“that man is hurled
  From change to change unceasingly,
  His soul’s wings never furled.”

The bliss of endeavour, the infinite worth of the consciousness of failure, with its evidence of coming triumph, “the spark which disturbs our clod,” these are the essence of his optimistic interpretation of human life, and also of his robust ethical doctrine.

“Then, welcome each rebuff
That turns earth’s smoothness rough,
Each sting that bids nor sit nor stand but go! 
Be our joys three-parts pain! 
Strive, and hold cheap the strain;
Learn, nor account the pang; dare, never grudge the throe!"[A]

[Footnote A:  Rabbi Ben Ezra.]

And he prolongs the battle beyond time, for the battle is the moral life and man’s best, and therefore God’s best in man.  The struggle upward from the brute, may, indeed end with death.  But this only means that man “has learned the uses of the flesh,” and there are in him other potencies to evolve: 

  “Other heights in other lives, God willing.”

Death is the summing up of this life’s meaning, stored strength for new adventure.

“The future I may face now I have proved the past;” and, in view of it, Browning is

  “Fearless and unperplexed
  When I wage battle next,
  What weapons to select, what armour to indue.”

He is sure that it will be a battle, and a winning one.  There is no limiting here of man’s possibility, or confining of man’s endeavour after goodness.

  “Strive and Thrive! cry ‘Speed,’ fight on, fare ever
  There as here,”

are the last words which came from his pen.

Now, it may fairly be argued that these allusions to what death may mean, and what may lie beyond death, valuable as they may be as poetry, cannot help in philosophy.  They do not solve the problem of the relation between morality and religion, but merely continue the antagonism between them into a life beyond, of which we have no experience.  If the problem is to be solved, it must be solved as it is stated for us in the present world.

This objection is valid, so far as it goes.  But Browning’s treatment is valuable all the same, in so far as it indicates his unwillingness to limit or compromise the conflicting truths.  He, by implication, rejects the view, ordinarily held without being examined, that the moral life is preliminary to the joy and rest of religion; a brief struggle, to be followed by a sudden lift out of it into some serene sphere, where man will lead an angel’s life, which knows no imperfection and therefore no growth.  He refuses to make morality an accident in man’s history and “to put man in the place of God,” by identifying the process with the ideal; he also refuses to make man’s struggle, and God’s achievement within man, mutually exclusive alternatives.  As I shall show in the sequel, movement towards an ideal, actualizing but never actualized, is for the poet the very nature of man.  And to speak about either God or man (or even the absolute philosopher) as “the last term of a development” has no meaning to him.  We are not first moral and then religious, first struggling with evil and then conscious of overcoming it.  God is with us in the battle, and the victory is in every blow.