But there lies a deeper difficulty than this in the way of reconciling morality and religion, or the presence of both God and man in human action.  Morality, in so far as it is achievement, might conceivably be immediately identified with the process of an absolute good; but morality is always a consciousness of failure as well.  Its very essence and verve is the conviction that the ideal is not actual.  And the higher a man’s spiritual attainment, the more impressive is his view of the evil of the world, and of the greatness of the work pressing to be done.  “Say not ye, there are yet four months, and then cometh harvest?  Behold I say unto you, ’Lift up your eyes and look on the fields; for they are white already to harvest.’” It looks like blasphemy against morality to say “that God lives in eternity and has, therefore, plenty of time.”  Morality destroys one’s contentment with the world; and its language seems to be, “God is not here, but there; the kingdom is still to come.”

Nor does it rest with condemning the world.  It also finds flaws in its own highest achievement; so that we seem ever “To mock ourselves in all that’s best of us.”  The beginning of the spiritual life seems just to consist in a consciousness of complete failure, and that consciousness ever grows deeper.

This is well illustrated in Browning’s account of Caponsacchi; from the time when Pompilia’s smile first “glowed” upon him, and set him—­

    “Thinking how my life
  Had shaken under me—­broken short indeed
  And showed the gap ’twixt what is, what should be—­
  And into what abysm the soul may slip”—­[A]

[Footnote A:  The Ring and the Book—­Giuseppe Caponsacchi, 485-488.]

up to the time when his pure love for her revealed to him something of the grandeur of goodness, and led him to define his ideal and also to express his despair.

  “To have to do with nothing but the true,
  The good, the eternal—­and these, not alone
  In the main current of the general life,
  But small experiences of every day,
  Concerns of the particular hearth and home: 
  To learn not only by a comet’s rush
  But a rose’s birth—­not by the grandeur, God,
  But the comfort, Christ. All this how far away
  Mere delectation, meet for a minute’s dream!"[B]

[Footnote B:  Ibid. 2089-2097.]

So illimitably beyond his strength is such a life, that he finds himself like the drudging student who

                           “Trims his lamp,
  Opens his Plutarch, puts him in the place
  Of Roman, Grecian; draws the patched gown close,
  Dreams, ’Thus should I fight, save or rule the world!’—­
  Then smilingly, contentedly, awakes
  To the old solitary nothingness."[A]

[Footnote A:  The Ring and the Book—­Giuseppe Caponsacchi, 2098-2103.]

The moral world with its illimitable horizon had Opened out around him, the voice of the new commandment bidding him “be perfect as his Father in heaven is perfect” had destroyed his peace, and made imperative a well nigh hopeless struggle; and, as he compares himself at his best with the new ideal, he breaks out into the cry,