This near affinity between the divine and human is just what Browning seems to repudiate in his later poems, when he speaks as if the absolute, in order to maintain its own supremacy over man, had to stint its gifts and endow him only with a defective reason.  In the earlier period of the poet there is far less timidity.  He then saw that the greater the gift, the greater the Giver; that only spirit can reveal spirit; that “God is glorified in man,” and that love is at its fullest only when it gives itself.

In insisting on such identity of the human spirit with the divine, our poet does not at any time run the risk of forgetting that the identity is not absolute.  Absolute identity would be pantheism, which leaves God lonely and loveless, and extinguishes man, as well as his morality.

  “Man is not God, but hath God’s end to serve,
  A Master to obey, a course to take,
  Somewhat to cast off, somewhat to become."[A]

[Footnote A:  A Death in the Desert.]

Man, at best, only moves towards his ideal:  God is conceived as the ever-existing ideal.  God, in short, is the term which signifies for us the Being who is eternally all in all, and who, therefore, is hidden from us who are only moving towards perfection, in the excess of the brightness of His own glory.  Nevertheless, as Browning recognizes, the grandeur of God’s perfection is just His outflowing love.  And that love is never complete in its manifestation, till it has given itself.  Man’s life, as spirit, is thus one in nature with that of the absolute.  But the unity is not complete, because man is only potentially perfect.  He is the process of the ideal; his life is the divine activity within him.  Still, it is also man’s activity.  For the process, being the process of spirit, is a free process—­one in which man himself energizes; so that, in doing God’s will, he is doing his own highest will, and, in obeying the law of his own deepest nature, he is obeying God.  The unity of divine and human within the spiritual life of man is a real unity, just because man is free; the identity manifests itself through the difference, and the difference is possible through the unity.

Thus, in the light of an ideal which is moral, and therefore perfect—­an ideal gradually realizing itself in a process which is endless—­the poet is able to maintain at once the community between man and God, which is necessary to religion, and their independence, which is necessary to morality.  The conception of God as giving, which is the main doctrine of Christianity, and of man as akin with God, is applied by him to the whole spiritual nature of man, and not merely to his emotion.  The process of evolution is thus a process towards truth, as well as goodness; in fact, goodness and truth are known as inseparable.  Knowledge, too, is a Divine endowment.  “What gift of man is not from God descended?” What gift of God can be deceptive?