As to the initial difficulty of faith, Browning with a touch of scorn, assures us that evidences of spiritual realities, evidences of Christianity—­as they are styled—­external and internal will be readily found by him who desires to find; convincing enough they are for him who wants to be convinced.  But in truth faith is a noble venture of the spirit, an aspiring effort towards what is best, even though what is best may never be attained.  The mole gropes blindly in unquestionably solid clay; better be like the grasshopper “that spends itself in leaps all day to reach the sun.”  A grasshopper’s leap sunwards—­that is what we signify by this word “faith.”

But the difficulties of the Christian life only shift their place when faith by whatever means has been won.  We are bidden to renounce the world:  what does the injunction mean? in what way shall it be obeyed?  “Ascetic” Mrs Browning named this poem; and ascetic it is if by that word we understand the counselling and exhorting to a noble exercise and discipline; but Browning even in his poem by no means wears the cilix, and no teaching can be more fatal than his to asceticism in the narrower sense of the word.  To renounce the world, if interpreted aright, is to extinguish or suppress no faculty that has been given to man, but rather to put each faculty to its highest uses: 

    “Renounce the world!”—­Ah, were it done
    By merely cutting one by one
    Your limbs off, with your wise head last,
    How easy were it!—­how soon past,
    If once in the believing mood.

The harder and the higher renunciation is this—­to choose the things of the spirit rather than the things of sense, and again in accepting, as means of our earthly discipline and development, the things of sense to press through these to the things of the spirit which lie behind and beyond and above them.

Such, and such alone, is the asceticism to which Browning summons his disciple; it is the asceticism of energy not that of atrophy; it does not starve the senses, but reinforces the spirit; it results not in a cloistered but a militant virtue.  A certain self-denial it may demand, but the self-denial becomes the condition of a higher joy.  And if life with its trials frays the flesh, what matters it when the light of the spirit shines through with only a fuller potency?  In the choice between sense and spirit, or, to put it more generally, in the choice between what is higher and less high, lies the probation of a soul, and also its means of growth.  And what is the meaning of this mortal life—­this strange phenomenon otherwise so unintelligible—­if it be not the moment in which a soul is proved, the period in which a soul is shaped and developed for other lives to come?