come a fuller light.  Browning does not, as yet, dwell exclusively on the negative element in progress, or forget that it is possible only through a deeper positive.  He does not think that, because we turn our backs on what we have gained, we are therefore not going forward; nay, he asserts the contrary.  Failure, even the failure of knowledge, is triumph’s evidence in these earlier days; and complete failure, the unchecked rule of evil in any form, is therefore impossible.  We deny

  “Recognized truths, obedient to some truth
  Unrecognized yet, but perceptible,—­
  Correct the portrait by the living face,
  Man’s God, by God’s God in the mind of man."[A]

[Footnote A:  The Ring and the Book—­The Pope, 1871-1874.]

Thus the poet ever returns to the conception of God in the mind of man.  God is the beginning and the end; and man is the self-conscious worker of God’s will, the free process whereby the last which is first, returns to itself.  The process, the growth, is man’s life and being; and it falls within the ideal, which is eternal and all in all.  The spiritual life of man, which is both intellectual and moral, is a dying into the eternal, not to cease to be in it, but to live in it more fully; for spirits necessarily commune.  He dies to the temporal interests and narrow ends of the exclusive self, and lives an ever-expanding life in the life of others, manifesting more and more that spiritual principle which is the life of God, who lives and loves in all things.  “God is a being in whom we exist; with whom we are in principle one; with whom the human spirit is identical, in the sense that He is all which the human spirit is capable of becoming."[B]

[Footnote B:  Green’s Prolegomena to Ethics, p. 198.]

From this point of view, and in so far as Browning is loyal to the conception of the community of the divine and human, he is able to maintain his faith in God, not in spite of knowledge, but through the very movement of knowledge within him.  He is not obliged, as in his later works, to look for proofs, either in nature, or elsewhere; nor to argue from the emotion of love in man, to a cause of that emotion.  He needs no syllogistic process to arrive at God; for the very activity of his own spirit as intelligence, as the reason which thinks and acts, is the activity of God within him.  Scepticism, is impossible, for the very act of doubting is the activity of reason, and a profession of the knowledge of the truth.

                                “I
  Put no such dreadful question to myself,
  Within whose circle of experience burns
  The central truth, Power, Wisdom, Goodness,—­God: 
  I must outlive a thing ere know it dead: 
  When I outlive the faith there is a sun,
  When I lie, ashes to the very soul,—­
  Someone, not I, must wail above the heap,
  ‘He died in dark whence never morn arose.’"[A]

[Footnote A:  The Ring and the Book—­The Pope, 1631-1639.]