is a trust laid upon himself, which he may either violate or keep.  It surpasses divine goodness, “tho’ matched with equal power” to make man good, as it has made the flowers beautiful.  From this point of view, spiritual attainment, whether intellectual or moral, is man’s own, a spontaneous product.  Just as God is conceived as all in all in the universe, so man is all in all within the sphere of duty; for the kingdom of heaven is within.  In both cases alike, there is absolute exclusion of external interference.

For this reason, it has often seemed both to philosophers and theologians, as if the world were too confined to hold within it both God and man.  In the East, the consciousness of the infinite seemed at times to leave no room for the finite; and in the West, where the consciousness of the finite and interest therein is strongest, and man strives and aspires, a Deism arose which set God at a distance, and allowed Him to interfere in the fate of man only by a benevolent miracle.  Nor is this collision of pantheism and freedom, nay of religion and morality, confined to the theoretical region.  This difficulty is not merely the punishment of an over-bold and over-ambitious philosophy, which pries too curiously into the mystery of being.  It lies at the very threshold of all reflection on the facts of the moral life.  Even children feel the mystery of God’s permitting sin, and embarrass their helpless parents with the contradiction between absolute benevolence and the miseries and cruelties of life.  “A vain interminable controversy,” says Teufels-droeckh, “which arises in every soul since the beginning of the world:  and in every soul, that would pass from idle suffering into actual endeavouring, must be put an end to.  The most, in our own time, have to go content with a simple, incomplete enough Suppression of this controversy:  to a few Solution of it is indispensable.”

Solution, and not Suppression, is what Browning sought; he did, in fact, propound a solution, which, whether finally satisfactory or not, at least carries us beyond the easy compromises of ordinary religious and ethical teaching.  He does not deny the universality of God’s beneficence or power, and divide the realm of being between Him and the adversary:  nor, on the other hand, does he limit man’s freedom, and stultify ethics by extracting the sting of reality from sin.  To limit God, he knew, was to deny Him; and, whatever the difficulties he felt in regarding the absolute Spirit as realising itself in man, he could not be content to reduce man into a temporary phantom, an evanescent embodiment of “spiritual” or natural forces, that take a fleeting form in him as they pursue their onward way.