to stop that activity, were therefore evil.  But it cannot end, for it is the self-manifestation of the divine life.  There is plenty of way to make, for the ideal is absolute goodness.  The process cannot exhaust the absolute, and it is impossible that man should be God.  And yet this process is the process of the absolute, the working of the ideal, the presence of the highest in man as a living power realizing itself in his acts and in his thoughts.  And the absolute cannot fail; not in man, for the process is the evolution of his essential nature; and not in the world, for that is but the necessary instrument of the evolution.  By lifting the moral ideal of man to infinitude, the poet has identified it with the nature of God, and made it the absolute law of things.

Now, this idea of the identity of the human and the divine is a perfectly familiar Christian idea.

  “Thence shall I, approved
  A man, for aye removed
  From the developed brute; a God though in the germ."[A]

[Footnote A:  Rabbi Ben Ezra.]

This idea is involved in the ordinary expressions of religious thought.  But, nevertheless, both theology and philosophy shrink from giving to it a clear and unembarrassed utterance.  Instead of rising to the sublime boldness of the Nazarene Teacher, they set up prudential differences between God and man—­differences not of degree only but of nature; and, in consequence, God is reduced into an unknowable absolute, and man is made incapable not only of moral, but also of intellectual life.  The poet himself has proved craven-hearted in this, as we shall see.  He, too, sets up insurmountable barriers between the divine and the human, and thereby weakens both his religious and his moral convictions.  His moral inspiration is greatest just where his religious enthusiasm is most intense.  In Rabbi Ben Ezra, The Death in the Desert, and The Ring and the Book, there prevails a constant sense of the community of God and man within the realm of goodness; and the world itself, “with its dread machinery of sin and sorrow,” is made to join the great conspiracy, whose purpose is at once the evolution of man’s character, and the realization of the will of God.

  “So, the All-Great, were the All-Loving too—­
  So, through the thunder comes a human voice
  Saying, ’O heart I made, a heart beats here! 
  Face, my hands fashioned, see it in myself! 
  Thou hast no power nor may’st conceive of mine,
  But love I gave thee, with myself to love,
  And thou must love Me who have died for thee.’"[A]

[Footnote A:  An Epistle from Karshish.]