“This doctrine, which one healthy view of things,
  One sane sight of the general ordinance—­
  Nature,—­and its particular object,—­man,—­
  Which one mere eyecast at the character
  Of Who made these and gave man sense to boot,
  Had dissipated once and evermore,—­
  This doctrine I have dosed our flock withal. 
  Why?  Because none believed it."[A]

[Footnote A:  The Inn Album.]

“O’er-punished wrong grows right,” Browning says.  Hell is, for him, the consciousness of opportunities neglected, arrested growth; and even that, in turn, is the beginning of a better life.

  “However near I stand in His regard,
  So much the nearer had I stood by steps
  Offered the feet which rashly spurned their help. 
  That I call Hell; why further punishment?"[B]

[Footnote B:  A Camel-Driver.]

Another ordinary view, according to which evil is self-destructive, and ends with the annihilation of its servant, he does not so decisively reject.  At least, in a passage of wonderful poetic and philosophic power, which he puts into the mouth of Caponsacchi, he describes Guido as gradually lapsing towards the chaos, which is lower then created existence.  He observes him

  “Not to die so much as slide out of life,
  Pushed by the general horror and common hate
  Low, lower,—­left o’ the very ledge of things,
  I seem to see him catch convulsively,
  One by one at all honest forms of life,
  At reason, order, decency and use,
  To cramp him and get foothold by at least;
  And still they disengage them from his clutch.

* * * * *

  “And thus I see him slowly and surely edged
  Off all the table-land whence life upsprings
  Aspiring to be immortality.”

There he loses him in the loneliness, silence and dusk—­

  “At the horizontal line, creation’s verge. 
  From what just is to absolute nothingness."[A]

[Footnote A:  The Ring and the Book—­Giuseppe Caponsacchi, 1911-1931.]

But the matchless moral insight of the Pope leads to a different conclusion, and the poet again retrieves his faith.  The Pope puts his first trust “in the suddenness of Guido’s fate,” and hopes that the truth may “be flashed out by the blow of death, and Guido see one instant and be saved.”  Nor is his trust vain.  “The end comes,” said Dr. Westcott.  “The ministers of death claim him.  In his agony he summons every helper whom he has known or heard of—­

  “‘Abate,—­Cardinal,—­Christ,—­Maria,—­God—­’

“and then the light breaks through the blackest gloom: 

  “‘Pompilia! will you let them murder me?’

“In this supreme moment he has known what love is, and, knowing it, has begun to feel it.  The cry, like the intercession of the rich man in Hades, is a promise of a far-off deliverance.”