finds its echo in every devout spirit from the beginning of the world:  it is of the very essence of religion.  But what of its moral consequences?  Religion, when thoroughly consistent, is the triumphant reconciliation of all contradictions.  It is optimism, the justification of things as the process of evolving the good; and its peace and joy are just the outcome of the conviction, won by faith, that the ideal is actual, and that every detail of life is, in its own place, illumined with divine goodness.  But morality is the condemnation of things as they are, by reference to a conception of a good which ought to be.  The absolute identification of the actual and ideal extinguishes morality, either in something lower or something higher.  But the moral ideal, when reached, turns at once into a stepping-stone, a dead self; and the good formulates itself anew as an ideal in the future.  So that morality is the sphere of discrepancy, and the moral life a progressive realization of a good that can never be complete.  It would thus seem to be irreconcilably different from religion, which must, in some way or other, find the good to be present, actual, absolute, without shadow of change, or hint of limit or imperfection.

How, then, does the poet deal with the apparently fundamental discrepancy between religion, which postulates the absolute and universal supremacy of God, and morality, which postulates the absolute supremacy of man within the sphere of his own action, in so far as it is called right or wrong?

This difficulty, in one or other of its forms, is, perhaps, the most pressing in modern philosophy.  It is the problem of the possibility of rising above the “Either, Or” of discrepant conceptions, to a position which grasps the alternatives together in a higher idea.  It is at bottom the question, whether we can have a philosophy at all; or whether we must fall back once more into compromise, and the scepticism and despair which it always brings with it.

It is just because Browning does not compromise between the contending truths that he is instructive.  The value of his solution of the problem corresponds accurately to the degree in which he holds both the absoluteness of God’s presence in history, and the complete independence of the moral consciousness.  He refused to degrade either God or man.  In the name of religion, he refuses to say that “a purpose of reason is visible in the social and legal structures of mankind”—­only “on the whole “; and in the name of morality, he refuses to “assert the perfection of the actual world” as it is, and by implication to stultify all human endeavour.  He knew the vice of compromising, and strove to hold both the truths in their fulness.

That he did not compromise God’s love or power, and make it dominant merely “on the whole,” leaving within His realm, which is universal, a limbo for the “lost,” is evident to the most casual reader.