But this is not the lesson he has been intended to learn.  The storm, breaking out afresh, catches up and dashes him to the ground, while the vesture, which he had let slip during his last musings, recedes swiftly from his sight.  Then he knows that there is one “way,” and he knows also that he may find it; and in this new conviction he regains his hold of the garment, and at one bound has reentered the little chapel, which he seems never indeed to have left.  The sermon is ending, and he has heard it all.  He still appreciates its faults of matter and manner; but he no longer rejects the draught of living water, because it comes to him with some taste of earth.  What the draught can do is evidenced by those wrecks of humanity which are finding renewal there.  There his choice shall rest; for, nowhere else, so he seems to conclude, is the message of Love so simply and so directly conveyed.

A great part of the narrative is written in a humorous tone, which shows itself, not only in thought and word, but in a jolting measure, and even grotesque rhymes.  The speaker desires it to be understood that he is not the less in earnest for this apparent “levity;” and the levity is quite consistent with religious seriousness in such a person as the poem depicts.  But, as I have shown, it is alone enough to prove that the author is not depicting himself.  The poem reflects him more or less truly in the doctrine of Divine Love, the belief in personal guidance, and the half-contemptuous admiration with which the speaker regards those who will mortify the flesh in obedience to a Christ-man.  But it belies the evidence of his whole work when, as in Section XVII., it represents moral truth as either innate to the human spirit, or directly revealed to it; and we shall presently notice a still greater discrepancy which it shares with its companion poem.[59]

“Easter-Day"[60] deals with the deeper issues of scepticism and faith; and opens with a dialogue in which the two opposite positions are maintained.  Both speakers start from the belief in God, and the understanding that Christianity is unproved; but the one accepts it in faith:  the other regards it as, for the time being, negatived.

The man of faith begins by exclaiming, how hard it is to be (practically) a Christian; and how disproportionate to our endeavour is our success in becoming so.  The sceptic replies that to his mind the only difficulty is belief.  “Let the least of God’s commands be proved authentic:  and only an idiot would shrink from martyrdom itself, with the certain bliss that would reward it.”  The man of faith, who is clearly the greater pessimist of the two, thinks the world too full of suffering to be placed, by any knowledge, beyond the reach of faith—­beyond the necessity of being taken upon trust.  And his adversary concedes that absolute knowledge would—­where it was applicable—­destroy its own end.  In social life, for instance, it would do away with all those acts of faith, those instinctive judgments and feelings, which are the essence of life.  But he thinks one may fairly desire a better touchstone for the purposes of God than human judgment or feeling; and that, if we cannot know them with scientific certainty, one must wish the balance of probability to lie clearly on one side.