Christ is arisen.  Why revert to discuss miracles?  The work of miracles—­whatever they may have been—­was long ago accomplished.  The knowledge of the Divine Love, its appropriation by our own hearts, and the putting forth of that love in our lives—­such for us is the Christian faith, such is the work of Christ accomplishing itself in humanity at the present time.  And the Christian story is no myth but a reality, not because we can prove true the beliefs of the first century, but because those beliefs contained within them a larger and more enduring belief.  The acorn has not perished because it has expanded into an oak.

This, reduced here to the baldest statement, is in substance the dying testimony of Browning’s St John.  It is thrown into lyrical form as his own testimony in the Epilogue to the volume of 1864.  The voices of singers, the sound of the trumpets of the Jewish Dedication Day, when the glory of the Lord in His cloud filled His house, have fallen silent.  We are told by some that the divine Face, known to early Christian days as love, has withdrawn from earth for ever, and left humanity enthroned as its sole representative: 

    Oh, dread succession to a dizzy post,
    Sad sway of sceptre whose mere touch appals.

Browning’s reply is that to one whose eyes are rightly informed the whole of nature and of human life shows itself as a perpetual mystery of providential care: 

    Why, where’s the need of Temple, when the walls
    O’ the world are that?  What use of swells and falls
    From Levites’ choir, Priests’ cries, and trumpet calls?

    That one Face, far from vanish, rather grows,
    Or decomposes but to recompose,
    Become my universe that feels and knows.[91]

In the great poem of 1868-69, The Ring and the Book, one speaker, the venerable Pope, like St John of A Death in the Desert, has almost reached the term of a long life:  he is absorbed in the solemn weighing of truth and falsehood, good and evil; his soul, like the soul of the dying Evangelist: 

    Lies bare to the universal prick of light.

He, if any of the speakers in that sequence of monologues, expresses Browning’s own highest thought.  And the Pope’s exposition of the Christianity of our modern age is identical with that of John.  Man’s mind is but “a convex glass” in which is represented all that by us can be conceived of God, “our known unknown.”  The Pope has heard the Christian story which is abroad in the world; he loves it and finds it credible.  God’s power—­that is clearly discernible in the universe; His intelligence—­that is no less evidently present.  What of love?  The dread machinery of sin and sorrow on this globe of ours seems to negative the idea of divine love.  The surmise of immortality may indeed justify the ways of God to man; this “dread machinery” may be needed to evolve man’s highest moral qualities.  The acknowledgment of God in Christ, the divine self-sacrifice of love, for the Pope, as for St John, solves