human best, and preserve, as the preacher very correctly expressed it, “the integrity of our anthropomorphism.”  The “magnified non-natural man,” and “the three Lord Shaftesburys” of Matthew Arnold’s irony are regarded with no fine scorn by the intellect of Browning.  His early Christian faith has expanded and taken the non-historical form of a Humanitarian Theism, courageously accepted, not as a complete account of the Unknowable, but as the best provisional conception which we are competent to form.  This theism involves rather than displaces the truth shadowed forth in the life of Christ.  The crudest theism would seem to him far more reasonable than to direct the religious emotions towards a “stream of tendency.”

The presence of evil in a world created and governed by One all-wise, all-powerful, all-loving, is justified in Mirhab Shah as a necessity of our education.  How shall love be called forth unless there be the possibility of self-sacrifice?  How shall our human sympathy be perfected unless there be pain?  What room is there for thanks to God or love of man if earth be the scene of such a blank monotony of well-being as may be found in the star Rephan?  But let us not call evil good, or think pain in itself a gain.  God may see that evil is null, and that pain is gain; for us the human view, the human feeling must suffice.  This justification of pain as a needful part of an education is, however, inapplicable to never-ending retributive punishment.  Such a theological horror Browning rejects with a hearty indignation, qualified only by a humorous contempt, in his apologue of A Camel-driver; her driver, if the camel bites, will with good cause thwack, and so instruct the brute that mouths should munch not bite; he will not, six months afterwards, thrust red-hot prongs into the soft of her flesh to hiss there.  And God has the advantage over the driver of seeing into the camel’s brain and of knowing precisely what moved the creature to offend.  The poem which follows is directed against asceticism.  Self-sacrifice for the sake of our fellows is indeed “joy beyond joy.”  As to the rest—­the question is not whether we fast or feast, but whether, fasting or feasting, we do our day’s work for the Master.  If we would supply joy to our fellows, it is needful that we should first know joy ourselves—­

    Therefore, desire joy and thank God for it!

Browning’s argument is not profound, and could adroitly be turned against himself; but his temperament would survive his argument; his capacity for manifold pleasures was great, and he not only valued these as good in themselves, but turned them to admirable uses.  A feast of the senses was to him as spiritually precious as a fast might be to one who only by fasting could attain to higher joys than those of sense.  And this, he would maintain, is a better condition for a human being than that which renders expedient the plucking out of an eye, the cutting off of a hand.