeds, of his beauty and
his strength, how nature and the people's
choice and God's anointing, all crowned King
Saul. As his song had been coming to its close,
the minstrel's heart had grown warm. He
had felt the stir of the old stories, so that
when the last word had to be sounded, and
David cried-" Saul! "-'twas the trump of
the Lord and of a nation. Then " Saul was
struck by his name." And suddenly, as the
piled-up avalanche cracks and rushes down
the mountain-side, leaving the mountain
black and bare, yet capable of verdure byand-by, so the blackness rolled away from
the soul of Saul.  Death was past, but life
had not yet come.  His hand held his brow,
then fell; then arm folded arm across his
chest.  Thus he stood. But what should


139




The Incarnation


the minstrel sing now? How keep Saul
free? How hinder him from falling back,
how lift him sheer out of the toils and the
shame of the past?   Again the minstrel
bent over his harp and sang, "But 'twas
Thou, 0 God, who didst give him the song."
He sang of the progress of life, of those
stages and levels that speak of a triumph in
the fulness of the days. He sang the blessed
Gospel, that by God's mercy the past may
be past for ever. How the best may yet be
coming. Is Saul dead? So be it: " In the
depth of the vale make his tomb."   Let
a new Saul arise from the grave of the
old.
As he sang, making the offer of a new
beginning to the man, the look of care
passed from Saul. A great gentleness came
over him; some hard thing had melted away.
He drew the young lad towards him, and sat
down.   Thus he sat for long, stroking
David's yellow hair.  And oh, how David
loved him then! He yearned to fill Saul's
140




The Incarnation


life with love and with the power to be great
for ever.
"Could I help thee, my father, inventing a bliss
I would add, to that life of the past, both the
future and this,
I would give thee new life altogether, as good,
ages hence,
As this moment-had love but the warrant, love's
heart to dispense."
"Then the truth came upon me," says
David, who has up to this point been speaking. But now Browning himself pours out
his soul, though still speaking in David's
name. And this is his message. "I see the
truth now and thus. As a man, I have a
certain faculty for knowledge.  But how
poor and weak compared with the Divine
Wisdom which appears in this orderly universe! I have forethought; but how weak
it is beside the Infinite Care of God! Every
faculty which I have, I find already displayed
to an infinite degree by God. Now, this day
as I played before Saul to deliver him from
141




The Incarnation


his frenzy, as I looked upon his weakness
and his loneliness, I loved him. I, a poor
erring child myself, I loved him. Ah, will
not God love him more! How God must
love him! Is it to be thought that God, who
has given me my faculties, Himself has them
not in infinite fulness? If ninety-nine doors
open, why should the hundredth appal? If
God exceeds me in the least things, will He
fall behind me in the greatest? Here, in
this great matter of loving, loving the weak,
the broken-hearted, the rebellious, shall the
creature surpass the Creator.? Would I do
all for that man; and will God do nothing?
Would I sacrifice myself in order to rescue
the true Saul from his fetters; and will God
be less loving than I? Never! 'Tis Thou,
God, that givest, 'tis I who receive. The
love I feel is already in Thee before it could
be in me. What is it that stops my despair
as I think of my own helplessness to remove
Saul's misery or the world's misery? This:
that what I would do, God has done or will
142




The Incarnation


do.   Or to   quote   from  Browning   elsewhere:"This good God-what He could do, if He
would,
Would if He could-then must have done long
since;
If so, when, where, and how? Some way must
beOnce feel about, and soon or late you hit
Some sense in which it might be, after all,
Why not, The Way, The Truth, The Life."
He surely"Would never need that I, in turn,
Should point Him out defect unheeded,
And show that God had yet to learn
What the meanest human creature needed."
No!
"Would I suffer for one that I love?    So
wouldst Thou, so wilt Thou.
So shall crown Thee the topmost ineffablest
uttermost crownAnd Thy Love fill infinitude wholly, nor leave
up nor down
I43




The Incarnation


One spot for the creature to stand in! It is by
no breath,
Turn of eye, wave of hand, that Salvation joins
issue with death!
As Thy Love is discovered Almighty, almighty
be proved,
Thy Power that exists with and for it of being
beloved!
He who did most, shall bear most; the
strongest shall stand the most weak-!
'Tis the weakness in strength, that I cry for!
My flesh that I seek
In the Godhead! I seek and I find it. 0 Saul
it shall be
A Face like my face that receives thee; a man
like to me
Thou shalt love and be loved by, for ever; a
Hand like this hand
Shall throw open the gates of new life to thee!
see the Christ stand! "
When he reached this thought, and had made
it ring like a proclamation through his own
soul-the thought of God out of the stress
of love, giving Himself to man-David, i.e.
Browning himself tells us-all nature took
on a different look. The hills, grey with
I 44




T'he Incarnation


early morn, the beasts of the field, the birds,
the purling brooks, all murmured to his
spirit, " Even so, it is so."
There are two criticisms which might be
made upon Browning's teaching on the Incarnation.  We shall do little more than
mention them; for after feeling the thrill of
faith which never fails to come to me as I
read " Saul," I confess I have little interest
in difficulties. It might be objected that it
was unwarrantable to build a doctrine of
God's nature upon anything in human
nature.  That Browning's teaching is the
merest anthropomorphism.  But Browning
himself was well aware of that. He, however, looked at the relation between God and
man from the opposite standpoint. To your
objection that he was making a God in his
own image, he would have replied, "What
you mean is that God has made man in HMr
image"; which is the old story.  As he
says:


K


145




T'he Incarnation


4' Take all in a word; the truth in God's breast
Lies trace for trace upon ours impressed:
Though He is so bright and we so dim,
We are made in His Image to witness Him."
Are our religious instincts to be trusted, or
is the light that is in us darkness? These
are the alternatives. In other regions what
we call truth is truth absolute and eternal.
Two and two make four here and in every
conceivable world.  We have the instinct
that this is an orderly world-all our sciences
are based upon that assumption. Is it to be
supposed that in the region of our peculiar
endowment as human, in our sense of what
is ethically right and the very highest, we
should be deceiving ourselves?   Can "a
Cosmos have a Chaos for its crown?" Love
-the giving away of oneself, the spending,
the toiling, the bearing, the pardoning, the
helping for the sake of others, for their
good, to make them pure, gentle, holy-love
is the highest and the best we know. But
the effect can never be greater than its cause;
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T'he Incarnation


the Creature cannot surpass his Creator. The
highest we know must at least be within
God. At least-for He must ever transcend
our most penetrating reach in what is good.
He must have within Himself our best and
more. Every good gift and every perfect
gift cometh down from above; from the
Father and Home of these lights.
Once more, it might be objected to
Browning's teaching on the Incarnation, and,
indeed, to any belief in the Incarnation that
there are many things in this present scene
which made it hard to hold. But with
Browning a faith must always be hard to
hold; faith is the contradiction of many
signs.
"You must mix some uncertainty
With faith if you would have faith be."
He would ask you to trust those moments
when the grand hope seemed true to you.
He would appeal to you to believe in the
stars which you see for a fine moment now
'47




The Incarnation


and then, though next moment they are
blurred and blotted out with cloud and
tempest. For himself, he sings"So long as there bejust enough
To pin my faith to, though it hap
Only at points; from gap to gap,
One hangs up a huge curtain so
Grandly, nor seeks to have it go
Foldless and flat along the wall.
What care I if some interval
Of life less plainly may depend
On God? I'd hang there to the end."
For, however we may fall away from those
high moments of the soul, it was truth, it
was reality, it was the Face of God, which
they disclosed:
" There, where I once saw points, I now see stars."


THE END




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