Throughout the series of poems it is not a Persian Dervish who is the speaker and teacher; we hear the authentic voice of the Dervish born in Camberwell in the year 1812—­Ferishtah-Browning.  The doctrine set forth is the doctrine of Browning; the manner of speech is the manner of the poet.  The illustrations and imagery are often Oriental; the ideas are those of a Western thinker; yet no sense of discordance is produced.  The parable of the starving ravens fed by an eagle serves happily as an induction; let us become not waiters on providence, but workers with providence; and to feed hungry souls is even more needful than to feed hungry bodies: 

     I starve in soul: 
    So may mankind:  and since men congregate
    In towns, not woods—­to Ispahan forthwith!

Such is the lesson of energetic charity.  And the lesson for the acceptance of providential gifts is that put in words by the poor melon-seller, once the Shah’s Prime Minister—­words spoken in the spirit of the afflicted Job—­“Shall we receive good at the hand of God and shall we not receive evil?"[143] Or rather—­Shall not our hearts even in the midst of evil be lifted up in gratitude at the remembrance of the good which we have received?  Browning proceeds, under a transparent veil of Oriental fable, to consider the story of the life of Christ.  Do we believe in that tale of wonder in the full sense of the word belief?  The more it really concerns us, the more exacting grow our demands for evidence of its truth; an otiose assent is easy, but this has none of the potency of genuine conviction.  And, after all, intellectual assent is of little importance compared with that love for the Divine which may co-exist as truly with denial as with assent. The Family sets forth, through a parable, the wisdom of accepting and living in our human views of things transcendent.  Why pray to God at all?  Why not rather accept His will and His Providential disposition of our lives as absolutely wise, and right?  That, Browning replies, may be the way of the angels.  We are men, and it is God’s will that we should feel and think as men: 

      Be man and nothing more—­
    Man who, as man conceiving, hopes and fears,
    And craves and deprecates, and loves and loathes,
    And bids God help him, till death touch his eyes
    And show God granted most, denying all.

The same spirit of acceptance of our intellectual and moral limitations is applied in The Sun to the defence of anthropomorphic religion.  Our spirit, burdened with the good gifts of life, looks upward for relief in gratitude and praise; but we can praise and thank only One who is righteous and loving, as we conceive righteousness and love.  Let us not strive to pass beyond these human feelings and conceptions.  Perhaps they are wholly remote from the unknown reality.  They are none the less the conceptions proper to humanity; we have no capacities with which to correct them; let us hold fast by our