And this view of God as immanent in man’s experience also forecloses all possibility of failure.  Beneath the failure, the possibility of which is involved in a moral life, lies the divine element, working through contradiction to its own fulfilment.  Failure is necessary for man, because he grows:  but, for the same reason, the failure is not final.  Thus, the poet, instead of denying the evidence of his intellect as to the existence of evil, or casting doubt on the distinction between right and wrong, or reducing the chequered course of human history into a phantasmagoria of mere mental appearances, can regard the conflict between good and evil as real and earnest.  He can look evil in the face, recognize its stubborn resistance to the good, and still regard the victory of the latter as sure and complete.  He has not to reduce it into a phantom, or mere appearance, in order to give it a place within the divine order.  He sees the night, but he also sees the day succeed it.  Man falls into sin, but he cannot rest in it.  It is contradictory to his nature, he cannot content himself with it, and he is driven through it.  Mephistopheles promised more than he could perform, when he undertook to make Faust declare himself satisfied.  There is not within the kingdom of evil what will satisfy the spirit of man, whose last law is goodness, whose nature, however obscured, is God’s gift of Himself.

  “While I see day succeed the deepest night—­
  How can I speak but as I know?—­my speech
  Must be, throughout the darkness.  It will end: 
  ‘The light that did burn, will burn!’ Clouds obscure—­
  But for which obscuration all were bright? 
  Too hastily concluded!  Sun—­suffused,
  A cloud may soothe the eye made blind by blaze,—­
  Better the very clarity of heaven: 
  The soft streaks are the beautiful and dear. 
  What but the weakness in a faith supplies
  The incentive to humanity, no strength
  Absolute, irresistible, comports? 
  How can man love but what he yearns to help? 
  And that which men think weakness within strength,
  But angels know for strength and stronger yet—­
  What were it else but the first things made new,
  But repetition of the miracle,
  The divine instance of self-sacrifice
  That never ends and aye begins for man? 
  So, never I miss footing in the maze,
  No,—­I have light nor fear the dark at all."[A]

[Footnote A:  The Ring and the Book—­The Pope, 1640-1660.]

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