From the lecture-room of Goettingen, with its destructive and reconstructive criticism, Browning is even farther removed than he is from the ritualisms of the Roman basilica.  Yet no caricature can be more amiable than his drawing of the learned Professor, so gentle in his aspect, so formidable in his conclusions, who, gazing into the air with a pure abstracted look, proceeds in a grave sweet voice to exhibit and analyse the sources of the myth of Christ.  In the Professor’s lecture-room Browning finds intellect indeed but only the shadow of love.  He argues that if the “myth” of Christ be dissolved, the authority of Christ as a teacher disappears; Christ is even inferior to other moralists by virtue of the fact that He made personal claims which cannot be sustained.  And whatever may be Christ’s merit as a teacher of the truth, the motive to action which His life and words supplied must cease to exist if it be shown that the divine sacrifice of God manifest in the flesh is no more than a figment of the devout imagination.  At every point the criticism of Browning is as far apart as it is possible to conceive from the criticism set forth in the later writings of Matthew Arnold.  The one writer regards the “myth” as no more than the grave-clothes of a risen Christ whose essential virtue lies in his sweet reasonableness and his morality touched with enthusiasm.  The other believes that if the wonderful story of love be proved a fable, a profound alteration—­and an alteration for the worse—­has been made in the religious consciousness of Christendom.  And undoubtedly the difference between the supernatural and the natural theories of Christianity is far greater than Arnold represented it to be.  But Browning at this date very inadequately conceived the power of Christ as a revealer of the fatherhood of God.  In that revelation, whether the Son of God was human or divine, lay a truth of surpassing power, and a motive of action capable of summoning forth the purest and highest energies of the soul.  That such is the case has been abundantly evidenced by the facts of history.  Browning finds only much learning and the ghost of dead love in the Goettingen lecture-room; and of course it was easy to adapt his Professor’s lecture so as to arrive at this conclusion.  But the process and the conclusion are alike unjust.

Having traversed the various forms of Christian faith and scepticism, the speaker in Christmas Eve declines into a mood of lazy benevolence and mild indifferentism towards each and all of these.  Has not Christ been present alike at the holding-forth of the poor dissenting son of thunder, who tore God’s word into shreds, at the tinklings and posturings and incense-fumes of Roman pietism, and even at the learned discourse which dissolved the myth of his own life and death?  Why, then, over-strenuously take a side?  Why not regard all phases of belief or no-belief with equal and serene regard?  Such a mood of amiable indifferentism is abhorrent to Browning’s