Still we may ask, whether all that lies between the soul and God, 'truth inside, and outside, truth also,' is falsehood; for that will include all the manifestations of God, all revelation, all the methods by which man has thought to draw near to God. The answer to this question brings us definitely to the subject of Mr. Browning's hold on Christianity.

It must be owned that if, as a matter of fact, he believes that the events recorded in the Gospels really happened, this is little more than an accidental circumstance: it does not seem to him to be of any real importance whether they did happen or not. In A Death in the Desert,' the question as to the reality of Christ's miracles is, not avoided but, neglected as unimportant. The belief in them certainly was created, and thereby came belief in Christ; but as to their reality, the Apostle does not pronounce :

'I say, that miracle was duly wrought

When, save for it, no faith was possible.

Whether a change were wrought i' the shows o' the world,
Whether the change came from our minds which see

Of shows o' the world so much as and no more

Than God wills for His purpose

I know not; such was the effect.'

But when the further objection arises—

́ ́... The fault was, first of all, in thee,
Thy story of the places, names, and dates,
Where, when and how the ultimate truth had rise,
-Thy prior truth, at last discovered none,
Whence now the second suffers detriment: '

the answer is once more the appeal to the necessity of growth for man :

'Grant this, then 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 :' which clearly leaves it in doubt whether the 'story of the places, names, and dates' may not be all 'vain' and 'mistake.' And the Pope, in The Ring and the Book, justifies this uncertainty even more clearly. He thoroughly believes, he says, the 'tale' of 'love without a limit,' which he finds revealed; but this only seems to apply to the innermost truth, the love revealed by the story, for as to the external facts, he goes on,

whether a fact,

Absolute, abstract, unconditioned truth,

Historic, not reduced to suit man's mind,
Or only truth reverberate, changed, made pass
A spectrum into mind, the narrow eye,--
The same and not the same, else unconceived-
Though quite conceivable to the next grade
Above it in intelligence,-as truth,

Easy to man were blindness to the beast
By parity of procedure,-the same truth.
In a new form, but changed in either case:
What matter so intelligence be filled?

so my heart be struck,

What care I,-by God's gloved hand or the bare.'

Here we see very plainly the influence of Mr. Browning's theory of truth. The only two truths being the soul and God, and between each, falsehood,' the method by which God works upon the soul must be by means of falsehood, or at best, of the shows o' the world.' As they are only shows, 'mere mists,' the question whether any particular combination of them really took place or not is insignificant, and the poet treats it doubtfully and vaguely. In The Two Poets of Croisic indeed, he describes a direct message from God to man as a setting aside of these intermediate shows:

all the universe

Being abolished, all 'twixt God and him-
Earth's praise or blame, its blessing or its curse,
Of one and the same value,-to the brim
Flooded with truth for better or for worse:'

but in the end, as we have seen, he pronounces 'such direct plain truth' impossible, in general, for us; we should become too conscious of the illusion of the common conditions of our life.

Of course, there is nothing new in this acceptance of the inner truth of Christianity along with doubt, or even denial, of the facts of the Gospel history. In Mr. Browning's case, however, we must be careful, first, to take it in connexion with his general view of truth and falsehood, and of the unreality of external things; and secondly, to remember the exceedingly firm hold that he has on the inner truth, or rather on several of the essential truths of Christianity. Mr. Browning deals with the great speculative difficulties of the day, not as if he himself was vitally interested in solving them, but as desirous of helping others, and of affording them an insight into the unity and coherence of his own faith. And we believe that the cause of this courage in thus stating and meditating upon objections to Christianity may

be found in the words put into the mouth of the Pope in The Ring and the Book, who has just asked the question, inspired by the worthlessness of contemporary Christian practice, 'Is the thing we see salvation?' He is quick to answer for

himself:

I

Put no such dreadful question to myself,
Within whose circle of experience burns

The central truth, Power, Wisdom, Goodness,-God.'

When Mr. Browning is discussing religious difficulties, even when he seems to be refining away the facts on which, for most, our religion rests, he always apparently possesses a confidence for which these words are the warrant; within his 'circle of experience' the 'central truth' does really 'burn,' and that truth is God. His religion works from the centre to the circumference, from the Being of God to the mode in which He has revealed Himself to man; and in the Being of God the chief, the one essential fact that he finds is Love, on which fact we may say that he builds his faith:

'In youth I looked to these very skies,
And probing their immensities,

I found God there, His visible power;
Yet felt in my heart, amid all its sense
Of the power, an equal evidence

That His love, there too, was the nobler dower.

For the loving worm within its clod,

Were diviner than a loveless god

Amid his worlds, I dare to say.'

And in 'A Death in the Desert' he argues that man must justly call himself 'first, last, and best of things,' unless he acknowledges that, in God, Love coexists with might and will:

'Since if man prove the sole existent thing
Where these combine, whatever their degree,
However weak the might or will or love,
So they 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 marvellous beyond dead Atlas' self,

Given to the nobler midge for resting-place!'

To give a complete representation of the great part which Love has in our conception of God, the poet imagines with wonderful power and truth the loveless god of the merc savage, in 'Caliban upon Setebos, or Natural Theology in the

Island,' which is Caliban's meditation upon the strange freaks and capricious power of 'his dam's god, Setebos.' The poem comes immediately after 'A Death in the Desert,' as if to emphasize the cardinal doctrine of the one, that God's essence is Love, and that

'Life, with all it yields of joy and woe,

And hope and fear,

Is just our chance o' the prize of learning love,
How love might be, hath been indeed, and is,'

by the terrible image, in the other, of the loveless power and will which Caliban has fashioned by reasoning from the phenomena of the world and of his own nature. The savage cannot imagine a loving God; even that which he believes to be 'over Setebos' is not love, but rather 'something quiet,' as distinguished from Setebos' restless activity, which came of being ill at ease.' And therefore, though he believes in 'the Quiet,' yet he 'never spends much thought nor care that way,' because the Quiet is only the germ of the logical conception of a First Cause, necessary, even to Caliban, in order to complete his theory of the universe, as the tortoise on which the elephant stands is necessary to the Hindoo philosopher, but of no practical importance, because, unlike Setebos, it does not 'make itself feared through what it does.' Few imaginative pictures cast such a dreary light upon the possibilities of our intellectual speculations, because it is so terribly complete in itself, and because the elimination of Love from our idea of God is all that stands between us and it. But the certainty of Mr. Browning's grasp of that idea enables him with impunity to play with such a subject; he is 'very sure of God,' and therefore Setebos has no terrors for him.

Now it is from his firm belief in God's Love that the poet has attained to the two great Christian truths which so continually come up in his writings, viz., the Incarnation and Immortality.

In the awful vision of Easter-Day,' which represents the soul standing before the Judge, when He has allowed it to keep the world it has chosen, but has stopped its exultation by showing the utter insufficiency of all that earth has, all its beauty, all its art, its science and philosophy, to satisfy the man when the goal's a ruin like the rest,' the wretched soul takes refuge in love, and prays to be allowed that only. But this also is denied, even while it is granted, by showing the uselessness of love without God's Love :

Thy tardy conscience! Haste to take
The show of love for the name's sake,
Remembering every moment Who
Beside creating thee unto

These ends, and these for thee, was said
To undergo death in thy stead

In flesh like thine: so ran the tale.
What doubt in thee could countervail
Belief in it? Upon the ground
"That in the story had been found

Too much love! How could God love so?"
He who in all His works below
Adapted to the needs of man,
Made love the basis of the plan,-
Did love, as was demonstrated:
While man, who was so fit instead
To hate, as every day gave proof,-
Man thought man, for his kind's behoof,
Both could and did invent that scheme
Of perfect love; 't would well beseem
Cain's nature thou wast wont to praise,
Not tally with God's usual ways!'

The fact that man possesses love is so far from being a proof that he invented the 'scheme of perfect love,' that it rather proves that God who gave him the love also gave him that final climax of love which is reached in the Incarnation and Atonement. So the poet rises from the love which is shewn in the outer world, from the love which man feels in himself to 'the love which tops the might, the Christ in God.' The argument that the presence of love in us is the proof of Christ is a main part of 'A Death in the Desert':... When, beholding that love everywhere, He reasons, "Since such love is everywhere,

And since ourselves can love and would be loved,
We ourselves make the love, and Christ was not—”
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 Incarnation, thus viewed as the necessary completion of all we think or feel about God, ensures the truth of the whole system, of which it is the climax. The Pope, in The Ring and the Book, uses it to explain the mystery of sin and

sorrow:

'I can believe this dread machinery

Of sin and sorrow, would confound me else,