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Fundamental Religious
Principles
IN
Tiruuntittg's #metry -
By W. D. Weatherford, M.A.
Submitted to the Faculty
of Vanderbilt University
as a Thesis for the Degree
of Doctor of Philosophy.
SMITH & LAMAR, AGENTS
PUBLISHING House of THE M. E. CHURCH, South
NASHVILLE, TENN.; DALLAs, TEX.
1907
CoPYRIGHT,
1907,
BY SMITH & LAMAR,
CONTENTS.
PAGE
FOREWORD . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . 5
INTRODUCTION . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . 7
CHAPTER I.
THE IDEA OF GOD. . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . 17
CHAPTER II.
CHRIST THE REVELATION OF GOD. . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . 5I
CHAPTER III.
THE PRINCIPLE OF DUALITY. . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . 76
CHAPTER IV.
THE ORIGIN AND NATURE OF EVIL................. 92
CHAPTER V.
THE PURPOSE OF EVIL. . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . tº e º & 4 is a s I2O
(3)
FOREWORD.
ROBERT BROWNING was one of the greatest seers as
he was one of the foremost poets of his time. His poetry
is a study of the deeper problems of life. These were
more to him than all the forms of art. God, Christ,
the World, Man, Suffering, Sin—these are in reality the
subjects of his thought. They emerge everywhere in his
poems. Though he was not professedly a theologian, he
has thought more vitally and written more helpfully
On the problems of theology than most of the theology
makers. Browning saw life. He saw it sanely. He
Saw it deeply. His starting point was life, his data,
the experiences of the human soul. Upon these he rea-
Soned, free from the biases of theological training and
the narrowing restrictions of theological method. He
touches the great vital truths, and he touches them
with a vital touch. He has therefore vital messages on
the fundamental problems and principles. His mes-
Sages will reach and help those who do not read the-
ology—and those who do.
Mr. Weatherford has made a thorough study of
Browning's works, has gathered up his views on the
great fundamentals, has arranged them in systematic
(5)
6 Aoreword.
order, and has put them in plain and lucid prose.
Browning interpreted nature, man, life; and Mr.
Weatherford has interpreted Browning's interpretation.
The result is a fresh and breathing statement of the
reality and personality of God, the divine-human and
the human-divine of Christ, and an elucidation of the
problem of evil—physical and moral—suffering and sin
—which, itself out of the ordinary, affords relief and
comfort of no ordinary sort.
We most heartily commend this little book to all
those who want help in understanding Browning and
those who want help in understanding the “mystery of
this unintelligible world.” GROSS ALEXANDER.
Nashville, Tenn., May, 1907.
NotE.—The references in the book are to the Cam-
berwell Edition of Browning’s works, in twelve vol-
umes, edited by Porter and Clarke.
INTRODUCTION.
It is the glory and good of Art,
That Art remains the one way possible
Of speaking truth, to mouths like mine at least.*
THERE is in the heart of every man a phi-
losophy of life which is struggling for expres-
sion. This philosophy, sometimes crude, some-
times more finished, is perpetually expressing
itself in the life work of the individual man.
The long-drawn dissertation of the philosopher
is his attempt to say how he sees life. The
exquisite workmanship of the artist is but the
Outpouring on the canvas of that ideal of life
which absorbs his heart. Not less than these,
and even more of necessity than either of them,
every great poem becomes a more or less per-
fect expression of some part of the poet's phi-
losophy. The deeper and more absorbing that
philosophy, the more difficult will be its ex-
pression. It is difficult in that the forms of
- - - -- ºr--— ºr *
“The Book and the Ring,” VII. 329.
(7)
8 Introduction.
the syllogism do not easily lend themselves to
poetic expression, and the visions of poetry are
not easily reduced to the categories of logic.
Browning had no intention of writing a phi-
losophy, but filled as his mind was with the
philosophi cal discussions of his time, the Con-
tent of his writing must be, from the very na-
ture of the man, a discussion of the great real-
ities of life. On the other hand, the form of
his thought could only shape itself in poetry.
As the poet grew older he came to feel that
some truths could be accurately and adequately
expressed in this form alone. Truth is so
complex that to see it rightly we must view it
from many sides, each facet reflecting a new
and changing beauty. To present separately
these various phases occasions seeming con-
tradiction, but when all are combined in a sin-
gle conception they give a more Satisfactory
expression of truth than could ever be at-
tained by a logical process. The fact that
Browning does thus view truth from every
direction has given rise to many contradictory
opinions concerning the value and content of
his poetry. He has been charged with heresy
Antroduction. 9
by such a writer as Strong"; by others he has
been heralded as the greatest Christian poet of
modern times. Some have thought him an
agnostic, while others have considered him a
devout believer. This very fact of the misun-
derstanding of his message may justify a some-
what more careful investigation of the funda-
mental conceptions of our author's poetry. In
the following chapters we propose, therefore,
to discuss five essentially religious conceptions,
though other conceptions may at times be in-
volved and receive some attention. A careful
study of Browning's thought of God, the
Christ, the Devil, the Origin and Nature of
Evil, and the Purpose of Evil, ought to make
more clear the meaning of his message to men.
Given these fundamental conceptions, it will
not be hard for each one to construct for him-
self the poet's philosophy of religion. Such a
philosophy is necessary to a complete under-
standing of the message of any great poet.
In working out these religious ideas, we at
Once meet with two serious difficulties. The
“The Great Poets and Their Theology,” p. 437.
IO Antroduction.
first is common in all poetry, and consists in
the fact that Art is a law unto itself. The
critical methods used in interpreting philosophy
cannot be used in the same way in interpreting
poetry; for while poetry may give expression
to a philosophy of life, it has ends in itself
which transcend, in the mind of the poet at
least, all philosophies. We are in constant
danger, therefore, of destroying our poetry in
wrenching from it a philosophy. With this
thought in mind, it seems wise to let the poet
himself write for us his philosophy, giving to
the present volume somewhat the appearance
of a bundle of quotations. And this suggests
the further difficulty which is, in a sense, pe-
culiar to Browning. When poetry is dramatic
in form, how are we to know when the poet
is speaking his own convictions? This be-
comes a most important question in the inter-
pretation of Browning, since he writes dramat-
ically in almost all his poems. Only now and
then does he throw off the dramatic veil and
stand forth speaking for himself. No law of
interpretation can be laid down and slavishly
followed, but it seems necessary at least to have
Antroduction. II
in mind some general principles in accordance
with which we shall draw our conclusions. In
the first place, there are some thoughts which
appear in a very great variety of poems. Thus,
the thought of the Incarnation, as will be seen
in the chapter on The Christ, has been most
clearly presented in the parleyings of a Dervish,
in the letter of a Greek, in the prophecy of a
Patriarch, and in the dialogue of a doubting
yet earnest Christian. All of these poems would
not present this thought repeatedly if it did
not appeal to the poet. The frequency with
which a thought occurs is a good test of its
genuine relation to the writer.
Then again, the relation of a thought to the
writer's belief may be determined by noting
whether he expresses it sympathetically or con-
ventionally. Those-passages—which contain
truth in harmony with the poet's own mind are
more apt to glow with poetic fire than are the
statements not in accord with the poet's belief.
Hence many passages glowing with fervor may
be considered as representing the poet, even
though they are spoken by dramatic personages.
In this, the essential point of interpretation
I 2 Antroduction.
would be to discover whether or not a passage
is put sympathetically. This is a sense which
must be acquired by much reading and a deep
love of Browning's poetry.
Further, it seems only fair, since we are
dealing with poetry and not with formal logic,
to put that interpretation on a passage which
wiſſ give to it greatest beauty and strength.
Thus in some passages where a reference is
made to the devil, we will see that the poetry
requires us to consider it as referring to tempta-
tion or evil tendency, rather than to a personal
being, if we do not wish to do violence to the
beauty of the verse. Lastly, we Imay search
his personal poems to find the author’s own
thought. Yet, even in this, we cannot lay
down an absolute rule, for there is some ques-
tion as to what poems are personal. Professor
Henry Jones thinks the number of personal
poems in which we can find Browning's phi-
losophy are four, namely: “Christmas Eve,”
“Easter Day,” “La Saisiaz,” and “One Word
More.” To this number, however, should be
added Part III. Of “Dramatis Personae,” Books
I. and XII. of “The Ring and the Book,” Pro-

Introduction. I3
logue to second series of “Dramatic Idyls,”
Prologue to “Jocoseria,” Epilogue to “Ferish-
ta's Fancies,” “The Guardian Angel,” and Epi-
logue to “Asolando.” Most of the other per-
sonal poems are lyrics dedicated to individuals,
criticisms of the poetic art, or poems general
in their content. These are “Sordello,” Book
III., lines 593-1022, “Development,” “War-
ing,” “Women and Roses,” “May and Death,”
the closing lines of “Balaustion's Adventure,”
Prologue to “Fifine at the Fair,” Prologue to
“Pacchiarotto,” Epilogue to “Pacchiarotto,”
“Never the Time and the Place,” “Pambo,”
“To Edward Fitzgerald,” “Why I am a Lib-
eral,” and “House.” In addition to these there
are many other poems considered semi-per-
sonal, such as “Pauline,” parts of “Fifine at
the Fair,” the Pope in “The Ring and the
Book,” to which we must apply the general
principles of interpretation.
It should be noted in the very beginning that
the topics chosen for discussion are so inter-
related as to be more or less dependent each
upon all the others. This will be most readily
Seen in the last two chapters, since no theory
I4. Introduction.
of evil can be complete which does not take
into consideration the nature of the Supreme
force in the universe. The five chapters,
therefore, should be considered as a whole,
each throwing light upon the other.
The feeling that Browning has a great mes-
Sage for our time, which message is not always
understood, has led to this discussion. If the
following chapters as a whole can help to make
clear some of the fundamental conceptions on
which his philosophy of life was based, we
shall be more than satisfied.
FUNDAMENTAL RELIGIOUS PRINCIPLES IN
BROWNING'S POETRY.
CHAPTER I.
THE IDEA OF GOD.
AMONG the fundamental religious concep-
tions presented to us in Browning's poetry, the
place of first importance is easily claimed by
the Idea of God. This idea stands first be-
cause of its large influence on the life of the
man, because of the varied and beautiful ex-
ression it finds in his poetry, and because of
its determining influence on the other beliefs
of his life.
There can be no doubt that Browning be-
lieved in a personal God. In his first published
poem, “Pauline,” the lode-star of the hero was
A need, a trust, a yearning after God;"
and after much sin this hero could say:
[I] still trusted in a hand to lead me through
All danger.”
The speaker in “Reverie”—the last but one of
Browning's poems—passed all laws to give
“Pauline,” I. 11. “Ibid., I 11.
2 (17)
/





18 Fundamental Religious Principles
praise to Omnipotence, Lord of laws; and there
are few intervening poetic characters that do
not give expression to a belief in God. To the
poet the question was one hardly admitting of
debate, and usually in his poems the existence
of a personal God is assumed as an accepted
truth. In “La Saisiaz” he raised the double
question of a future life and the existence of
God, but the whole discussion is taken up with
the first, and the second seems to be taken for
granted.
Question, answer presuppose
Two points: that the thing itself which questions, an
swers, is, it knows;
As it also knows the thing perceived outside itself-
force
Actual ere its own beginning, operative through its
course,
Unaffected by its end,-that this thing likewise needs
must be ;
Call this—God, then, call that—Soul, and both—the only
facts for me.”
This is one of the most philosophic of
Browning's poems, written rather late in life,
when the poet is said by Professor Henry Jones
“La Saisiaz,” XI. 83.

In Browning's Poetry. I9
to have declared all knowledge a failure; but in
it there is an element of certainty concerning
God. Browning, however, was anything but
dogmatic. He had too great a dramatic abil-
ity of putting himself in the position of another
to be a thoroughgoing dogmatist. He held
most tenaciously to his own opinions, but he
did not expect other men to accept them as cor-
ect simply because he believed them. In at-
tempting, therefore, to formulate his concep-
ion of God, we are not shut up to bare state-
ments of belief, but may here and there catch
glimpses of the more fully outlined arguments
by which he arrived at his conclusions. Phi-
losopher as he was, we are not surprised that
his thought should have followed at times the
line of the arguments of the old schools, at
least in so far as he considered them valid."
*For convenience of reference it may be well to give
in a paragraph the three stock arguments for the exist-
since of God, keeping in mind that they are useful only
as confirmatory evidence.
I. Cosmological: The world in which we live is con-
tingent, therefore there must be an unconditioned and
* necessary power above it. Or more commonly it is
Stated in the terms of effect and cause. Since the world









2O Fundamental Religious Principles
As he looked about him he saw a vast uni-
verse revealing great power and wisdom. All
nature spoke a language of greatness, and to
think of nature without an intelligent cause
was impossible. The hypothesis of a number
of independent elements which were from the
beginning, and which were subject to certai
general laws, as they acted upon each other i
bringing about the present status of creatio
was not satisfactory.
is not self-creative, there must be some cause to give
existence. The argument attempts to prove that th:
cause is an ultimate and infinite cause. The failure
the argument consists in the fact that we cannot dra
the conclusion of an infinite cause from the premise O
finite effects. We can only legitimately conclude som
more powerful cause, which cause may still be finite
and so with an endless series of causes. The argu-
ment is valuable only as it shows the direction in
which the mind must travel in going from the finite to
the infinite. It can deny the finality of the finite, but
cannot posit the infinite.
2. Teleological. This argument takes as its point of
departure the conformity of all created things to a wise ſ
end. It is commonly known as the design argument,
and attempts to prove that all creation is the result of
an intelligent first cause. This argument breaks down
because from experience we cannot prove or even be-
lieve—apart from our belief in a wise God, which the










In Browning's Poetry. 2 I
What made and drives
The sun is force, is law, is named, not known,”
was the thought which the dying John declared
to be false. There must be something more
than mere force behind the workings of nature.
It must be an intelligent cause which could
create such a universe. Thus Paracelsus in
that great poetic theory of evolution learns to
Say:
argument attempts to establish—that there is a wise de-
sign running through all creation. There are Some
aberrations which cannot be explained away save by
yositing an all-wise Designer who would not create
hings awry.
3. Ontological: The existence of God is involved in
bur thought of him. The fact of the conception is in-
erently correlative with the objective reality. The old
answer, that, because I think a perfectly round island,
does not prove its existence, will hardly be considered a
valid objection. The accidental existence of any object of
sense cannot, of course, be inferred from the thought.
But Descartes gave to this argument the form of cause
and effect. Since there is nothing finite that can originate
the idea of the infinite, there must be an existing in-
finite who gave to my finite mind the thought. Then, if
we mean that all conscious life is dependent on a uni-
versal self-consciousness, we arrive at a proof which is
not easily refuted.
“A Death in the Desert,” V. Ig5.









22 Fundamental Ateligious Principles
God tastes an infinite joy
In infinite ways—one everlasting bliss,
From whom all being emanates, all power
Proceeds.”
Unlike Wordsworth, Browning rarely wrote
of nature for its own sake. When woven into
his verse it usually bears close relation to God
and man, since the poet’s love for nature and
reverence for its varied manifestations grew
Out of his deep, abiding faith that in nature
God, as Creator, is revealing himself to man.
But not only is nature a manifestation of God,
it is a growing revelation, for through it runs
a wise design. As “progress is the law o
life,” so development is the law of the universe
There may be discords, but they are only indica:
tions of a deeper harmony, pervading all, whic
we do not understand. God animates all na-
ture, making it divine.
Thus he dwells in all,
From life’s minute beginnings, up at last
To man."
It is precisely the fact that Paracelsus did not |
recognize this truth in early life that accounts
“Paracelsus,” I. 159. "Ibid., I. I60.






In Browning's Poetry. 23
for his partial failure. In his blind, stumbling
way he went counter to the very things he most
desired to find. Not knowing that a wise de-
sign was bringing all things to a perfect end,
he failed
To trace love's faint beginnings in mankind,
To know even hate is but a mask of love's,
To see a good in evil, and a hope
In ill success.”
He came to see all of these things only through
experience with life in its various forms.
The speaker in “Christmas Eve,” who flung
himself out of the chapel in such disgust, found
peace and soothing in the presence of nature,
for God was there permeating all with love and
bringing all to a most perfect end.
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,
O God, and in thy light retrace
l-How in all I loved here, still wast thou !”
The optimistic creed of our poet rested just
upon this view of the world. However much
“Paracelsus,” I. 166. “Christmas Eve,” IV. 297.
24 Fundamental Ateligious Principles
of Sorrow or pain or suffering there might be,
all was designed to lead life to its higher per-
fection. Nor is there any permanent thwart-
ing of this supreme purpose. Even though
failure seemed Sure, it was only apparent fail-
11te,
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.”
The more significant thought of the All-
Creator is found when the poet begins to won-
der whence man has sprung. There can be
but one answer found:
Before me was my Cause—that's styled
God: after, in due course succeeds the rest.*
Starting with knowledge of his own conscious-
ness, man can project that knowledge into the
past only far enough to see that there is some
cause without, giving rise to that which is
within. The mere thought of being the ulti-
*“Apparent Failure,” V. 275.
*“Francis Furini,” XII. I32.
In Browning’s Poetry. 25
mate existence, of commanding for command-
ing's sake, as the ultimate authority, makes his
soul sick.
The last point I can trace is—rest beneath
Some better essence than itself [the soul] in weakness.”
As late as the period of “The Ring and the
Book” we hear Browning giving beautiful ex-
pression to the same thought through the words
of the Pope:
Yet my poor spark had for its source, the sun.”
Then again Browning was not willing to
acknowledge that the Ontological argument
was of no value. In “A Death in the Desert”
we have the Cartesian form of this argument
presented. If there is no God, whence came
this conception of him. At least we can rely
on this to strengthen the belief which may be
established by other methods.
But these arguments for the existence of
God were not enough to satisfy. There must
be a nearer : nproach to God than could be
found in these. The intuition supplied such
an avenue of approach. There is something
“Pauline,” I. 27. “The Pope,” VII. 202.
20 Aºundamental ſteligious Principles
within man that reaches above and takes hold
on God. It is not based on argument, for it
transcends all processes of reasoning and comes
at once to the object of its desire. It is in ev-
ery human heart, and cannot be smothered.
Like plants in mines which never saw the sun,
But dream of him, and guess where he may be,
And do their best to climb and get to him,”
So we have that within us that makes us grope
upward toward our God. We may never have
seen him by reasoning, but our hearts yearn for
him and we must feel after him, if haply we
may find him. Paracelsus, with his strongly
emotional nature, feels he is guided by an un-
seen hand. There is no mistaking the fact of
God’s existence. Intuition is sufficient to make
him say:
I know, I felt (perception unexpressed,
Uncomprehended by our narrow thought,
But somehow felt and known in every shift
And change in the spirit, nay, in every pore
Of the body, even), what God is, what we are,
What life is.”
The lonely Moor is so sensitive to the spir-
*“Paracelsus,” I. I66. *Ibid., I. 159.
In Browning's Poetry. 27
itual influences of life that he feels the Floren-
tines are cold and heartless. They do not see
God as he sees him and as his people see him.
How nearer God we were ! He glows above
With scarce an intervention, presses close
And palpitatingly, his soul o'er ours:
We feel him, nor by painful reason know !“
Pompilia was not permitted to know much.
She could not reason deeply, and yet by her
intuition she attained to more of godlikeness
than all the priests of learned and reasoning
powers. The Pope looking upon her beautiful
character marvels at its perfection. All of
power, all of reasoning, all of the knowledge
of God which others may have attained, make
not up a Soul like hers,
Earth’s flower
She holds up to the softened gaze of God.”
“La Saisiaz” is a poem given to a very phil-
OSophic discussion of our relation to God and
future life, In this poem Browning starts with
the determination to seek the truth about these
things, and it makes no difference what that
truth may be. But after going through all the
“Luria,” III. 252. "“The Pope,” VII. I94.
28 Fundamental Religious Principles
arguments, the truth arrived at is only a hope.
It is not demonstrable knowledge. However,
this is satisfactory, for as he says in the first
of the poem:
Weakness never needs be falseness: truth is truth in
each degree—
Thunder-pealed by God to Nature, whispered by my
soul to me.*
Browning was aware of the fact that most of
the people who knew God had arrived at that
knowledge, not through long study of phi-
losophy, not even through the revelation of
the Testaments, but through that inner revela-
tion of the heart which was given to every
one. Nor did he consider this kind of knowl-
edge in any way inferior to that which might
be attained by more difficult processes. In
fact, the older he grew and the more he pon-
dered this question, the more was he con-
vinced that we must rely on the inner light as
Our Surest guide in finding God.
The form and content of this intuitive con-
ception was, with Browning, largely determined
by the needs of his own nature. It would be
**La Saisiaz,” XI. 79,
In Browning’s Poetry. 29
difficult to find a more beautiful expression of
this view of God than that given us in his
earliest poem. There, we can feel the very
pulse-beat of passion, as the restless Soul cries
Out:
O God, where do they tend—these struggling aims?”
And the answer is:
Even from myself
I need thee and I feel thee and I love thee.
I do not plead my rapture in thy works
For love of thee, nor that I feel as one
Who cannot die: but there is that in me
Which turns to thee, which loves or which should love.”
The true Christian man in “Easter Day”
fears to trust the wants and needs of the human
heart as a guide to real belief, and the poor
pagan in “Cleon” with yearning heart, but
pessimistic mood, looks up to a dead Zeus for
the revelation of a future life and a fuller joy.
This not having been revealed, he supposes his
heart yearns for that which is not. It is not
hard in either case, however, to see the poet's
feeling; that both, though groping in the dark,
were at least groping upward. With burning
“Pauline,” I. 26. *Ibid., I. 27.
30 Fundamental Religious Principles
rapture and full hope he would have the pagan
Say:
I dare at times imagine to my need
Some future state revealed to us by Zeus,
Unlimited in capability
For joy, as this is in desire for joy,
To seek which, the joy-hunger forces us:
That, stung by straightness of our life, made straight
On purpose to make prized the life at large—
Freed by the throbbing impulse we call death,
We burst there as the worm into the fly,
Who, while a worm still, wants his wings.”
If there be no reality of God giving to us a
future life corresponding to this yearning in
man's heart, then indeed is this life one of deep-
est sorrow and this world one “reflex of the
devil's doings.” The deepest feelings of life
not only give the greatest joy, but they furnish
the acutest pain, and we choose that pain rather
than anything else in the world, “because our
souls see it is good.” It is good because there
is reality corresponding to it, and because we
have faith that these nobler parts of our being
are but the faint gleams of the far-off sun
caught and mirrored in Our Souls.
*“Cleon’’. V. 90.
In Browning’s Poetry. 3I
O Thou, -as representing here to me,
In such conception as my Soul allows,
Under Thy measureless, my atom width !—
Man's mind, what is it but a convex glass
Wherein are gathered all the scattered points
Picked out of the immensity of sky,
To reunite there, be our heaven for earth,
Our known unknown, our God revealed to man?”
By some divine process God has written his
own life in our hearts, and we are like him in
desire. It is just this fact that lends such won-
derful significance to man's yearning after God.
It is this fact that makes that conception of
God the truest, which interprets him in terms
of human life. There is, to be sure, a partial
revelation of God in nature; philosophy may
give us abstract ideas about him, but that truth
becomes vital to us only when it “becomes flesh
and dwells among us.”
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.**
This does not, of course, give absolute de-
monstrable knowledge, but that is neither nec-
*The Pope,” VII. 203 **Christmas Eve,” IV, 317.
32 Fundamental Religious Principles
essary nor possible. Men are ever growing
higher and purer in soul life, and as man's own
Soul grows, the conception of God, which it
Shadows forth, must also grow. This does not
mean that the older conceptions were false;
they were only relatively inferior. They were
the projection of man's highest self in each suc-
cessive age, just as Our Own present conceptions
are the projection of our own truest soul life.
Caliban's religion was for him as true as our
own is for us, but it was relatively inferior.
All things suffer change save God the Truth.
Man apprehends him newly at each stage
Whereat earth's ladder drops, its service done.”
The best illustration of this anthropomorphic
interpretation of God is found in the growing
revelation of the Old Testament. Each suc-
cessive idea! in this wonderful narrative is the
embodiment of the highest national and indi-
vidual attributes which had existed up to that
time. In the early history of Israel, God is a
God of battles. Later he becomes an admin-
istrator of justice; still later he is a God of love
*A Death in the Desert,” V. 196.
In Browning’s Poetry. 33
and mercy. So the ideal grew as manhood
developed and the people had a greater national
life, until at last Isaiah could break forth in
that climax of prophecy concerning the one
who should represent God:
He shall be called Counselor, the Mighty God, the
Everlasting Father, the Prince of Peace.”
More than any other poet of his time, perhaps,
Browning recognized the truth of this anthro-
pomorphic element in religion, and more than
once he gave what seems an almost perfect
expression to it. One of the most beautiful of
these is found in “Saul’’:
'Tis the weakness in strength, that I cry for my flesh,
that I seek 4. Asºº
In the Godhead ' I seek and I find it. O Saul, it
shall be →
A Face like my face that receives thee; a Man like
to me, - -
Thou shalt love and be loved by, forever: a Hand like
this hand
Shall throw open the gates of new life to thee! See
the Christ stand 1%
There are those, however, who think that
such a view of God has no truth in it. It is
*Isaiah ix. 6. *Saul,” IV. 85.
34 Fundamental Religious Principles
merely a fiction made to appease the heart of
man. There may be beauty in it, but there is
no reality corresponding to it. The dying John,
in “A Death in the Desert,” foresees just this
thought:
Must Christ then be?
Has he been P Did not we ourselves make him?
Our mind receives but what it holds, no more.
First of the love, then ; we acknowledge Christ—
A proof we comprehend his love, a proof
We had such love already in ourselves,
Knew first what else we should not recognize.
'Tis mere projection from man's inmost mind,
And, what he loves, thus falls reflected back,
Becomes accounted somewhat out of him;
He throws it up in air, it drops down earth's,
With shape, name, story added, man's old way.”
John's answer to this is, that if Power has
not love and the other attributes found in man,
then man, possessing them, becomes himself
the God, for he is greater than that force which
created him. But a power which has the at-
tributes of love and wisdom must be more than
an impersonal force, it is a personal being. To
Browning it was a valid process to arrive at a
knowledge of God in this way:
*A Death in the Desert,” V. IgA, Ig5.
In Browning’s Poetry. 35
Since if man prove the sole existent thing
Where these combine, whatever their degree,
However weak the might or will or love,
So they may be found there, put in evidence,—
He is as surely higher in the Scale
Than any might with neither love nor will,
As life, apparent in the poorest midge,
Is marvelous beyond Atlas' self—
Thus, man proves best and highest—God, in fine,
And thus the victory leads but to defeat,
The gain to loss, best rise to the worst fall,
His life becomes impossible, which is death.*
It is a contradiction when a man says there is
a need in his heart which must have had a
cause and yet denies the very cause which alone
could create that need.
How shall ye help this man who knows himself,'
That he must love and would be loved again,
Yet, owning his own love that proveth Christ,
Rejecteth Christ through very need of him?”
The same answer is given in “The Sun,”
where the old Dervish is trying to make clear
that we can have no real conception of God
save in the form of our own personality. The
*A Death in the Desert,” V. 200.
*Ibid., V. 198, 199.
36 Fundamental Religious Principles
fact that we cannot ever understand how this is
possible makes no difference.
Fitlier thou saidst “I stand appalled before
Conception unattainable by me
Who need it most”—than this—“What? boast he holds
Conviction where I see conviction’s need,
Alas, and nothing else? then what remains
But that I straightway curse, cuff, kick the fool?”
For Browning, as we have said, there was
really no valid objection to this anthropomor-
phic view, and upon it he not only built his
truest thought of the existence of God and the
immortality of the soul, but he also made it the
point of departure in working out more per-
fectly those attributes of God which determined
very largely his view of the problem of life.
Every need in man must find a response in God,
else life would be a failure. Just as every in-
vention may be considered as the transposing
of man's attributes into mechanical form, even
so man—the creation of God—may be con-
sidered the being into whom God has trans-
posed his own attributes and spiritual nature.
These attributes may be very crude as found
*The Sun,” XII. 20.
In Browning’s Poetry. 37
in man, but the leap from “man’s nothing per-
fect to God’s all-complete” was not a very diffi-
cult one for a nature like Browning. This does
not limit God to the small compass of man's
life, it only tries to define such of the attributes
of God’s nature as could give rise to those in
man. What other noble attributes God may
have, reaching on far beyond anything which
man possesses, we do not know. We only
hope that with the growth of man's soul, one
by one, these also will probably develop in his
nature, until man shall really be “made in His
image to witness Him.” And we know that
this process is going on, for love which has
come to mean so much to us was hardly known
in the early ages. Other attributes are like-
wise developing.
Most prominent among all the attributes of
God was that of power. We most easily ar-
"rive at a conception of this all-powerful Crea-
tor by comparing man's finite power with his
infinite desire. Weak as man is, there is yet
enough power to give a contrast, on which we
can build in thought an All-powerful One.
But if this ability which inheres in man is the
38 Fundamental Religious Principles
basis for this belief, we must go further to
find a more complete manifestation of it. If
we read “Paracelsus,” we shall see the wrath
sea's waves, edged with foam, white as the
bitten lip of hate; the bursting of the spring
like a smile striving with a wrinkled face; the
upward soaring of the lark shivering for very
joy; and we shall hear the voices of the forest
and the wise discussion of the herded pines, as
God in power renews his ancient rapture. From
the tiniest insect with its perfectly wrought
functions up to “man the consummation of this
scheme of being,” there is not one creature that
does not declare God’s power.
Soar the conceivable height,
Find cause to match the effect in evidence,
Conjecture of the worker by the work:
Is there strength there?—enough.”
Many of Browning's contemporaries, we
know, held to the thought of an abstract power
which, acting in accordance with certain uni-
versal and uniform laws, brought about just
these results which he attributes to a personal
*“The Pope,” VII. 204, 205.
In Browning’s Poetry. 39
God. But he was never affected by such the-
ories. In all of his poetry we cannot recall an
expression where he sets forth belief in a mate-
rialistic force in opposition to a personal being.
On the other hand, he proclaims most strongly, .
in such poems as “A Death in the Desert” and
“The Sun,” the thought that a blind force is
inconceivable. For man to suppose might can
exist without either will or love, as we have
it pointed out so clearly,” is to make himself
a God; for, having all of these himself, he is
greater than any impersonal being called nat-
ural law. To be sure he dwells in all, from
life's minute beginnings up at last to man, as
an animating and active force. Evolution is
a process of development, but it is a process
guided by the hand of a personal God. The
old Greek idea of the sun chariot was crude
enough, but not so crude as the thought of
those who see mere force behind its rising and
its setting ! Nor is this personal power lim-
ited in its field of operation. If it is manifest
in the world processes, it is equally seen and felt
*“A Death in the Desert,” V. 195.
40 Fundamental Religious Principles
in the personal affairs of men. As David
thinks of how he would help Saul, he is sad
because he has not the power, but suddenly he
realizes that he should not doubt that he (God)
alone will help him who yet alone can. The
fact of the omnipotence of God was very real
to Browning. In conversation with Mrs. Orr,
he once said: “The evidences of divine power
are everywhere about us.”
As from man’s limited power Browning
passed to the unlimited power of God, so in the
consideration of omniscience we may take our
departure from man's partial knowledge in
moving toward God’s all-complete. The Pope
tells us that man’s mind is but a mirror where-
in is reflected the mind of God. The intel-
lectual process which consists in grasping at
mistake considered truth, and ever yearning to
attain unto truth, is called the gift of God, in
Si"A Death in the Desert.” *
Earlier poets had talked of the wonders of
nature, but Browning swept all of these things
aside and called man to the realization of his
**Contemporary Review, LX. 879.
In Browning’s Poetry. 41
own majesty. Man left out, all earth was a
worthless void.
Man's breath evoked the beautiful,
then,
Touched aright, prompt yields each particle its tongue
Of elemental flame.*
Nature without a thinking mind to interpret
it is nothing. It is dead and useless. It is as
music where no ear listens, or beauty where no
eye sees. But when man steps upon the stage,
every process of nature takes on a new signif-
icance. It is the fact of this knowledge that
transforms the voices of the earth :
The winds
Are henceforth voices, wailing or a shout,
A querulous mutter or a quick gay laugh,
Never a senseless gust now man is born.”
But this thought does not end in the exalta-
tion of man. It must go further than that. If
nature finds its true significance only in the
presence of the mind of man, then the Creator
of nature who designed it for the pleasure and
development of that mind must have been an
“Fifine at the Fair.” IX. IO6. *Paracelsus,” I. 161.
42 Fundamental Ateligious Principles
Intelligent Being. The exaltation of the Di-
vine Mind is even further impressed upon us
when we think of how little man can under-
Stand the processes which are going on about
him.
Have I knowledge? confounded it shrivels at Wisdom
laid bare.
Have I forethought? how purblind, how blank, to the
Infinite Care 1**
The finiteness of man's mind not only compels
him to find an Infinite Intelligence in the in-
terpretation of nature, but it forces him to be-
lieve that behind all these forces of nature, with
the eternal harmony of their workings, there
must be a perfect Intelligence. The processes
of evolution alone are ample proof that over
all there rules a God without limit in thought
and power of execution. When this subject
is discussed in “Prince Hohenstiel-Schwangau,”
and some one seems to suggest that the theory
of evolution places man on a level with the
brutes, the Prince at once replies that it would
seem so if we only take this short life into
account; for men hurry into life, without due
*Saul,” IV. 81.
In Browning’s Poetry. 43
preparation, shuffle through their part on the
stage as best they can, but that best is very
poor. But this life is not all of man; it is
only a course of training. What God has in
store for each individual may be judged by the
development of the race. Here God takes time,
nor tries to build a nation in a day, nor create
a civilization in a century. Just here it is that
the process of evolution speaks So clearly of an
Omniscient Creator.
It is no mean Intelligence which can look
through thousands of years and lay a scheme
of forces, the working out of which will pro-
duce a perfect race. A lesser intelligence
would begin with the present, trying to make
these forces fashion each individual into per-
fection; but God sees that the perfect race
means more, and not only so, but only by bring-
ing it to perfection can he give to each individ-
ual his truest place in life. As it is well that
all life should pass through infinite change in
order that it may be molded into perfect shape
and use, So it is well that man should pass
through many stages of experience in order to
be fitted for his station in 1ife.
44 Fundamental Areligious Principles
I like the thought He should have lodged me once
I’ the hole, the cave, the hut, the tenement,
The mansion, and the palace; made me learn
The feel o' the first, before I found myself
Loftier i' the last.”
If one goes entirely through Browning's
poems, in search for passages expressing his
belief in an Omniscient Creator, those passages
would be few as compared with those bearing
on some other attributes of the divine nature.
This is not because of any doubt on the part
of the poet; it was rather because he felt so
sure of it that it seemed unnecessary to re-
affirm it. In one of his last poems we find
these words:
Knowledge obtained Power praise.
Had Good been manifest,
Broke out in cloudless blaze,
Unchequered as unrepressed,
In all things Good at best—
Then praise—all praise, no blame—
Had hailed the perfection.”
Here we see what troubled our poet was
proof of the beneficence of God, and not the
**Prince Hohenstiel-Schwangau,” IX. 32.
*Reverie,” XII. 265.
In Browning's Poetry. 45
proof of his power and wisdom. He believed
God to be a God of love, but the proof was
difficult. If God was all-wise and could see
exactly the needs of man; if he could see every
act in the light of its effects; if he was all-
powerful; how, then, could he be all-loving
when sin and suffering seemed so universal?
The answer to this question will help us very
much in a later chapter to find his solution of
the problem of evil. There is no lack of mate-
rial from which to form his answer, for he
refers to it in almost every poem. No one can
read these poems without feeling absolutely
sure that Browning's conviction was settled,
and that he believed in a God of love; but nev-
ertheless there always seems to linger just a
little doubt as to the proof. It may be well in
the outset to determine what is meant by love.
Professor Royce, in his paper on “Paracelsus”
read before the Boston Browning Society,”
points out quite clearly that love has for Brown-
ing a pregnant meaning. It is not mere senti-
ment; it is not the simple attraction between
“The Boston Browning Society Papers,” p. 22I.
46 Fundamental Religious Principles
the sexes, but it is the aspiration, the passion,
the yearning of a personal being, for absolute
perfection. In God it would then be the desire
to see perfection in every man, which perfec-
tion would be the fulfillment Of his scheme of
being. We have before quoted from “Para-
celsus” an expression about the plant growing
in the mine, never having seen the sun, but
groping after him, which was to Browning a
perfect type of love. In order that the plant
may seek the sun, there must be that in the
latter which draws the plant to itself. In order
that man may love God and desire to be loved
by him in turn, there must be love in the heart
of God to draw out this affection of man. He
must sympathize with the yearnings of the hu-
man Soul; more, he must know the feelings as
self-conscious experience. This he did and
does, through the Incarnate Christ. Here
again we find Browning turning to his anthro-
pomorphic view to get assurance. David loves
Saul with a passion all-consuming, and as he
dwells on what he feels and would do for
his friend he is suddenly stopped by the
thought:
/m, Browning’s Poetry. 47
Do I find love so full in my nature, God's ultimate gift,
That I doubt his own love can compete with it?
Here, the parts shift?
Here, the creature surpass the Creator, the end, what
began P
Would I fain in my impotent yearning do all for this
111a11,
And dare doubt he alone shall not help him, who yet
alone can P"
The inconceivableness of a God without love
is again stated in “A Death in the Desert,” to
which we have before referred, where it is
shown that if man has love and God has not,
then man is the God after all, and God dwin-
dles into cold law. The speaker in “Christmas
Eve,” as he looks into the blue heavens, knows
what it is to yearn for a God of love:
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 a nobler dower.
For the loving worm within its clod
Were diviner than a loveless god
Amid his worlds, I will dare to say.”
His ripest conviction on this subject is
found in “Reverie,” which was written after
“Saul,” IV. 82, 83. “Christmas Eve,” IV., 294, 295.
48 Fundamental Religious Principles
his mind had gone over all the philosophic
arguments on both sides:
From the first, Power was—I knew.
Life has made clear to me
That, strive but for closer view,
Love were as plain to see.*
In the foregoing discussion we have thought
it necessary to give only the main outlines of
thought which lead to the complete poetic con-
ception of God. It now only remains to deter-
mine what can be known about Browning's
religious opinions, from sources other than his
poems. If we had only his essay on Shelley
from which to draw, we are quite sure we
should call Browning an orthodox, though lib-
eral, Christian. One does not hesitate to call
him a Christian, but he surely was not a con-
ventional Christian. He rarely attended reli-
gious exercises when in the city,+though his
introduction to Thomas Jones's “Divine Order”
clearly indicates his appreciation of strong ser-
mons,—but when in the country, or on his visits
to the universities, he rarely ever missed a serv-
ice. The freedom of worship in the country
*“Reverie,” XII. 267.
In Browning’s Poetry. 49
and its lack of formalism and conventionality
seemed to have appealed to him very strongly.
He did not believe in a mechanical revelation to
man, since this would have been, according to
his way of thinking, the destruction of all reli-
gious life. Anything that would take away
the basis of faith and give absolute knowledge
would make all religion non-moral. He, how-
ever, had a deep respect for the Bible; held that
those parts, and that meant about all of it,
which were true interpretations of God in terms
of human life, were valid. It is said that no
one of his time enjoyed reading the Bible more
than he. Surely we have evidence of his sym-
pathetic knowledge both of the Old and the
New Testaments in his poems.
His attitude toward God was one of love and
reverence. Mrs. Orr says of him: “He never
lost what was for him the consciousness of a
supreme Eternal Will.” But an Eternal Will
was not enough to satisfy him. He must have
something that was loving, tender, personal.
Mrs. Orr quotes him as saying to her: “That
love could only reveal itself to the human heart
by Some Supreme act of human tenderness and
4.
50 Fundamental Ateligious Principles
devotion; the fact or fancy of Christ's cross
would alone supply such a revelation.” With
him it was doubtless fact and not fancy.
That one Face, far from vanish, rather grows,
Or decomposes, but to recompose,
Become my universe that feels and knows.”
When he had read this to Mrs. Orr, turning
he said: “That face is the face Of Christ. That
is how I know and feel him.” Ultimately we
see it was through the Christ-life that Brown-
ing came to a full knowledge of a personal,
loving heavenly Father.
**Contemporary Review, LX. 879.
**Epilogue (to “Dramatis Personae”), V. 280.
*Contemporary Review, LX. 880.
CHAPTER Ii.
CHRIST THE REVELATION OF GOD.
IN the first chapter we attempted to show
that Browning believed in a God of love, and
that he arrived at this conclusion through the
conception of a loving, suffering Christ. It
is here our purpose to develop more fully this
last conception.
There is probably no more significant period
of religious thought in England than the fifty
years just following 182O. It was a period dur-
ing which many schools of varying theology
arose. These religious movements were preg-
nant not only with changing ideals, but with
new and vital thought. One needs only to
mention the names of Whately, Arnold, Pusey,
Coleridge, Carlyle, Maurice, Kingsley, and
Robertson—all of whom were prolific in their
discussions of the religious problems of the
day—to see how very full this period is of
such vital religious energy. It is rather a sig-
(51)
52 Fundamental Religious Principles
nificant fact that Robert Browning lived in a
time of such profound theological thought
without being drawn into it. He spent most
of these years (after 1846) in Italy, and was
too far away to catch the contagion of the
movement. He, however, could not escape
entirely. The atmosphere was too full of fer-
ment for any active mind not to be affected to
a certain extent. The whole meaning of “A
Death in the Desert” hangs upon the restless
condition of thought and speculation at the
time it was written. The poem presents a pe-
riod of doubt following close upon the apos-
tolic era, but that period was a direct prototype
of the time when Browning wrote, a time when
the old traditions of the mediaeval Church were
being cast to the winds; when criticism was
running rife with the mad impulse which al-
ways accompanies a new movement of radical-
ism; and when evolution was intoxicating men
with the novelty of its claims.
The historical questions of religion, such as
were brought forward by Strauss’s “Leben
Jesu,” and his work on John's Gospel, referred
to in line 196 of “A Death in the Desert,”
/n Browning’s Poetry. 53
seem never to have troubled our poet; but, on
the other hand, the difficulty of getting a clear
conception of the essential Christ caused him
much unrest. Quite early in the century there
had been a swing toward humanitarianism.
The old Calvinism, with its hard doctrines, was
gradually giving way before a more sympa-
thetic ideal. In 1831, two years before Brown-
ing's first poem was published, Campbell, a
Scotch minister, was expelled from the Scot-
tish Church for preaching an unlimited atone-
ment. In his preaching he brought out more
clearly than it had before been seen that Christ's
suffering was not alone vicarious, but was ef-
fective in that it perfected his own inward char-
acter and became a perfect revelation of the
character of God. Maurice went very far in
denying all penal satisfaction in the suffering
of Christ, and also denying the thought of
eternal punishment. To him the expression
“eternal punishment” meant simply a condition
and not duration of time. This of course car-
ried out his idea of the atonement.
How much Browning knew of these move-
ments we cannot say, but so far as he has ex-
54 Fundamental Religious Principles
pressed himself his attiude was much in har-
mony with them. He, at least, agreed with
those who discarded the doctrine of eternal
punishment. To him there could have been
nothing more awful than the thought that God
would punish a man to Satisfy his own anger.
Rather all punishment was meant for the cor-
rection of faults, and when that had been ac-
complished there was no use of further penalty.
“A Camel Driver” is a clear presentation of
his theme, where we are told that Overpunished
wrong grows right in its turning upon the
avenger. No better proof could be found that
Browning believed in the eternal possibility of
growth toward God than is given in the final
word of the Pope regarding Guido's sentence
and death. When, said he, this sentence of
mine comes to him, suddenly lighting up the
future like a flash upon the midnight seas, he
may repent: -
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.”
“The Pope,” VII. 228.
In Browning’s Poetry. 55
The theory of the fall of man and its attend-
ant thought of Original sin combined to make
necessary the current conception of the atone-
ment. Of these theories Browning made noth-
ing. There are a few passages in “The Ring
and the Book” which speak conventionally of
the fall of Adam; and in some other poems
we find like references, but they are probably
only phrases caught up from current thought.
The fact that he was a thoroughgoing evolu-
tionist is sufficient proof that he did not believe
in the literal fall of man as such, hence he
would find no place for an atonement as held
by his contemporaries. Little is made of the
suffering on the cross save as it reveals Christ's
love for and sympathy with man. It is true
he speaks of the shame and pain of the cross,
and of Christ's
Dying the death whose signs remain
Up yonder on the accursed tree,”
and from time to time the Pope speaks in a
conventional way of the cardinal doctrines of
the Catholic Church; but one would hardly be
*“Christmas Eve,” IV. 304.
Af
56 Fundamental Religious Principles
able to find passages which could be called
Orthodox regarding the doctrines of atonement
and vicarious suffering, and most if not all the
passages which refer to these are without po-
etic fire or sympathetic statement. We do not
know that our poet necessarily disbelieved these
things, for they were matters of indifference to
him. They were nonessential to his Christian
life. Probably it would be a better statement
of the truth if we should say that he disbelieved
many of these things but did not stop to give
expression to his unbelief.
But he would never remain negative. He
must find an essential ground of Christian life
before he could rest. Here again we find him
reaching the same conclusion with Maurice in
his theology. Each came to the thought of the
Incarnation as the only true revelation of a
*—loving God, the one in his rebound from Cal-
vinism, and the other in his drawing away
from cold Intelligence and Power.
Having, then, cleared the ground of some
of these misconceptions as they appeared to
Browning, it will be of interest to build up
from his poetry that conception of Christ which
In Browning’s Poetry. 57
did satisfy his soul. There are two distinct
points of view from which he approaches this
study. One is the point of view of the non-
believer and heathen; the other, that of the
Christian. The first is found in such poems
as “The Sun,” “An Epistle,” and “Cleon”;
the second is mainly set forth in “Saul,” “A
Death in the Desert,” and the double poem of
“Christmas Eve and Easter Day.”
Karshish, the Arab physician, approaches
the question with great doubt and little rev-
erence. He had always lived under an idea of
a divine Power, but that power was cold, hard,
arbitrary, far away in the distance and only
dimly to be known. Nevertheless, it was a
Power which had commanded his respect and
fear; but the thought of a loving God had nev-
er found him. He meets one day with Laz-
arus, whom Jesus had raised from the dead.
Of course he does not believe that Lazarus was
really dead, or that Christ was really God; but
he cannot rid himself of thoughts concerning
him. What if this man who raised Lazarus
should be divine, then God has taken on flesh
and come to earth to minister to man. How
58 Fundamental A'eligious Principles
very strange and incredible; but if it were only
possible, how very beautiful! This he thinks
would add love to the heretofore cold attributes
Of his God. Time after time he casts the
thought aside, as it were, to pursue his scien-
tific discussion; but each time this new concep-
tion draws him back with irresistible power,
till at last he closes his letter with the conclu-
sion that God would be all-loving if this hypoth-
esis were true. These last words are not cold
argument, for they burst forth into a passion-
ate expression of faith transcending all intel-
lectual difficulties:
The very God think, Abib; dost thou think?
So, the All-Great, were the All-Loving too—
So, through the thunder comes a human voice
Saying, “O heart I made, a heart beats here !
Face, my hands fashioned; see it in myself
Thou hast no power nor mayst conceive of mine,
But love I gave thee, with myself to love,
And thou must 1ove me who have died for thee!”
The conclusion of Cleon, the Greek poet,
artist, philosopher, is just the reverse of this
glad, hopeful faith. He, too, needs the living
revelation of God. His soul is not satisfied
“An Epistle,” V. 19, 20.
In Browning’s Poetry. 59
with what it has, but longs for an incarnation.
We cannot help thinking that this desire may
have been quickened by what he has heard of
Christ, but which he cannot believe. However
this may be, a cold Zeus does not satisfy him.
Long since, I imaged, wrote the fiction out,
That he or other gods descended here
And, once for all, showed simultaneously
What, in its nature, never can be shown,
Piecemeal or in succession.*
But because he is not sure of this revelation,
because it is a fiction, he becomes a pessimist.
Life is not worth living, for without such a
manifestation of God, giving a more perfect
knowledge and a hope for the future, most
progress is most failure. This revelation is
just what Browning felt he must find in Christ,
and he found it. He had descended from God
and was God. He had come to man and was
Man. He was a perfect revelation of this life,
which could not be presented piecemeal or by
verbal revelation. There must be a descended
God, who, whatever his limitations, was nev-
ertheless a God.
“Cleon,” V. 84.
6o Fundamental Religious Principles
Call Christ, then, the illimitable God,
Or lost.*
There is yet another pagan poem that bears
on this subject. The most elaborate argument
found in any of these poems for the Christ
Man is in “The Sun.” Ferishtah, the teacher,
talks with a disciple who reports to him that
one has blasphemously said:
God once assumed on earth a human shape.”
The Dervish replies that man is so constituted
that he must give praise. His gratitude must
go to something outside of himself. Let us
suppose, he contends, that the ancients were
right in thinking the sun was God. Every-
thing which we enjoy on earth springs from
the sun, and therefore we love and praise it.
We eat a fig; we are pleased and give thanks
to the gardener, but our gratitude does not
stop here.
Step by step,
I mount by just progression slow and sure
To some prime giver—here assumed yon orb–
Who takes my worship."
*“A Death in the Desert,” V. 204.
“The Sun,” XII. I5. "Ibid., XII. I6.
In Browning’s Poetry. 6I
When he arrives at this, the Sun is no longer
a ball of fire. It is no longer a mass of dead
matter, for that does not call for praise or love.
Whom have I in mind,
Thus worshiping, unless a man, my like
Howe'er above me? Man, I say—how else,
I being man who worship Pº
Then the Dervish goes on to explain that every
expression of love on man’s part is a failure
unless there is a loving God. But in order that
God may love us he must understand us, which
can only be when he becomes partly human.
Only kindred soul can move a man's soul. This
limits God in a sense; but the Dervish is will-
ing to have that if only he can arrive at the
Incarnation. He closes by saying that if any
man can convince himself that such an incar-
nation has taken place, then he himself stands
appalled at that conception which he needs but
has not yet reached. On the whole the argu-
ments of the pagan poems are unsatisfactory.
They only show a positive need and demand
for a God in human form. This can give rise
to a conception of the truth, but cannot estab-
“The Sun,” XII. 16.
62 Fundamental Ateligious Principles
lish it as a fact. However, we feel that even
in the minds of these pagans it is something
which points them to a higher life, and brings
them in closer touch with Divinity.
In the second class of poems which treat of
the Incarnation the Christian characters ap-
proach the truth in very much the same man-
ner as the pagans. However, they are not shut
up simply to need as a basis of belief; they
have a more vital contact. They look at it
as a matter of living experience, and out of the
richness of that experience they bring forth
their arguments. It is not a question of de-
monstrable knowledge alone; but rather it is
a question of life, of soul impressions. To
them the historical Christ is certain; the essen-
tial Christ is much more important. The his-
torical Christ is a subject for intellectual belief,
but
the real God-function
Is to furnish a motive and injunction
For practicing what we know already.”
Such a motive can be furnished alone by the
essential Christ. It makes little difference how
“Christmas Eve,” IV, 318.
In Browning’s Poetry. 63
crude may be our ideas, or what mode of wor-
ship we employ, so long as we are vitalized by
the Christ Spirit. The real command is not
to believe in justice, truth, or any abstract prin-
ciple, but, -
- Believe in me,
Who lived and died, yet essentially
Am Lord of Life. Whoever can take
The same to his heart and for mere love's sake
Conceive of the love, that man obtains
A new truth; no conviction gains
Of an old one only, made intense
By a fresh appeal to his faded sense.”
Even the Professor in “Christmas Eve” with
his fine arguments cannot get away from this
need of a Christ. He still loves and worships
the myth, and tells his pupils to do so. Christ
remains in the lecture room as the Professor
lectures, showing there must be some truth
there. But the speaker feels that when trouble
and death come this Professor must have some-
thing more substantial than a myth:
May Christ do for him what no mere man shall,
And stand confessed as the God of salvation "*
The question of an historic Christ is taken
“Christmas Eve,” IV, 318. “Ibid., IV. 327.
64 Fundamental Religious Principles
up in “Easter Day,” and also in “A Death in
the Desert,” but it is quite significant that no
argument based upon historic facts is set forth.
In each case the poet finds a more essential
truth. Let us leave this truth, to look for a
moment at the anthropomorphic view presented
in Saul. The great king being despondent,
David comes to solace him with music from
his lyre. As he plays he also sings: first, the
songs which are filled with the beauty of true
life; then, the help tunes speaking of life's
epochs; then, Songs of aspiration; lastly, he
sings of the king's future glory. At this the
king really arouses, and bending back the head
of the singer, gazes long and tenderly into his
face. It is only then that the real truth for
the consolation of Saul comes to David. He
no longer sings. The love which he feels for
the king is too great for music. He tells of a
vision which makes a new law and a new life.
The vision is this: If he loves Saul so much
that he would give his life for him, would not
God do even more? Can he lay claim to do-
ing more for the creature than the Creator him-
self? Surely not. Then as the failure to un-
In Browning’s Poetry. 65
derstand this love of God comes surging Over
him, he reaches out for a revelation of that
love. It must be a human manifestation. He
cannot understand anything else. The pas-
sage quoted before, should be given here also:
'Tis the weakness in strength, that I cry for my
flesh, that I seek
In the Godhead I seek and I find it. O Saul, it
shall be
A Face like my face that receives thee; a Man like
to me, -
Thou shalt love and be loved by, forever: a Hand like
this hand
Shall throw open the gates of new life to thee! See
the Christ stand “”
There is also the question as to whether this
Christ whom our needs demand is, after all,
filling that need. The question is only sug-
gested here, but its answer is plain. He cer-
tainly is sufficient, and is filling with power
each human life which accepts him. This also
is the real center of thought in “A Death in the
Desert.” Men following John will ask if John
really was and did know. The answer to this
is not to be found in the facts of history. It
*Saul,” IV. 85.
66 Fundamental Religious Principles
is not even to be found in an ideal Christ fash-
ioned according to our needs. It is found
alone in experience. This experience John has
had, and many of his disciples also. The only
way to prove Christ is to live in him; to have
his conscious presence with us. This is the
ever new, ever vital proof that Christ is, when
he transforms Our lives by his power. Christ
alone is able to
Snatch Saul the mistake,
Saul the failure, the ruin he seems now, and bid him
awake
From the dream, the probation, the prelude, to find
himself set
Clear and safe in new light and new life, a new har-
mony yet - -
To be run, and continued, and ended. . . .”
The same thing is said in “Easter Day,”
though the conclusion is not quite So clearly set
forth. Here the Christian and non-Christian
in conversation have a greatly differing ideal.
To believe in the historical Christ is not hard
for the Christian man. He accepts that with-
out doubt. What more could he want, says
the non-Christian. Believing there is only one
*Saul,” IV. 83.
J72 B rowning's Poetry. 67
thing to do, and that is to follow. But there
is a deeper thought in the heart of the other.
It is hard for him to be a Christian because
it is hard for him to incorporate the Christ life
into his own. Until he can do this—which he
can never do perfectly—the proof of Christ as
an adequate Saviour is not complete. He be-
lieves in it, he is growing toward its comple-
tion, and so all men must grow, through doubt
to that which approximates truth. *
We may be somewhat surprised to find that
Browning, whom we are accustomed to think
of only as philosopher, has made experience the
final test of the validity and power of the Christ
life. But such seems to be the case, for in his
later poems he almost discarded the knowledge
which is acquired by processes of reasoning,
and thus was forced back upon the inner life,
the experience of his soul. The result of such
a knowledge of Christ and his power is often
set forth. The Christ, who by his incarnation
is able to throw open the gates of new life to
us, becomes the Christ of regenerate life. When
this life Opens up to the human soul, all nature
takes a different coloring. It is again the old
68 Fundamental Religious Principles
story of the New Testament, with the angelic
choir singing,
Glory to God in the highest :
On earth peace and good will among men.
Browning gives the thought beautiful expres-
sion:
And the stars of night beat with emotion, and tingled
and shot
Out in fire the strong pain of pent knowledge.”
When this experience came to David it brought
a new meaning into all nature:
In the gathered intensity brought to the gray of the
hills; -
In the shuddering forests’ held breath; in the sudden
wind-thrills; -
In the startled wild beasts that bore off, each with eye
sidling still -
Though averted with wonder and dread; in the birds
stiff and chill
That rose heavily, as I approached them, made stupid
with awe :
E’en the serpent that slid away silent, he felt the new
1avy.”
Thus we see that Christian and pagan alike
felt the absolute necessity for the Incarna-
*Saul,” IV. 86. “Ibid., IV. 86.
In Browning's Poetry. 69
tion.” Life without it was not complete. Man
was so created by God. Some of the ancients
in their desire for this visible manifestation
deified the sun; others saw God in certain ani-
mals, but all of these were unsatisfactory.
These after all gave no real knowledge of God.
They did not bring man in touch with him. A
kindred soul was necessary to draw out the
highest and most perfect worship. An insen-
tient object would not serve, nor would an ani-
mal without sympathy. He must be a soul
that throbs with sympathy for our own; suf-
fers, hopes, loves, just as we do; and this could
*It may be noted here that the idea of an incarna-
tion is foreign to the philosophy both of Buddhism and
Mohammedanism. Browning must have been familiar
with this fact, but this would only heighten the force of
the argument coming from these pagan characters. Nor
is this merely a fancy of the poets. I have been as-
sured by Dr. Zwemer, that most scholarly missionary
to the Mohammedan world, that a desire for an incar-
nation is in the heart of the most devout followers of
the prophet. It is worth mention also that Professor
C. P. Teile, in his Gifford Lectures on the “Elements
of the Science of Religion” (Vol. II., Chap. V.), claims
that this desire is universal, and is the supreme ex-
pression of man’s need for communion with God.
70 Fundamental Religious Principles
Only come through such a manifestation as
Christ. Even before Christ came, and in the
centuries yet to come, Browning saw that man
must ever cry out for the human in the Divine.
In the preceding chapter we quoted Brown-
ing's words to Mrs. Orr in which he said that
the evidences of divine power were all about us.
But divine love could only be made clear by a
Christ who became human. We also quoted
the last words of the Epilogue to “Dramatis
Personae,” after which he said to Mrs. Orr that
the face spoken of was the face of Christ, and
it was a personal Christ to him.
C. If our poet did not believe in the atonement
as it was usually accepted, he did believe in it
as a reconciliation of man to God. Christ be-
came the reconciler of man to God in that he
became the incarnate expression of God’s love.
Himself conceived of life as love,
Conceived of love as what must enter in,
Fill up, make one with his each soul he loved.”
It was not necessary for God to be drawn
back to man, but the reverse was true. Before
***A Death in the Desert,” V. 203.
In Browning’s Poetry. 7I
man could be made one with God, he must be
shown his sin; else, how could his sin be for-
given? This sin could be shown only by a
Christ who died because of hatred of sin, and
love for the men who lived in it. In as far as
a man can show us our sin and reveal God’s
love and power to us through his own Chris-
tian life, just so far he becomes a human recon-
ciler, a reincarnation, a new atonement. This
is most beautifully expressed in the third part
of the Epilogue to “Dramatis Personae,” to
which we have just referred. Each individual
is the center of the flow of life just as the rock
in the great ocean. The human and divine
power surging round him makes him a real cen-
ter of being. At some time he is for a moment
a world force. In “Fifine at the Fair” we are
told that each grain of sand on the beach finds
Some moment when the whole of creation is
reflected in its being. This moment is the mo-
ment of a man's most exalted life. Growth
into this highest forms the greatest theme of
Browning's poetry. It is the individual soul
and its struggle that holds his attention. This
growth must come by way of the garden of
72 Fundamental Religious Principles
Sorrow, the Golgotha of Soul-stirring experi-
ence, the cross of an unselfish sacrifice in suffer-
ing, and through the greatest service to others.
Out of this rending of his soul there shall grow
a more perfect reincarnation, and his life shall
be drawn up to Infinity. In all, Browning
recognized that man must be led by the love
of the Christ.
In such souls as Pompilia's, all these agen-
cies have done their work. Her life, though
filled with unhappiness and struggle, is finally
love-crowned, and she passes away, the truest
flower which earth holds up to the softened
gaze of God! She was indeed a human man-
ifestation of the Christ-life. Yes, she was
more. She was a human atonement lifting
the soul of Pope and priest to higher levels.
In like manner Caponsacchi breaks the bonds
of conventional Christianity and rises to a vital
life, the soldier-saint. He becomes the me-
dium through which others see God, and as
such is a living atonement. No priest or
prophet ever received a truer testimony of this
than that bestowed on him by Pompilia:
In Browning’s Poetry. 73
Through such souls alone
God stooping shows sufficient of his light
For us i' the dark to rise by. And I rise.”
Christ's purpose in coming into the world
was not alone to show men God’s love, but also
to show them simultaneously, and not by piece-
meal, what they might become. By this In-
carnation he reveals
The worth both absolute and relative
Of all his children from the birth of time,
His instruments for all appointed work.”
By growing into the spirit of Christ's life,
we become new incarnations; by doing the
work which God appoints, we become his chil-
dren; by showing the world his love, we be-
come his new atoning agents drawing all men
to him. But the incarnate Christ was to
Browning much more than a simple example of
a perfect life. He was a divine being, enter-
ing into and making divine all those who
Sought his companionship, desired his power,
and accepted his will. When this love of
Christ was found in the life of a man, it was
*Pompilia,” VII, 57. “Cleon,” V. 84.
74 Fundamental Ateligious Principles
but natural that he should become the minister
of the things of Christ.
If Christ, as thou affirmest, be of men
Mere man, the first and best but nothing more,
Account him, for reward of what he was,
Now, and forever, wretchedest of all.
For see; himself conceived of life as love,
Conceived of love as what must enter in,
Fill up, make one with his each soul be loved :
Thus much for man’s joy, all men's joy for him.
Well, he is gone, thou sayest, to fit reward.
But by this time are many souls set free,
And very many still retained alive :
Nay, should his coming be delayed a while,
Say, ten years longer (twelve years, some compute),
See if, for every finger of thy hands,
There be not found, that day the world shall end,
Hundreds of souls, each holding by Christ's word
That he will grow incorporate with all,
With me as Pamphylax, with him as John,
Groom for each bride! Can a mere man do this?
Yet Christ saith, this he lived and died to do.
Call Christ, then, the illimitable God,
Or 10 St 139 -
Such was the message of Browning concern-
ing the world’s greatest personality. It came
at a time when men were crying out for help.
Strauss had written his “Leben Jesu,” and
*“A Death in the Desert,” V. 203, 204.
In Browning’s Poetry. 75
Renan had published his work on the Life of
Jesus. Other writers, such as Voltaire and
Rousseau, had shaken the faith of the age.
There was need of a strong, vital message of
belief. This Browning supplied, and that, too,
in such form that it commanded the respect
and assent of the most careful scholars. He
went beyond the mere historical research of
Strauss, and showed that Christian faith was
valid because it was able to explain the deep
realities of life.
To Browning the world owes a great debt
for bringing such a positive and convincing
message in this period of deep unrest. He met
this age of doubt by reminding men that doubt
was but a mask of faith, and the greatest proof
that Christ really was lay in the fact that
through doubt men were groping for a knowl-
edge of him. He helped men to see that the
essential argument for Christ was not histor-
ical, but based upon the fact that Christ, and
Christ alone, was able to solve the problems of
life and satisfy the longings of the soul.
CHAPTER III.
THE PRINCIPLE OF DUALITY.
WE shall have occasion later to call atten-
tion to Browning's emphasis on the sharp con-
trasts of life. It is by virtue of contrast alone
that we are conscious beings, and this law ex-
tends into every field of human thought and
act1On.
On this basis men have from time immemo-
rial looked at good and evil, and then looked
behind this good and evil to their supposed
creators—God and the devil. Primitive men
such as Caliban saw certain forces about them
which made for happiness and peace, such
forces as the sky, the sun, and the stars. But
Caliban saw also and worshiped—if slavish
fear can be called worship—the powers of the
storm, of the earthquake, of night, and Of
death. These to him were the real gods whom
he was bound to please if he might, and whom,
please or not, he must always fear. Such a
power was in the mind of Caliban when he
(76)
In Browning’s Poetry. 77
talked of Setebos, who did just as he pleased
save for the power of Quiet.
In some such way as Browning works out
for us in this poem, men came to believe in a
dual set of rulers in the universe—gods and
devils. As civilization advanced, the thought
that every object was possessed of an inde-
pendent spirit, good or evil, began to change,
and it became a common notion that over these
good and evil spirits there ruled two supreme
beings, a God and a devil. To the former was
attributed all good and pleasure which came
into the life of man, and to the latter was
attributed all sorrow and pain. This idea
grew with the ages, and finally found its way
into the Hebrew literature and the Bible. In-
corporated into the creed of the Christian
Church, it grew ever stronger through the
Middle Ages, and not until the prevalence of
the idea of evolution was there any other well-
formed and widely accepted theory of the ori-
gin of evil than that it was the work of the
devil. At the time when Browning began to
write, however, there was a radical change
coming Over religious thought. Men were be-
78 Fundamental Religious Principles
ginning to see that the paradox of good in ap-
parent evil really had a plain truth in it, and
certainly many things that had once seemed
evil were by a deeper knowledge proved good
for man. This at once set men to question-
ing if there was a real author of evil, as such,
and if so the old question of the ages was
to be faced. How could he coexist with an
all-powerful, all-loving, all-wise God? To
this question Browning early addressed him-
self. Let us see if we can find the truth of
his thought about a personal devil by looking
at Some of his passages.
We propose to divide the passages which
contain references to the devil into three class-
es in accordance with the principles of inter-
pretation laid down in the Introduction. First,
those spoken by Browning himself in non-dra-
matic poems; second, those spoken by dramatic
persons and put with some degree of sympa-
thy; and, third, those which seem to be used
in an entirely conventional manner without
thought either of belief or of disbelief in the
devil. -
We have given in the Introduction the list
In Browning's Poetry. 79
of poems which are considered autobiograph-
ical. In all of these poems there are Only a
few references to the devil.
It is not quite certain whether “Easter Day”
is a personal poem or not, but by many it is
so considered, and therefore we give a refer-
ence from it. As the doubting Christian closes
his narration of the vision which came to him
three years before, he again repeats the opening
thought of the poem, that to be a Christian is
very hard; but of this he is glad. He would
not live in a world and enjoy a religion which
made all life ghastly smooth, but rather would
he be thwarted as a man and struggle against
the evil tempter.
Thank God, she still each method tries
To catch me, who may yet escape,
She knows, the fiend in angel’s shapel"
The fiend here may be the environment of earth,
with its alluring evil and crying wrong, but it
is barely possible to read behind that environ-
ment a personal force for evil.
The first book of “The Ring and the Book”
“Easter Day,” IV. 360.
8o Fundamental APeligious Principles
is Browning's Own words, given as an explana-
tion of what follows. In this Guido and his
accomplices are spoken of as devils.” Conven-
tional reference is also made to “the world, the
flesh, and the devil.” A little later Guido is
aided in his foul deeds,
By hands unguessed before, invisible help
From a dark brotherhood.”
The parents of Pompilia are cheated of their
child by the Prince o’ the Power of the Air;”
and finally cowardly wrongdoers are compared
to Satan.”
The twelfth book of “The Ring and the
Book” is also personal, or at least Semi-per-
sonal. In this there are four passages where
the word devil is used," but they throw no
light on our discussion.
“Christmas Eve” is also a personal poem in
which occur two references to the devil. The
first of these somewhat flippantly refers to the
chapel congregation listening
*The Ring and the Book,” VI. 13. “Ibid., VI. I5.
“Ibid., VI. 18. "Ibid., VI. 18, 19. "Ibid., VI, 30.
“The Book and the Ring,” VII. 310, 316, 319, 320.
In Browning's Poetry. 8I
With such content in every snuffle,
As the devil inside us loves to ruffle.”
The second one is purely hypothetical, and can-
not be taken as evidence of belief in a personal
devil.” “La Saisiaz” contains two strong ref-
erences in which a personal devil is set forth.
The presence of evil in the world forces one
to ask why God has allowed the beauty of the
universe to be marred by the infecting breath
of the serpent.” The more the poet looked
about him, the more strongly did this question
press for an answer. Must there be clouds in
order that we may enjoy the shine; and must
there be anguish to teach us sympathy? The
deliberate conclusion of the poet is that this
life is simply a pupil’s place; if such is not
true, then this world is devil-born.
If the harsh throes of the prelude die not off into
the swell
Of that perfect piece they sting me to become a-
strain for,
Plainlier l if this life's conception new life fail to
realize,
“Christmas Eve,” IV. 291. "Ibid., IV, 317.
“La Saisiaz,” XI. 89.
6
82 Fundamental Religious Principles
then all is but
One huge
Reflex of the devil's doings—God’s work by no subter-
fuge.” -
This is probably the strongest of all the ref-
erences to a personal devil, and may be taken
as a climax of the non-dramatic utterances,
the list of which is, I believe, complete.
The references to the devil, put into the
mouths of dramatic persons, are so very nu-
merous that mention of them all would be im-
possible. The hero in “Pauline” speaks of
God having vanished from the universe and
Some dark spirit sitting in his seat.” Para-
celsus denominates the devil “a tempter of
men,” and Pippa, the innocent weaving girl,
declares:
- Not the worst of people's doings scare
The devil.”
In an exquisite poem, which glows with truth,
the devil maliciously destroys the bliss of two
lives. It is in bitter tones the woman cries she
is satisfied
*“La Saisiaz,” XI. 89, 90. “Pauline,” I. 16.
*Pippa Passes,” I. 234.
An Browning’s Poetry. 83
Now that I know if God or Satan be
Prince of the Power of the Air.”
The noblest of all Browning's characters, the
Pope, who is a good Catholic, speaks often of
the devil. He portrays him as the “arch tempt-
er, whom all must fight”; the ruler of the hosts
of evil, of which bad men form a part; the
plucking fiend who would have destroyed the
purity of Pompilia's soul, and the one whom
Christ alone can slay.
Half-Rome thinks the marriage of Guido
and Pompilia was carried out because of “the
devil's will to work his worst for once.” Other
Half-Rome calls Lucifer “the son of night,”
and later, “a lord who pays his liegemen brass
for gold.” Tertium Quid makes him the au-
thor of trouble, mischief and evil for the
Climax and crown of things
Invariably is, the devil appears himself,
Armed and accoutered, horns and hoofs and tail lº
Guido, being born and reared a Catholic, of
course believed in a devil, but it seems not to
have affected him very seriously as to his con-
“Inn Album,” X. 183. “Tertium Quid,” VI. 184.
84 Fundamental Religious Principles
duct; and Pompilia, the fairest flower of earth,
a Soul SO pure it would not take pollution,
looked to a God above with love, and shunned
a fiend below with fear and trembling. The
noble woman in “Inn Album,” whose life is a
tragedy that strikes Sorrow to the coldest heart,
Speaks with an earnestness begotten of convic-
tion, when she calls the devil the “Prince of
the Power of the Air,” and declares that he
had a part in the ruining of her life.”
The references which are merely convention-
al may be counted almost by hundreds. The
devil is the One to swear by, the one to swear
at, and, on the whole, one of the most conven-
ient hackneys that a literary man ever had;
and Browning did not hesitate to use him free-
ly. Besides these three classes of references,
there are a few that use the conventional name
devil, but really mean the evil tendency of man,
as Our theologians would say. Paracelsus,
whose own spirit has become his accuser and
persecutor, says to Festus,
If you knew how a devil sneers within me!”
“Inn Album,” X 183. “Paracelsus,” I. I34.
In Browning’s Poetry. 85
It is this same kind of tempting fiend which
comes to Leonce Miranda and urges him
to lose his troubled memories in the Seine.
An evil spirit was behind the villain in “Inn
Album” pushing him on to his vile deeds.
When Pompilia calls, the priest Caponsacchi
throws aside his robes, flings away his indo-
lent lack of manhood, and springs forth a
Soldier-Saint; but the Pope, while praising him,
says there was
Power in the air for evil as for good,
Promptings from heaven and hell.”
As they escape with the truest purity of soul,
an “unseen assembly” watches the journey.
In many such passages as these the prick of
evil conscience, the evil motive, when turned
toward the destruction of man’s entire self, are
personified as a personal devil. When we
stand over a precipice and look down to the
rocks beneath, where our bodies would be
dashed to pieces if we should throw ourselves
Over, the temptation is sometimes very strong
to commit the deed. It is this impulse, this
*The Pope,” VII. 183.
86 Fundamental Religious Principles
initial of action which leads to harm, that is
often personified as the devil.
What, then, shall we say in regard to all
these passages? Do they represent Browning's
own belief ? and if not, how shall we explain
them P The conventional references need not
be much discussed. The belief in a personal
devil was so very common, and we might Say
universal then, that the easiest possible way
of getting a conception of evil into the minds
of men was to put in a reference to the devil.
Then also it was a good word to use because it
carried along with it the weight of tradition
and saved explanation. It would be very nat-
ural, therefore, for any writer to put in such
references regardless of his belief in the sub-
ject. The passages which are put in the
mouths of Catholics—no small number—must
of course, by the very laws of dramatic art,
accept and uphold the idea of a personal devil.
The dramatic passages we may explain in
two ways—either the speakers were forced to
speak respectfully of the devil because of their
official position, or else these speakers are using
the term in an entirely conventional way. If
In Browning's Poetry. 87
one will go very carefully over all the dramatic
references he will probably not be able to find
one that thoroughly convinces him that Brown-
ing was speaking seriously for himself in it.
There is not that glow of poetry, not that
expression of feeling, which is necessary to
bring conviction. One cannot help feeling that
these expressions were never intended to carry
conviction of truth with them.
As to the quotations from autobiographical
poems, we find more difficulty of explanation.
However, if we will examine each of these we
will find that the thought is rather that of evil
personified than of any real person. The fiend
in angel shape found in “Easter Day” was
probably the man’s own passions over which
he found much trouble in keeping a hand of
control, or it might have been environment as
suggested before, or—what is barely possible
—it might be personal.
The dark brotherhood in “The Ring and the
Book” seems to come as a familiar expression,
and certainly conveys nothing more to the
mind than the thought of circumstances which
aided the evil deed. The reference found in
88 Fundamental Ateligious Principles
5
“La Saisiaz,” which we have said is probably
the strongest in all Browning's poetry, is con-
ditioned on the fact that there be no future life.
This life without the hope of the future, where
wrong shall be righted and struggle show forth
in development, would be a terrible example
of misguided and maladjusted creation. Such
a creation could not come from a God such as
Browning conceived, but must come from an
evil god or a devil. It means simply this:
If there is no future where the real purpose
of evil will be revealed, then all life is evil
and absolutely so. There is no God, and our
human aspirations are false prophets which
add to our sorrows by making tenders which
they never pay. But, after all, Browning does
not accept the condition. He does believe in
a future existence, and therefore the passage
does not of necessity mean that he believed in
a devil. -
The other reference in “La Saisiaz” asks
whether God was lacking in power or in love
when he allowed the serpent to shrivel life’s
garlands with his breath. The answer is: If
this life is a training place for larger things,
In Browning’s Poetry. 89
then God may have a wise purpose in all evil
and may have created it himself to fulfill this
purpose.
Finally, we may say that the passages where
the expression is used do not usually glow
with the fervor of real belief, and where such
passages are really poetic the poetry will usual-
ly be marred if we take the word devil to mean
a real monster. It is the fact of evil tendency,
and its being turned; the fact of evil passion,
and its being controlled; the fact of evil inten-
tion, and its being thwarted, that lends the
halo to the poetry. Take this thought away
and put in the thought of a person who rules
and controls, and our poetry is spoiled. Now
if real poetry, and by poetry we mean that
verse which glows with passion,--if real poetry
is the expression of the truth of a writer's
Soul, we are forced to say that that interpreta-
tion which gives to it the greater fervor is more
nearly the truth than any other. Taking this
as a basis of the interpretation of Browning’s
poetry, we do not think that any belief of the
poet in a personal devil can be found there.
But if we had only these references to judge
z
90 Aſundamental A'eligious Principles
from, there might still be grounds for holding
that Browning believed in a personal devil.
Let us view the thought in connection with
his other tenets of faith—if such we may call
them. In Our chapter on God we have shown
that Browning believed in a God who was all-
powerful, all-wise, and all-loving. This being
the case, it is improbable that a man of his
bent of mind should hold also to a personal
devil. The doctrine of eternal punishment has
always gone along with the doctrine of a per-
sonal devil. Browning dropped the former,
and the latter must go also. It would be in-
consistent with the nature of the devil to pun-
ish a man in order to reform him, and when
he had been reformed to send him out on his
mission of eternal development; and yet this
is what Browning claims that evil does. In
fact, the whole purpose of evil as conceived by
the poet is inconsistent with the nature of the
devil. Evil is the sting to growth; it is the
impetus to a higher life. If now the devil
is the author of evil, he is the creator of that
which elevates mankind. But the Office of the
devil is not to elevate, but to tear down and
In Browning's Poetry. 9T
destroy. Hence, our devil is thwarting the
purpose of his own being and is become rather
a god than an evil monster. Browning gets
out of this difficulty by simply saying that God
is the author of evil. On the other horn of the
dilemma one might say that since God is the
author of evil he is without love, and hence
may be behind the devil in all his fiendish work.
But Browning was as unwilling to accept that
as he was to accept the other. His deliberate
conclusion, then, was that we do not need—
nay, what is more, we have no place for—a per-
sonal devil. God is responsible for both good
and the possibilities of evil, and Browning
thinks the results therefrom justify the means.
Many would shrink from this thought, but
Browning feared not to believe what to him
seemed the truth; he dared say what he be-
lieved, and what he has said convinces us that
he was by no means a dualist.
CHAPTER IV.
THE ORIGIN AND NATURE OF EVIL.
PROBABLY no question has claimed the at-
tention of man so long, and caused so many
bitter controversies, as that of the Origin and
Nature of Evil. If we should go back in the
history of humanity to the earliest awakening
of moral consciousness, we should probably
find some theory, more or less crude, in regard
to this question, following close upon that
awakening. One of the earliest facts that
came to man was the fact of pain in the world;
that he was in the midst of an environment
with whose powers and working he was out of
harmony. Naturally his first question would
be, Who created him and nature thus at vari-
ance? The shock of this first awakening is
most graphically given in the story of the fall
of man; and this narrative has been the rally-
ing point around which arguments have raged
for centuries. .
Man has asked many times not only, Whence
(92)
In Browning's Poetry. 93
came this evil? but, What is its nature? And
both questions are legitimate. All classes of men
in all ages have formed their theories in re-
gard to this subject; but no other class of men
have given such striking utterance to those the-
ories as have the great poets. Job, wrestling
with the evil of life, in the dark valley of pain
where no comforter could be found, cried out
in his anguish :
Why is life given to a man whose way is hid,
And whom God hath hedged in Pº
Dante gave the best years of his life to a poem
that involved the whole sweep of the question
of evil and its overcoming:
I found me in a gloomy wood, astray,
Gone from the path direct.”
Milton’s greatest song was
Of man's first disobedience and the fruit
Of that forbidden tree, whose mortal taste
Brought death into the world, and all our woe,
With loss of Eden till one greater man
Restore us, and regain the blessed seat.”
‘Job iii. 23. “Dante's “Hell,” lines 2, 3.
“Paradise Lost,” Book I., II. I-5.
94 Fundamental Religious Principles
Tennyson wrote the greatest poem of his life
with this as a keynote:
Oh, yet we trust that somehow good
Will be the final goal of ill,
To pangs of nature, sins of will,
Defects of doubt, and taints of blood.”
On no other question has Browning spent so
much thought, and to his poetry the world is
indebted for many helpful ideas looking to
its solution. -
What, then, is the origin of evil? The
Gnostics settled the question by saying that
evil was inherent in matter. As God was good
he could not create that which was essentially
evil—matter. Matter was created by an ema-
nation,-the last in a series evolved from
God, each successive emanation having less
and less of the divine element. Since man
could not entirely free himself from contact
with matter, he was himself evil; even his body
being a source of contamination. Thus Gnos-
ticism limited God, and the system ended in
Dualism, recognizing a principle of good and
“In Memoriam,” Sec. 54.
Zn Browning’s Poetry. 95
a principle of evil. Others have regarded evil
as without a creator. To them it was simply
a negative principle, and needed no efficient
cause to bring it into existence. Still others,
and among them the poet Tennyson, have re-
garded it as arising Out of man's Own Sensuous
nature, and hence a form of animalism. Fi-
nally, what seems terrible to many, the whole
matter has been attributed to God as the only
efficient Creator.
It may be well, before proceeding further,
to outline the ordinary view of the origin and
nature of evil held at the time of Browning.
The account in Genesis tells us that God crea-
ted the world perfect, with all its forces and
counter-forces in truest harmony. There was
no thought in the mind of the writer as to
God’s inability or lack of desire to create all
things in a manner which to the writer seemed
perfect—that is, without any evil whatever.
On man was placed the responsibility of evil,
for he yielded to the beguiling of the serpent.
It was God who placed it within man's power
to choose good or evil. God is also made re-
sponsible for natural evil, for he drove Adam
96 Fundamental Religious Principles
and Eve from the garden with the curse that
Adam should eat of the fruit of the ground in
Sorrow all the days of his life; and Eve should
bring forth her children in sorrow. There is
here no mention of a personal devil. God is
responsible for the existence of natural evil.
It was not until many centuries after this was
written, or at least in a much later development
of the Old Testament, that the conception of .
a devil, on whom the responsibility of evil
could be placed, was brought forward. But this
conception does find a place in the later books
of the Old Testament. Strange to say, the
Church has for many centuries transferred the
attributes of the devil to this serpent in the gar-
den, and thus plunged us into endless contro-
versy. What is even stranger, Satan is sup--
posed to have been the creator of evil. Evil
is assumed to be a lack of perfection, and
hence the world became imperfect through the
introduction of this principle. This was the
thought most prevalent in Browning's time.
In a book written quite recently by a believer
in a personal devil, we have found this very sig-
nificant sentence which sums up fairly well the
In Browning's Poetry. 97
attitude of many of the religious thinkers of
the first half of the nineteenth century: “In
perfect goodness and perfect power and wis-
dom He made it all, but an enemy disturbed
the nice adjustment of things.” Browning
was unable to conceive how an enemy could
slip in and destroy the harmony of a uni-
verse sustained by an all-powerful and all-
loving God. - - --
We are now prepared to examine Brown-
ing's views of natural evil. As was shown in
the preceding chapter, he did not believe in a
personal devil, and hence that source of its
origin was not valid for him. Without hesi-
tation, then, he puts the whole responsibility
on God. Ferishtah asks of one of his ques-
tioners,
Shall we receive good at the hand of God -
And evil not receive?"
As the perfect being languished in galling se-
renity on the Star Rephan, it was God who
put unrest in his heart and made him a fit per-
Sonage for this world of evil and strife.
“Evil and Evolution” (anonymous), p. 59.
“Ferishtah's Fancies,” XII. 6.
7
98 Fundamental Religious Principles
Prime Potency, did Thy hand unbar
The prison-gate of Rephan my Star?"
Even the Orthodox old Pope speaks of pain
as the creation of God, meant to evolve the
moral qualities of man. This being settled, it
was incumbent upon him to show that the na-
ture of evil was such as was consistent with
the goodness of God.
First of all, there are many natural evils
which arise out of man's limitation of being.
He is not perfect and has no perfection of
vision. His knowledge is limited; he is in a
state of progress, and progression denotes that
he is imperfect and bound to evil. We cannot
speak of man in a fixed state, but must ever
think of him as in a state of progression, be-
coming more and more. But this is in itself
a limitation, and his aspirations must con-
stantly draw beyond himself.
God’s gift was that man should conceive of truth
And yearn to gain it, catching at mistake,
As midway help till he reach the fact indeed.”
"“Rephan,” XII. 258.
*“A Death in the Desert,” V. 201.
In Browning’s Poetry. 99
This ignorance works itself out into various
forms of limitation. There are forces in the
universe which ought to work toward the hap-
piness and well-being of man; but in his short-
sightedness he does not perceive his own rela-
tionship to them. These forces then become
man's greatest enemy, destroying instead of
blessing. Much of physical evil is a simple
matter of maladjustment. When men are
wiser, they will no longer build their houses
on the sides of volcanic mountains where the
lava may burst forth; or settle on low islands
where a wave of the sea may sweep them
from existence. Men need to learn the laws
of nature and put themselves in harmony with
them.
Then again, this lack of knowledge becomes
a source of evil in that it keeps us from our
highest attainment. It does more, it dooms us
to partial failure. The strife which Paracel-
sus speaks of is a “blind and endless one.” It
is not One waged by a person with full wis-
dom and knowledge. His failure, in so far as
he was a failure, was due to ignorance. Sqr-,
dello speaks of ; : :"... ::" ::::
e tº e
* @ • * * *
.
º * > e
Ioo Fundamental Religious Principles
:
Evil, the scheme by which, thro’ Ignorance,
Good labors to exist.”
We can never do the greatest work until we
learn to use the forces which God has given us
for our assistance. When these forces are
known and their laws are followed, then many
of the present natural evils will be turned into
blessings. This, it seems, is what is meant by
the sublime expression of the musician :
The evil is null, is naught, 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, a per-
fect round.”
Still again this ignorance is a source of evil,
in that it blinds man to the real results of life.
He looks at the present rather than the future.
He fails to see that this evil is transient, that
it passes away like a cloud. It may obscure
the Orb for a moment; but it is no orb itself,
and hence must pass. God looks not at the
present; he cares not for time; for, since he
himself is eternal, only that which is eternal
is vital to him.
:
:
:
;
“Söğlio.3 II. 179. “Abt Vogler," V. 173.
*
g
In Browning’s Poetry. IOI
Yet since Earth's good proved good—
Incontrovertibly
Worth loving—I understood
How evil—did mind descry
Power’s object to end pursued—
Were haply as cloud across
Good’s orb, no orb itself:
Mere mind—were it found at loss
Did it play the tricksy elf
And from life’s gold purge the dross?”
As Browning stands in the presence of Guer-
cino's angel spreading her soft wings above
the head of the child which she holds in keep-
ing, he longs for a perfect rest which the angel
of God alone can give. If only this angel
would place her hands gently upon his head
and smooth away the cares of life which dis-
tort his vision of God; if she would only sweep
away the clouds which shut out a perfect
knowledge of God; if by her agency his eyes
might be made to see as God sees, then how
different would life appear.
How soon all worldly wrong would be repaired
I think how I should view the earth and skies
And sea, when once again my brow was bared
After thy healing, with such different eyes.
*Reverie,” XII. 262.
Io2 Fundamental Religious Principles
O world, as God has made it! All is beauty:
And knowing this, is love, and love is duty.
What further may be sought for or declared?”
If man could just lift the veil which hides the
future; if from the mountain tops of the far-
distant ages he could look on these evils of
the present, how very different all would be!
He could then see them in the light of their re-
Sults, and not be prejudiced by their joy or
sorrow. He could see them in relation to God,
and recognize the fact that they were only tran-
sient and not lasting or eternal. The whole
of life, with its joys and sorrows, would blend
into one harmony and would lead upward to
God.
Over the ball of it,
Peering and prying,
How I see all of it,
Life there, outlying !
Roughness and Smoothness,
Shine and defilement,
Grace and uncouthness:
One reconcilement.
All's lend-and-borrow
Good, see, wants evil,
*“The Guardian-Angel,” IV. I28.
In Browning’s Poetry. IO3
Joy demands sorrow,
Angel weds devil!”
Taken, then, in the sweep of eternity, in com-
parison with everlasting principles, in relation
to God's eternal purpose, natural evil is a tran-
sient quantity. Of course to the individual
at the present it is a vital and real thing. It
must be, else its purposes would be lost. Of
this we will speak more definitely later on.
The problem of moral evil is somewhat more
difficult. In biblicat language it is the trans-
gression of law. Law would probably mean,
if rightly interpreted, the rules of conduct laid
down in revelation and approved by conscience,
or those rules dictated by conscience even if
omitted in revelation. But moral law has
often been made a more arbitrary thing by the
Church. It has been made a matter of author-
ity, and the transgression of that authorized
code has been called sin, without regard to
whether or not reason and conscience approved.
Under such a system, sin had little reference
to voluntariness of action. Done deliberately
“Pisgah-Sights,” IX. 203.
IO4 Fundamental A'eligious Principles
or not, in ignorance or in the light of full
knowledge, if a deed crossed this authority it
was called sin. The devil has been made re-
sponsible for most of the sin of the world, in
that he constantly persuades men to take the
wrong way rather than the right. A few peo-
ple of Browning's time believed that the devil
did more than persuade men; he forced them,
so that “all their striving turned to sin.” Be-
sides, much was made of sin which came to
man by imputation. By Adam all sinned, and
a penalty was demanded and must be paid.
It will be readily understood that Browning
did not accept many of these views. To the
time-worn question, Why does God permit the
devil to live? he gave a decided answer. In
one of his latest poems, “Mihrab Shah,” the
question is seriously asked as to whether ma-
lignity defeats beneficence; or in other words,
Did the devil create evil? But the thought is
strongly and in all seriousness put aside. Who,
then, is the author of sin? Man, and man
alone. Not man in a generic sense, but in the
individual sense. Of the fall of Adam, in its
theological sense, the poet made nothing; but
In Browning’s Poetry. IO5
he certainly believed in the possibility of a
constant falling on the part of Adam's poster-
ity. The immortality of the race was a mat-
ter of small concern to him compared with the
immortality of the individual man. Man is a
free moral agent upon whom is placed the re-
sponsibility of good and evil, and each man
must decide for himself which he will choose.
God, whose pleasure brought
Man into being, stands away
As it were a handbreadth off, to give
Room for the newly-made to live,
And use his gifts of brain and heart,
Given, indeed, but to keep forever.”
The sin of Adam, then, is not imputed to the
succeeding generations. The sins of the fa-
thers can only be visited upon the children of
the third and fourth generations by the simple
law of heredity. It is true we do find in a few
poems conventional expressions of the “flesh
being eaten up with sin”; of the soul being
“knit around as with a charm of sin”; of an
“indulgence ripening the inborn germs of sin
*“Christmas Eve,” IV. 295.
Ioë Fundamental Ateligious Principles
*
to strength”; but these references do not show
the real trend of the author’s mind. Even
the Pope, when he considers the selfishness and
meanness of his priests, bursts forth with right-
eous indignation:
The fault, the obduracy to good,
Lies not with the impracticable stuff
Whence man is made, his very nature's fault.**
Man's nature is not made of cold, passionless
ice which the moon cannot melt, nor is it made
of stone which the sun cannot warm into
bloom, with neither ice nor stone to blame;
But it can melt, that ice, can bloom, that stone.”
We are free, and the essence of sin consists in
the very fact that we do choose that which is
wrong. When we transgress law ignorantly
we may bring down evil upon our heads, but
it can never be charged to us as sin. A
Camel-Driver says most emphatically that “ig-
norance which sins is safe.” Sin, then, is not
a transgression of an arbitrary code; it can
hardly be said to be a specific act at all; it is
rather the spirit of the action. To Browning
“The Pope,” VII. 210. “Ibid., VII. 210.
In Browning’s Poetry. Io7
the dangerous thing was not the single deed, it
was the spirit which dominated the life. That
alone has the quality of sin or righteousness
which proceeds from our vital being.
'Tis not what man Does which exalts him, but what
man Would do ſº."
Goodness does not consist in abstaining from
a certain number of proscribed things; its chief
commandment is not, “Thou shalt not.” It is
rather a real growth, an active element, a posi-
tive quality, whose vital command is, “Thou
shalt be.” With all his might we find the poet
fighting against the idea of a negative virtue.
Black—present, past, and future, interspersed
With blanks, no doubt, which simple folk style Good
Because not Evil.”
No life was considered an example of piety
which merely abstained from doing certain
things considered wrong. On the other hand,
one of the greatest sins a man could commit
was to lack decisive life. No sharper criticism
of inactivity has been uttered than “The Statue
and the Bust,” which closes with these lines:
*Saul,” IV. 84. **A Bean-Stripe,” XII. 46.
IO8 Fundamental Areligious Principles
And the sin I impute to each frustrate ghost
Is—the unlit lamp and the ungirt loin,
Though the end in sight was a vice, I say.”
To do the thing which is proscribed may be a
sin, but to do a proper thing with an evil spirit
is worse, and to be negative is worst of all.
Browning commends the young Duchess who
runs away from her custom-bound and conven-
tionalizing husband, not because she thought
the marriage vow was wanting in sacredness,
but because it was better for her to flee and
have life than to live with a man to whom her
heart was not married and never could be.
Many other such poems as this have brought
down upon him the condemnation of the the-
ological critics. He has been charged with
having a surface idea of sin. “Sin as inter-
preted by Browning,” says Wilson, “is not
the kind of sin that the Bible proscribes, that
the law of God legislates against.” It seems
evident, however, that even the casual reader
of Browning would find him to be no easy-
going temporizer. He is rather the apostle of
a strenuous life. One has called him the
“The Statue and the Bust,” IV. 274
In Browning’s Poetry. IO9
“Poet militant, the Prophet of struggling man-
hood.” He called for a positive life, for a
fight against all sin, and he surely would not
have done this had he thought it a delusion.
Miss Scudder has said of him: “Sin is so in-
tense a fact to Browning that it turns him
dramatist and furnishes all his best motifs.
His poetry is simply an arena where men fight
wickedness within and without.”
Those who think that he believes sin to be a
delusion must have confused his thought of
natural evil with his thought of this specific
evil. He does say that natural evil will vanish.
It is only a shadow. It arises out of limita-
tions, and when man has advanced to perfec-
tion those limitations will be removed. He
also hopes with a strong hope that men in the
process of moral evolution will at last reach
that stage of perfection where they will no
longer choose that which is evil, and in this
way sin itself will vanish. But both natural
and moral evil are intense realities So long as
they have any power over man. Whatever
they may be in the future they are vital to men
now, and men must fight against them. Just
'IIo Fundamental Religious Principles
here is the fact that makes evil unreal. . It is
the Overcoming of it, the growth beyond and
above it. Evil will never vanish so long as
man has not put it beneath his feet. It does
not help him to have no personal devil and by
his own misconduct become the devil of his
own destruction. It means nothing to him
that evil is only a shadow so long as it darkens
his life and keeps him from being his higher
self. If Browning hoped that sin would some
time vanish from the world, he recognized that
the possibility of sin would always remain so
long as man remained a free agent. -
It has been further said of Browning that
his easy-going conception of sin led him to
condone it in life, and even at times to incite
men to sin. One can hardly understand how
a careful student of Browning could make such
a statement. We are aware of the fact that
the priest in “The Ring and the Book” is made
to speak of Pompilia as
A soul made weak by its pathetic want
Of just the first apprenticeship to sin.”
*The Book and the Ring,” VII. 320.
In Browning's Poetry. III
A number of Browning's readers have quoted
this as a proof that he upheld the necessity of
sin in the growth of a soul, but the lines fol-
lowing the quotation explain that she was so
innocent she knew not how to protect herself
against ignoble souls. A sin would have
awakened her to the necessity of this, but it
would also have made her Soul its own dead-
liest enemy.
The “Statue and the Bust” and “Fifine at
the Fair” are often taken as proof poems to
show that the poet encouraged men to sin.
Such an interpretation, however, is entirely
false. It does not catch the spirit of the poems
in the least. They are simply a presentation
of a half truth which could not be so forcibly
treated Otherwise. The whole theme of the
first is one of activity, unconventionality, and
of vital feelings, and has otherwise no refer-
ence to any question of sin whatever. That
would have made an entirely different poem.
“Fifine at the Fair” is simply a vent to the
thought of being “frenetic to be free.” It is
not a justification of ballet dancing or of un-
clean living, but a setting forth of a character
112 Fundamental Religious Principles
which had strength enough to do the uncon-
ventional. To be sure, it is only a half truth;
but if we say that a man is not justified in pre-
senting One side of a question without noticing
the other, we condemn many of Christ's own
parables.**
On the other hand, Browning spoke freely
of the fact that virtue was the law of life; and
he strongly believed that the virtuous life was
the happiest: .
Yet self-mistrusting, should man bear himself,
Most assured on what now concerns him most,-
The law of his own life, the path he prints,
Which law is virtue and not vice, I say.”
Sin was something hideous in itself, and terri-
Sle in its results. There could be no stronger
Jº of the hatefulness of sin to Browning
than the two pictures of Guido and Pompilia
which he has drawn for us. The one repre-
sents sin and its retribution, the other purity
and its exaltation. That sin sometimes did
awaken men from their indifference he held
was true, but this thought must be left for an-
other chapter.
*Cf. Matt. xiii. 44. *The Pope,” VII. 216.
In Browning’s Poetry. II.3
If, then, sin is so hateful, and God knew
that some men would choose it, why did he not
make a world where no such choice could be
possible? The answer to this can be found in
a number of poems. Man is a moral being,
and in order that he may be such, he must be
allowed freedom to choose. If there is no
choice, then there is no morality attached to the
action. To have made a world where there
was no choice, where all was good, would have
lifted the whole creation out of the realm of
moral life. We have the picture of such a
world in “Rephan.” Everything there is per-
fect. There can be no change, for any change
would be for the worse. Man, or rather, be-
ings, there, have no desire. They are not even
moral beings, for there is no choice. They
languish in dead contentment without growth
or life. The same thing would be true if God
should force all men to be what we would now
call moral. If they were forced they would
not be moral, even though the things done, the
thoughts entertained, were ever so perfect in
themselves. We can have no such thing as a
forced morality.
8
II4 Fundamental /ēeligious Principles
Who speaks of man, then, must not sever
Man's very elements from man,
Saying, “But all is God’s”—whose plan
Was to create man and then leave him
Able, his own word saith, to grieve him,
But able to glorify him too,
As a mere machine could never do,
That prayed or praised, all unaware
Of its fitness for aught but praise and prayer,
Made perfect as a thing of course.”
Again it may be asked, Why did not God
make sin of such a nature that man would
know it was bad and absolutely so, and hence
would not choose it? The answer to this is
practically the same as before. The Chris-
tian speaker in “Easter Day” says that faith,
in order to be, must be mixed with doubt.
Otherwise it is no longer faith, but knowledge.
If a man knew absolutely that a certain action
would bring a rich reward and another action
would bring him much sorrow, he of course
would choose the former. But it would not be
moral.
'Tis well averred,
A scientific faith’s absurd,
Frustrates the very end 'twas meant
To serve.**
*Christmas. Eve,” IV. 295. “Easter Day,” IV, 331.
An Browning’s Poetry. II5
Since a moral being is the highest of all con-
ceivable things, it is necessary that man have
a chance to choose. This is not So when a
man knows absolutely the result of all ac-
tion. The non-Christian man in “Easter
Day” claims that the whole trouble is with
belief: * - . . . .
--.... Could I believe once thoroughly,
The rest were simple. What? Am I
An idiot, do you think, La beast?
Prove to me, only that the least
Command of God is God's indeed,
And what injunction shall I need
To pay obedience? -
. cannot I compute,
Weigh loss and gain together, suit
My actions to the balance drawn?”
We can readily see that this action would be a
mere bargaining. Fancy, in the dialogue of
“La Saisiaz,” brings the same argument. Each
moment spent here in life is just laying up so
much gain or loss for the future life. To this,
Reason answers that it is liberty of doing evil
which alone gives good, grace. * -
“Easter Day,” IV. 328, 329.
II6 Fundamental Ateligious Principles
Once lay down the law, with Nature's simple “Such
effects succeed
Causes such, and heaven or hell depends upon man’s
earthly deed
Just as Surely as depends the straight or else the
crooked line
On his making point meet point or with or else with-
out incline,”—
Thenceforth neither good nor evil does man, doing
what he must.*
It is the constant struggle for the truth, the
constant fear lest one shall not do the best
and attain the highest, that lends moral qual-
ity to all man's action. It is the doubt that
gives us assurance that we are moral beings.
With me, faith means perpetual unbelief
Kept quiet like the snake 'neath Michael's foot
Who stands calm just because he feels it writhe.”
Evil which is absolutely black gives no chance
for choice. No man will take that which is
absolutely hateful. It is the evil which may
have an attendant good that man is tempted
to take. In fact, it may be doubted whether
any man ever takes any course of action in
*La Saisiaz,” XI. 99.
*Bishop Blougram's Apology,” V. 69.
In Browning's Poetry. 117
which he sees only evil. But precisely this
deciding between that which is essentially good
and that which is only momentarily good is
the means which man has of growth. If he
is robbed of this possibility of choice, then he
is no longer a moral agent.
To have made evil, then, of such a nature
that man would not and could not desire it,
would have been the same as forcing man to
be virtuous, which is a contradiction. We do
not choose between things absolutely foreign to
our nature, hence it was morally impossible
for God to make sin of the nature implied.
One is aware of the fact that just at this
point Browning's philosophy breaks down to a
certain extent. If doubt is necessary to faith,
and partial ignorance is necessary to choice and
hence to moral life, then the perfect being
whose development has brought him to full
knowledge would be beyond both faith and
moral qualities. This dilemma arose in the
mind of the author from the fact that how-
ever we consider evil, we fail to gain a final
Solution. If it is a real entity, then it can nev-
er be entirely overcome, and hence good can
I 18 Aſundamental Ateligious Principles
never triumph. This would be death to opti-
mism. If it be unreal, then there is no need
to fight it, and hence all moral life ceases. Ei-
ther alternative ends by destroying moral life.
But we must choose to believe one alternative,
or else say we cannot know. Browning says
the latter. Knowledge cannot be exact. The
intellect is no sure guide. So much the more
is this so to Browning, since absolute knowl-
edge, as we have just seen, would in itself de-
stroy all faith and all moral action. We, how-
ever, have never been able to see how the poet
can be supposed to discard knowledge ab-
solutely. If we have not perfect knowledge,
we, at least, have a knowledge which is ever
becoming complete. Likewise an ideal life has
never yet been realized, but it is ever realizing.
Though the possibility of sin is never absent,
evil is ever becoming less real. Man, though
he never will have attained, is ever attain-
ing. All is progression toward a perfect state,
though it may never reach that perfection.
The origin and nature of natural evil, then,
is that it is a matter of maladjustment; it arises
out of ignorance and limitation, and hence will
In Browning's Poetry. II9
some time vanish. Since these limitations are
of the very essence of man's nature, they are
given by God, and hence even that part of nat-
ural evil which arises therefrom is to be attrib-
uted to God. God is entirely responsible for
the possibility of moral evil, for he has made
man free. Man is responsible for the fact that
sin has been actualized in the world. Sin is
real and destructive, and must be fought and
overcome. It will always remain a possibility,
even if not finding expression in the deeds or
thoughts of man.
CHAPTER V.
THE PURPOSE OF EVIL.
To every man there must be a supreme real-
ity with respect to which he judges life. With-
out such a supreme reality, there can be no
such thing as a philosophy of life. Hence the
first essential to an understanding of that phi-
losophy is to discover for ourselves what this
principle is. In the first chapter we tried to
set forth Browning's belief in God, as a God
of love. All life is to be interpreted in the
light of a spiritual principle, and that principle
is love. It remains here to notice very briefly
in what manner he presents this love as a solu-
tion of the problem of life. J.ove is the point
of contact between God and man. It is the
full perfection of God, the partial attainment
of man. It makes no difference what else may
happen to a man, he has gained all if he at-
tains to love. In “Cristina” we are told that
the whole purpose of life is to learn to love.
(120) -

**"--~ --
In Browning’s Poetry. I 2 I
Ages past the soul existed,
Here an age 'tis resting merely,
And hence fleets again for ages,
While the true end, sole and single,
It stops here for is, this love-way,
With some other soul to mingle.”
In a much more philosophic poem we have
practically the same statement:
For life, with all it yields of joy and woe,
And hope and fear, believe the aged friend,-
Is just our chance o’ the prize of learning love,
How love might be, hath been, indeed, and is.”
So supreme is this principle of love that the
possession of it by man would make him great-
er than God if God did not possess it.
For the loving worm, within its clod,
Were diviner than a 10veless god
Amid his worlds, I will dare to say.”
Even all pain in the world is meant to develop
this love, and as a man attains to a more per-
fect possession of it he is said to be God-like.
This “dread machinery of sin and sorrow” is
intended
“Cristina,” IV. 26.
*“A Death in the Desert,” V. I90.
*“Christmas Eve,” IV. 295.
122 Fundamental Areligious Principles
To make him love in turn and be beloved,
Creative and self-sacrificing too,
And thus eventually God-like.”
Love is the eternal thing in the world which
man's neglect cannot lessen and the forces of
evil cannot destroy.
Be love less or more
In the heart of man, he keeps it shut
Or opes it wide, as he pleases, but
Love's sum remains what it was before.”
How, then, are we to reconcile this princi-
ple of eternal love with the existence of al-
most universal evil? If there is no purpose
in the evil from which man suffers, or if this
purpose could be accomplished by some other
means, then love is not the spiritual principle
by which all life may be interpreted, and God
is not a God of love. If, however, Browning
can show that God has a wise purpose in plac-
ing man in the midst of evil, and if this pur-
pose cannot be otherwise fulfilled so far as our
finite minds can see, then we must allow him
to retain his conception of a loving Father in
spite of the fact of sorrow, pain, and evil.
“The Pope,” VII. 205. “Christmas Eve,” IV. 296.
In Browning’s Poetry. I 23
This question was constantly before Brown-
ing, and throughout his poetry he was trying
to solve it. He was sure that evil had a pur-
pose in the world.
Let the sage
Concede a use to evil, though there starts
Full many a burgeon thence, to disengage
With thumb and finger lest it spoil the yield
Too much of good’s main tribute 1"
And again :
Suppose the Gardener of Man’s ground
Plants, for a purpose, side by side with good,
Evil."
Browning conceived the purpose of evil to be
threefold: to teach knowledge of good by con-
trast; to arouse the feeling of sympathy; and
to serve as a means of development. John
Fiske has a most admirable essay on the “Mys-
tery of Evil,” in which he brings out quite
clearly that all consciousness is the result of
incessant change:
In every stream of human consciousness that we
call a soul, each second of time witnesses thousands
of infinitely small changes, in which one fleeting group
of pulsations in the primordial mind-stuff gives way to
“Bernard de Mandeville," XII. 83. "Ibid., XII. 82.
124 Fundamental Religious Principles
another and different but equally fleeting group. Each
group is unlike its immediate predecessor. The ab-
sence of difference would be continuation, and continua-
tion means stagnation, blankness, negation, death. That
ceaseless flutter in which the quintessence of conscious
life consists is kept up by the perpetual introduction of
the relations of likeness and unlikeness.”
Just as consciousness is kept up by incessant
change, and change can come only by variety,
or likeness and unlikeness, so each particular
state of consciousness must be superinduced
by likeness and unlikeness in the superinducing
agents. If there were no variety, there would
be no consciousness. Thus we know cold be-
cause we have experienced heat; we know
black because we have seen white; we are con-
scious of sound because we have known si-
lence. If one lived in the midst of an incessant
cannonade, there would be no consciousness of
Sound because there would be no contrast with
silence. If one never had any color save black
presented to him, he would have no conception
of color, for there would be no contrast. This
is the law of counter-relativity, or, as it is
sometimes called, the law of contrast, on which
“Through Nature to God,” p. 32.
In Browning's Poetry. I 25
the whole of our knowledge is founded. With-
out it we could attain to no knowledge, we
would be without consciousness, the whole
world would be one undisturbed Sameness.
Now we find this law of philosophy applied by
Browning to all the higher states of conscious-
ness. His application is as courageous as it
is beautiful. Even such an exalted passion of
the Soul as love, which he calls the best of all
good, must be learned through experience of,
and contrast with, hatred, or else a lower form
of love. -
And I yearned for no sameness but difference
In thing and thing, that should shock my sense
With a want of worth in them all, and thence
Startle me up, by an Infinite
Discovered above and below me—height
And depth alike to attract my flight,
Repel my descent: by hate taught love.”
Paracelsus, in that sublime flight with which
he closes his life, sees the real truth of
Love—not serenely pure,
But strong from weakness, like a chance-sown plant
Which, cast on stubborn soil, puts forth changed buds
And softer stains, unknown in happier climes.”
• *.
* • e.
º © * . *
so
“Rephan,” XII. 259. “Paracelsus,” J. .160;
• 3. . º, : - :
°s * º
I26 Fundamental Religious Principles
Even faith must be known by placing opposite,
doubt. The old Pope, looking upon a church
in which faith had dropped into a lethargic
state, asks if he shall wish back the first thrills
of dawn in the Christian era, when doubt and
persecution made faith strong.
What if it be the mission of that age
My death will usher into life, to shake
This torpor of assurance from our creed,
Reintroduce the doubt discarded, bring
That formidable danger back, we drove
Long ago to the distance and the dark.”
Blougram with his opportunist view of 11fe is,
nevertheless, made to give expression to many
vital truths.
Here’s my box—
I need the excitation of a pinch
Threatening the torpor of the inside-nose
Nigh on the imminent sneeze that never comes.
“Leave it in peace” advise the simple folk:
Make it aware of peace by itching-fits,
Say I—let doubt occasion still more faith.”
Every man's knowledge of himself comes
from a comparison with what he is not. Suc-
*“The Pope,” VII. 219.
:::::Bishop B1qugram's Apology,” V. 69, 70.
©
e - e e
&
* ...”
º
In Browning's Poetry. I27
cess springs out of failure, joy is known only
when we have experienced pain, peace is born
alone out of the din of a hard-fought battle.
Now, Browning did not hesitate to carry this
thought to its logical conclusion, which is,
that good cannot be known save by comparison
with evil. If there be no evil, there could be
no consciousness of good, since every state of
consciousness must be produced by variety in
the facts of which the mind takes notice. This,
however, could not be if only an absolute good
existed. The very fact that we can conceive
of an absolute good is proof of the existence of
evil or, as Browning puts it, the reverse:
Want was the promise of supply, defect
Ensured completion.*
Wherever good exists evil will be found by its
side.
What know I
But proof were gained that every growth of good
Sprang consequent on evil's neighborhood 2"
The aged John says:
“Francis Furini,” XII. 133.
“Bernard de Mandeville,” XII. 82.
I 28 Fundamental Religious Principles
And, as I saw the sin and death, even so
See I the need yet transiency of both,
The good and glory consummated thence.*
And again the same thought is found in “Pi-
etro Of Abano”:
Fair and Good are products
(So he said) of Foul and Evil; one must bring to
pass the other.
Just as poisons grow drugs, steal through sundry odd
ducts
Doctors name, and ultimately issue safe and changed.”
If there were no evil we could not know
good, and vice vérsa; and this would mean
that man could make no choice, since he would
be robbed of the power of discrimination, and
the world would be non-moral. Now, a non-
moral world would be a low order of creation
as compared with the one we have, with all the
evil in it. Nor can we take this evil to be un-
real, as it certainly is not so to us, though in
its final essence it may be.
Though wrong were right,
Could we but know—still wrong must needs seem
wrong
“A Death in the Desert,” V. 190.
*Pietro of Abano,” XI. Io9.
In Browning’s Poetry. I29
To do right's service, prove men weak or strong,
Choosers of evil or of good.”
We have referred before to “Pisgah-
Sights,” where we are told that even though
all good and evil blend in a perfect harmony,
yet it would be unwise for us to see this, else
we would cease to struggle. -
Could I but live again,
Twice my life over,
Would I once strive again?”
The preceding chapter pointed out that so
long as man is overcome by evil, just so long
it will remain for him an intense reality.
Growth beyond it, and power over it, will
alone make it unreal to each individual. Its
whole purpose would be destroyed if it should
take from us our spirit of progression. What
would be the good of having a mountain to
climb if one possessed neither power nor spirit
for the climbing? To what end would a mere
semblance of evil be placed before us? There
would then be no incentive to fight. Yet, evil
cannot be eternal, else it would be useless to
“Francis Furini,” XII. 136.
*Pisgah-Sights,” IX. 204,
9
130 Fundamental Religious Principles
struggle against it. We must see the intense
reality of evil at the present as it affects every
individual, and at the same time know that we
must Overcome it that it may vanish in the
future. In the process of evolution, Brown-
ing hoped there would come a time when evil
would not be positive evil, but only a lower
form of good. This would serve the purpose
of bringing good into the realm of man's con-
sciousness by contrast.
As truth successively takes shape, one grade above
Its last presentment, tempts as it were truth indeed
Revealed this time; so tempts, till we attain to read
The signs aright, and learn, by failure, truth is forced
To manifest itself through falsehood.”
If we had no other purpose of evil presented,
this would be sufficient to justify its existence,
for without it we could have no moral world.
Browning, however, found further justification
for the existence of evil.
Probably no thought has stirred the world
more during the last half century, and put more
philanthropic organizations in motion, than
that which is summed up in the term “Broth-
erhood of Man.” The most vital poetry, the
*Fifine at the Fair.” IX. 162.
In Browning’s Poetry. I31
most appealing sermons, the truest fiction of
this period, have been shot through with this
idea. The conception itself is based upon the
fact that men have a common heritage and a
common destiny. It is the force which touch-
es every life, that brings all together. Brown-
ing had little to say about this feeling of broth-
erhood as applied to the whole race; he did not
often think in terms of whole classes of society;
he dwelt little with the masses; he spent his
thought on the individual. But he did have
much to say about the bond which ties one in-
dividual to another. This bond is sympathy,
which is a most pregnant term. It means far
more than a simple pity; it embraces the whole
range of those feelings which bring beings to—
gether, from the lowest fellowship with men up
to the highest and most exalted of all ties, har-
mony in thought with God. This sympathy
can only exist where there is something to
elicit it; and suffering serves this purpose.
Tell me, now !
What were the bond 'twixt man and man, dost judge,
Pain once abolished P” -
**Mihrab Shah,” XII. 22.
I32 Fundamental Religious Principles
Francis Furini asks:
How were pity understood
Unless by pain Pº
And La Saisiaz expects an affirmative answer
to the question: -
Needs there groan a world in anguish just to teach
us sympathy P*
º
A certain ruling Shah has the sympathy of all
his subjects, not because he rules well, for his
power commands no respect; not because he
possesses a strong mind, for he can scarcely
count his fingers; not because he is kind, for
his insolence is notorious; but because he suf-
fers, he is on the same plane with his subjects
and wins their sympathy. The lyric to this
poem puts the thought lightly and beautifully:
So were it rightly, so shall it bel
Only, while earth we pace together
For the purpose apportioned you and me,
Closer we tread for a common tether.”
Paracelsus, the proud but noble searcher
after truth, who despised all human love,
slighted all sympathy of men, had to pass
through many trials, endure many hardships,
*Francis Furini,” XII. 136. **La Saisiaz,” XI. 89.
*Mihrab Shah,” XII. 25.
In Browning's Poetry. I33
and suffer great disappointments, before he
was able to see and meet the love in man’s
soul. Nothing but suffering could have caused
him to call out for sympathy, and in that call
to utter the great truth of his lifelong search.
In the small cell of St. Sebastian’s Hospital,
as the clouds of a long and stormy life clear
away, a transcendent moment of clear vision
comes to his departing Soul. He sees the glory
Of the universe which has in it the immanent
presence of a loving God. He sees that what
he once called hate was only a mask of love;
that men whom he once despised were touched
with nobleness; that their errors were upward
tending. What a wonderful revolution this
suffering has wrought in him Instead of the
proud despiser of friendship, whom we saw
starting out on life's journey, we see him now,
at the close of life, an humble soul, spending
his last moments giving to men the words of
truest counsel, and saying to his old friend with
most perfect tenderness and love:
Festus, let my hand—
This hand, lie in your own, my own true friend lºº
“Paracelsus,” I. 167.
I34. A undamental Ateligious Principles
In the Star Rephan there was no evil, but
all was perfection. There was therefore no
sympathy there, no fellowship. Why should
there be? There was no weary soul to com-
fort, no restless passion to be soothed, no sor-
rowing heart to cheer. Each man was com-
plete within himself, and dwelt apart.
Each rose sole rose in a sphere that spread
Above and below and around—rose-red:
No fellowship, each for itself instead.*
This fact of Suffering as a bond of sympathy
is well illustrated by the attitude of poorer peo-
ple toward each other as compared with the
attitude of the rich. Those who have had
much dealing with the people in the slums af-
firm that there is more milk of human kindness
to be found there than in the upper classes.
This is doubtless due in part to a greater
amount of common suffering. Browning's
folk-poems present the same thought.
But pain is not alone a bond between man
and man. It is a means of love from man
to God. In time of much prosperity man is
often self-complacent and satisfied, forgetting
*Rephan,” XII. 257.
In Browning’s Poetry. I35
the duty he owes to his fellow-man, or the
love for his heavenly Father; but let a great
sorrow come into his life, and his self-centered
spirit is transformed into one of sympathy
for men and love for God. Browning, whose
mind penetrated every emotion of man's na-
ture, felt this most keenly.
Put pain from out the world, what room were left
For thanks to God, for love to Man?”
If all of life were smooth and easy, there would
be no necessity compelling man to seek a high-
er than himself. It is the fact of his own suf-
fering which forces him to cry for help from
One more than human. It is out of the deep
experiences of sorrow and failure that we find
the poor shattered soul in “Pauline” crying:
My God, my God, let me for once look on thee
As though naught else existed, we alone !”
Herein also Browning finds one aspect of the
truth of Christ's suffering. It was a proof of
love. Somehow, we cannot quite know how,
love can only be proved to be the highest
through suffering. It is the final test and in
*Mihrab Shah,” XII. 24. **Pauline,” I. 27.
I36 Fundamental Religious Principles
Some sense the purest essence of love that it
can, does, and must suffer. To meet this suf-
fering in man, which arises out of evil in its
various manifestations, God must show his
Own love through suffering, and thus draw out
the love from man. The necessity for this
manifestation of God’s love has been dwelt on
in the chapter on “The Christ.” The fellow-
ship of suffering which draws men together
and points man to God, this divine passion of
the soul which can alone be brought out by
evil, goes far toward a justification of this
scheme of the world with which we are dealing.
Finally, Browning claims that evil is a spur
to the development of higher life. “The moral
sense grows but by exercise,” and evil is the
obstacle in the overcoming of which our souls
find growth. It is the constant choice between
good and evil that gives our moral muscle
strength. We are “stung to strength through
weakness, strive for good through evil.” It
is this “sting that bids nor sit, nor stand, but
go.” Herein Browning becomes the martial
poet of the centuries. To him all life is a bat-
tlefield, and the enemy marshaled thereon is
In Browning's Poetry. I37
evil. The forces of the enemy are great, its
resources unbounded, but he would not have
the foe less powerful, since it is in conflict with
the mighty that heroic characters are devel-
oped. There is throughout that glad joyous-
ness which characterizes the great soldier. He
is constantly measuring the strength of the Op-
position, never underestimating its power, but
always full of confidence that the victory is
certain. It is no funeral dirge that we find
here, but the paean of the brave as they pass
forward to a desperate fight but sure triumph.
There are only one or two short poems where
the retreat is beaten;” everywhere else the drum
Sounds out a constant rally, and this rally to
battle is necessary.
The Pope, reviewing the history of the
Church, recognizes the fact that ease and too
great success have eaten away the pristine valor
of his followers. The fact that -
No wild beast now prowls round the infant camp :
We have built wall and sleep in city safe,”
*Cf. “A Toccata of Galuppi’s.”
*The Pope,” VII. 219.
I38 Fundamental Religious Principles
has caused the Church to degenerate. The
Overarming Of the knight with silk and gold,
where plain, hard steel would have better
served; the making easy of the Christian life;
the taking away of all conflict, has destroyed
the power of the saints.
But if some earthquake try the towers that laugh
To think they once saw lions rule outside,
And man stand out again, pale, resolute,
Prepared to die—which means alive at last,”
then there will be Christian heroes once again.
Man cannot stand idly by and watch the play
of forces; if he would be heroic, he must buckle
On the armor and plunge into the fight. In all
of Browning's characters one does not recall
a single one that has attained to strength save
through the most desperate conflict. Pompil-
ia, always the Soul of purity, has not strength
at first, but must win it through her long, hard
struggle with the forces of evil. When we
first see Caponsacchi, he is a proud, insolent,
foppish priest. He was taken into the Church
simply for his suave manners and his easy
familiarity with the gayer circle of society.
*“The Pope,” VII. 219, 220.
/n Browning's Poetry. I39
He never would have been a man had there
not come to him a time of great trial. It is
in the midst of the play of forces of good
and evil, where decisions must be made and
thoughts must be put into action, that he finds
a real character. When he rescued Pompilia
from her cruel husband, there was
Power in the air for evil as for good,
Promptings from heaven and hell.”
Was the trial sore?
Temptation sharp 2 Thank God a second time,”
for it is alone because of the temptation Over-
come that he can be called the “warrior-priest,”
the “soldier-Saint.”
Ixion, fighting against the Opposing powers,
attained at height beyond that of Zeus himself.
We cannot but know that the speaker in “Cris-
tiana” is nobler because of the great passion
which flamed in his heart. It is the hour of a
great trial as well as the hour of a struggling
passion that becomes the birthday of Colombe.
This leads to the further statement that it was
not positive evil alone which seemed to devel-
*The Pope,” VII. 183. *Ibid., VII. 199.
I4o Aſundamental Religious Principles
Op, but even the relative evil which arose out
of imperfection, and caused greatest pain. The
more highly the life is developed the greater
becomes its yearning, and rightly so. To be
satisfied would be death; to look upward no
longer would be to lose all power of growth.
This constant dissatisfaction shows man how
much of the divine there is in him. By the
ever reaching upward man grows like the di-
vine of his aspirations. But the growing soul
never finds rest; rather it cries,
Only I discern—
Infinite passion, and the pain
Of finite hearts that yearn.”
Paracelsus's great charm of character comes
from this insatiable thirst of his soul, which
assures us he must succeed. Not all the fail-
ures that his life could meet, nor all the dis-
couragements that beset his way, could destroy
the success of his quest, so long as he held this
lamp of God close to his breast. Unrest in the
heart of the inhabitant of Rephan set his soul
growing.
*Two in the Campagna,” IV. Ioff.
In Browning’s Poetry. I4I
When the trouble grew in my pregnant breast
A voice said, “So wouldst thou strive, not rest?
Burn and not smoulder, win by worth,
Not rest content with a wealth that’s dearth?’”
The question comes just here whether sin
develops character. If so, would Browning
claim sin to be necessary to character? We
have mentioned in another connection that
many readers of his poetry believe he does up-
hold sin. After going through all his poetry
with this thought in mind, we must say that we
cannot find any references which sustain such
a view. It may be necessary to quote again
the one regarding Pompilia, which, however,
needs no further comment:
A soul made weak by its pathetic want
Of just the first apprenticeship to sin
Which thenceforth makes the sinning soul secure
From all foes save itself, souls' truliest foe,
Since egg turned snake needs fear no serpentry.**
This certainly is no defense of sin. There is
a place in the Pope's speech where sin and sor-
row are said to be joined in the development
*“Rephan,” XII. 259, 260.
“The Book and the Ring,” VII. 320.
I42 Fundamental Religious Principles
of character,” but this does not represent the
real attitude of the Pope toward sin. There
is also a passage in “Paracelsus” where the
speaker thinks he may love God better because
of sin;” but if this sin is that of his own life,
it refers simply to experience and not to trans-
gression. In either case it is not the sin, but
God's mercy, which creates the greater love.
Of the young man who makes his confession
to Pauline we are told that sin has destroyed
his soul. After he had indulged in unclean-
ness and sin of all kinds, he confesses
I would lose
All this gay mastery of mind, to sit
Once more with them, trusting in truth and love
And with an aim, not being what I am.**
The outright sinning soul does not grow.
Sin did not develop Ottima or Sebald or Chiap-
pino. Guido and his accomplices are damned
by it. It causes a great tragedy without com-
pensation in “A Blot in the 'Scutcheon.” It
universally acts as a blight. Browning, how-
ever, does say that it may awaken a soul.
*The Pope,” VII. 205. “Paracelsus,” I. 157.
*“Pauline,” I. 4.
In Browning’s Poetry. I43
Thus in the little poem “The Statue and the
Bust” we are told that a sin will serve as well
for a test as anything else. Paracelsus tells
us that sin causes a rude shock at times; and
in various other poems sin may bring a char-
acter to the realization of weakness. But this
is neither a defense of sinners nor a palliation
of sin. The possibility of sin is necessary to
the existence of moral beings, but the choosing
of it is neither necessary nor uplifting. On
the other hand, it is the overcoming of the
impulse to sin that makes for character. The
fact that a man sins is proof that he has not
fought a good fight; he has remained passive
before temptation. Evil has not proved a spur
to drive him on to victory, but has become a
canker in his heart eating away the strength
of his being. It is the fight that counts.
When the fight begins within himself,
A man's worth something. God stoops o'er his head,
Satan looks up between his feet—both tug-
He's left, himself, i' the middle: the soul wakes
And grows. Prolong that battle through his life!
Never leave growing till the life to come.”
“Bishop Blougram’s Apology,” V. 70.
I44 Pundamental Religious Principles
When a man loses a battle by giving way to
temptation, he has in so far ruined his soul.
But to him who can overcome, a blessing of
new strength is found in the very fact of the
Struggle. Without it our lives would be pas-
sive and non-moral, and yielding to it we be-
come immoral; neither of which is good.
Why comes temptation but for man to meet
And master and make crouch beneath his foot,
And so be pedestaled in triumph 2 Pray
“Lead us into no such temptations, Lord!”
Yea, but, O Thou whose servants are the bold,
Lead such temptations by the head and hair,
Reluctant dragons, up to who dares fight,
That so he may do battle and have praise!”
Unwillingness to meet this condition of strife
constitutes for Browning the unpardonable
sin. To live is to meet squarely the issues of
life; to fight a good fight; to give the soul full
sweep in its desire to overcome. The thing
to be overcome, whether great or small, makes
little difference. To those souls which acted
in spite of opposition the poet gives unstinted
praise. The Duchess who escaped from her
husband's home, that she might find larger life
“The Pope,” VII, 199.
In Browning's Poetry. I45
in a gypsy camp, did well; for She acted, even
though her act was a violation of conventional
morality. Even the wild leap of Miranda from
the tower is approved. It destroyed his life,
but it proved his soul. It is Caponsacchi as
soldier-saint that we admire, and not as priest.
Our souls are inspired by the picture of the
venerable Pope, just ready to depart this life,
standing armed with Paul's sword as well as
Peter's key, and saying with his last breath,
* I Smite
With my whole strength once more, ere end my part,
Ending, so far as man may, this offense.”
A life that is active, even though it may
blunder, is better than passive innocence.
As it was better, youth
Should strive, through acts uncouth,
Toward making, than repose on aught found made.”
What difference if we do fall sometimes? Is
it not the very fact that we have fallen that
makes us rise to fight better? Is not all walk-
ing a constant effort to overcome our falling?
Is not all progress upward a struggle to over-
“The Pope,” VII. 222.
“Rabbi Ben Ezra,” V, 179.
IO
I46 Aſundamental Ateligious Principles
come an opposite tendency? Growth, and not
stagnation, is the aim of life.
I say that man was made to grow, not stop.”
Man must pass from old to new,
From vain to real, from mistake to fact,
From what once seemed good, to what now proves
|best.”**
Progression is the distinctive work of man.
The beast does not grow. There is no struggle
in his life, no choice between good and evil.
Doubt frets not the maw-crammed beast; care
irks not the crop-full bird. They are of a
lower order. They have not been given the
high privilege of choice. They are complete.
Man partly is and wholly hopes to be.
A spark disturbs our clod;
Nearer we hold of God
Who gives, than of His tribes that take, I must believe.”
Good for the animal kingdom is purely phys-
ical and can find perfection, but goodness for
man is moral and can never be complete. It
is rather the ever-increasing realization of a
divine perfection. Even though perfection
can never actually be ours, if evil speeds us on
“A Death in the Desert,” V. 106. “Ibid., V. 200.
“Rabbi Ben Ezra,” V. 176.
An Arowning’s Poetry. I47
our way toward that high ideal, it is well. If
this earth is just a place for learning how to
realize goodness, then it is by no means a fail-
ure. We can readily bear the pangs of Sor-
row for a few years, if thereby we gain mo-
mentum in our movement toward God.
Life is probation and the earth no goal,
But starting-point of man : compel him strive,
Which means, in man, as good as reach the goal.”
Over and over again we are told that life is
but a pupil’s place. It is not the end of all,
it cannot be.
There is no reconciling wisdom with a world dis-
traught,
Goodness, with triumphant evil, power with failure in
the aim,
If you bar me from assuming earth to be a pupil's
place.”
But if this be assumed—as indeed it was—
I acquiesce
In this present life as failure, count misfortune's worst
assaults
Triumph, not defeat, assured that loss so much the
more exalts
Gain about to be.”
“The Pope,” VII. 207.
“La Saisiaz,” XI. 86. “Ibid., XI, 91.
I48 Fundamental Religious Principles
We are told in “Abt Vogler” that every
thought worth while, every power gained here,
every note of melody which has gone forth,
shall await us in the future. More than this,
all that we have willed or even hoped or
dreamed of good shall be stored up for our
enjoyment in the life beyond. How else shall
this be, save as all these forces of the divine
find lodgment in our character?
I search but cannot see
What purpose serves the soul that strives, or world it
tries
Conclusions with, unless the fruit of victories
Stay, one and all, stored up and guaranteed its own
Forever, by some mode whereby shall be made known
The gain of every life. Death reads the title clear—
What each soul for itself conquered from out things
here.”
Earth is a place of training; and the develop-
ment of a Soul, as we are told in the preface
to “Sordello,” is the only subject worthy of
study. The discord of life's music rushes in
that we may prize the harmony more. The
pause comes that singing may issue forth with
greater beauty. Freed from the battle with
*Fifine at the Fair.” IX. IO6.
In Browning's Poetry. I49
sin, we will, with a strength gained through
conflict, rejoice the more in the higher pro-
gression after we leave this earth.
If, then, we are right in our interpretation,
Browning says that evil makes man conscious
of good through comparison with evil, either
positive or relative, and hence arises the pos-
sibility of moral action through the fact of
choice between these two. It teaches man sym-
pathy for all mankind. He could never know
that passion of brotherliness which it is possible
for all men to know, were it not for evil. Nor
could he find his way up to God, if the divinity
of suffering had not led him on. Indeed, he
would not even know love, the highest of all
good, were it not for the existence of evil in
the form of a lower love. But what is more,
after he knew of love he could not experience
it save when taught by suffering. Evil has
made him yearn for something more than his
present attainment. It has made him go be-
yond his dead life to better life. It has urged
him to a desperate struggle which alone can
give strength. The burning thirst for life
which it has awakened has projected him on a
150 /ºundamental Ateligious Principles
career of endless progress which shall never
find a resting place, though it shall ever ap-
proach nearer and nearer to the divine. All
this being true, can we not find a reconciliation
of evil with a principle of divine love? Be-
cause God is love, he has made the earth just
as it is. The purposes of life could not he real-
ized without evil, and hence we can come back
to an all-wise, all-powerful, all-loving Father.
So long as man sees that evil is evil, hates it
and fights it, a philosophy of optimism will be
possible. All cannot be bad so long as this is
true. For the very fact that man hates evil is
the surest condemnation of the theory of the
pessimist. This hatred of evil could only come
from an exalted moral sense, and this moral
sense cannot be the creation of man's Own
heart. Man has no power to create and
change, else he would change this order of
evil, which he hates. But if God created this
moral sense in man, and has not a correspond-
ing feeling, the creature becomes more noble
than the Creator, which cannot be. Hence, in
spite of the fact that we may not be able to
see the full meaning of this mystery, we are
In Browning’s Poetry. I5 I
brought again to the conclusion that love is the
ruling principle of the world.
Should not the heart beat once “How good to live and
1earn ?”
Not once beat “Praise be Thine !”
I see the whole design,
I, who saw power, see now love perfect too;
Perfect I call Thy plan;
Thanks that I was a man |
Maker, remake, complete, I trust what Thou shalt
do 150
Thus Browning's message was one of Opti-
mism, an optimism based on the essential di-
vinity of man: divinity, to be sure, in its forma-
tive stage, but capable of endless development.
When Browning's logic ended in nescience, he
fell back upon this supreme fact of the divine
in man's nature. It was because of this in-
trinsic value of man that it was worth while to
fight, for victory was ahead. A message of
struggle and hope was the great need of
Browning's time. Lack of faith, and the
breaking down of traditional belief, had de-
stroyed hope and paralyzed the arm of many a
moral soldier. To restore confidence in the
“Rabbi Ben Ezra,” V. 177.
I52 Fundamental Ateligious Principles
order of the universe, to make man see his real
dignity, to make clear the goal toward which
man's progress tends, and to point out a sure
way of reaching that goal—these were the su-
preme needs of the time.
This fourfold message Browning combined
in his doctrine of optimism. The order of the
universe is justified because love is the Supreme
principle of life, and behind this principle is a
God who rules in power, wisdom, and love.
The Incarnation was an essential fact in devel-
oping Browning's thought of a God of Love.
Through this fact he was able to attain unto
an assurance of the divine benevolence; and it
was this benevolence which completed the proc-
ess of bringing God into the realm of personal-
ity, and made him a real God. For personal-
ity was so supreme a fact with Browning that
man possessing its attributes would be greater
than any power without will or love.
Herein also is seen the dignity of man, that
while he has in him the elements of divinity
he is not absorbed into the divine, but stands
forth as an individual. On the other hand, that
there is a divine principle in man's nature, such
In Browning’s Poetry. I53
as is typified in the Christ-life, can never be
doubted so long as man hates evil and strug-
gles against it. It is this very divinity in man
that makes him conscious that he has not yet
attained. The goal of his existence is growth
toward perfection, an eternal becoming. Evil
stings him to become a strain of that perfect
music which swells throughout the universe.
And, finally, the way of attaining this goal is
by the road of struggle and yearning, by the
constant fight of an heroic manhood.
Into an age of doubt Browning came with
his message of God in Christ, solving all ques-
tions. By the side of Carlyle's wail of despair
he sang his poems filled with the note of glad
joyousness. Into a time of moral shrinking and
retreat he brought this bold optimism, inspir-
ing the noble quality of hopeful courage which
delights in the wounds of a hard-won victory.
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 tº
“Rabbi Ben Ezra,” V. 176.


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