“Brow-furrowed old age, youth’s hollow cheek,—­
  Diseased in the body, sick in soul,
  Pinched poverty, satiate wealth,—­your whole
  Array of despairs,"[D]

[Footnote D:  Ibid.]

still, without them, the best is impossible.  They are the conditions of the moral life, which is essentially progressive.  They are the consequences of the fact that man has been “startled up”

            “by an Infinite
  Discovered above and below me—­height
  And depth alike to attract my flight,

“Repel my descent:  by hate taught love. 
Oh, gain were indeed to see above
Supremacy ever—­to move, remove,

“Not reach—­aspire yet never attain
To the object aimed at."[A]

[Footnote A:  Rephan—­Asolando.]

He who places rest above effort, Rephan above the earth, places a natural good above a moral good, stagnation above progress.  The demand for the absolute extinction of evil betrays ignorance of the nature of the highest good.  For right and wrong are relative.  “Type need antitype.”  The fact that goodness is best, and that goodness is not a stagnant state but a progress, a gradual realization, though never complete, of an infinite ideal, of the perfection of God by a finite being, necessarily implies the consciousness of sin and evil.  As a moral agent man must set what should be above what is.  If he is to aspire and attain, the actual present must seem to him inadequate, imperfect, wrong, a state to be abolished in favour of a better.  And therefore it follows that

            “Though wrong were right
  Could we but know—­still wrong must needs seem wrong
  To do right’s service, prove men weak or strong,
  Choosers of evil or good."[B]

[Footnote B:  Francis Furini.]

The apparent existence of evil is the condition of goodness.  And yet it must only be apparent.  For if evil be regarded as veritably evil, it must remain so for all that man can do; he cannot annihilate any fact nor change its nature, and all effort would, therefore, be futile.  And, on the other hand, if evil were known as unreal, then there were no need of moral effort, no quarrel with the present and therefore no aspiration, and no achievement.  That which is man’s highest and best,—­namely, a moral life which is a progress—­would thus be impossible, and his existence would be bereft of all meaning and purpose.  And if the highest is impossible then all is wrong, “the goal being a ruin, so is all the rest.”

The hypothesis of the moral life as progressive is essential to Browning.