“Behind the will and might, as real as they?” (vol. vii. p. 140.)

But when he reasons:  since love is everywhere, and we love and would be loved, we make the love which we recognize as Christ:  and Christ was not; then is he spiritually dead.  For the loss which comes through gain is death, and the sole death.”

(b) The second objection he answers by reverting to his first statement.  “Man is made for progress.  He could not progress if his doubtings were at once changed to certainties, and all he struggles for at once found.  He must yearn for truth, and grasp at error as a ’midway help’ to it.  He must learn and unlearn.  He must creep from fancies on to fact; and correct to-day’s facts by the light of to-morrow’s knowledge.  He must be as the sculptor, who evokes a life-like form from a lump of clay, ever seeing the reality in a series of false presentments; attaining it through them, God alone makes the live shape at a jet.”

The tenderness which has underlain even John’s remonstrances culminates in his closing words.  “If there be a greater woe than this (the doubt) which he has lived to see, may he,” he says, “be ‘absent,’ though it were for another hundred years, plucking the blind ones from the abyss.”

       “But he was dead.” (vol. vii. p. 146.)

The record has a postscript, written not by the same person, but in his name, confronting the opinions of St. John with those of Cerinthus, his noted opponent in belief, into whose hands the MS. is also supposed to have fallen.  It is chiefly interesting as heightening the historical effect of the poem.[62]

“RABBI BEN EZRA” is the expression of a religious philosophy which, being, from another point of view, Mr. Browning’s own, has much in common with that which he has imputed to St. John; and, as “A Death in the Desert” only gave the words which the Evangelist might have spoken, so is “Rabbi Ben Ezra” only the possible utterance of that pious and learned Jew.  But the Christian doctrine of the one poem brings into strong relief the pure Theism of the other; and the religious imagination in “Rabbi Ben Ezra” is strongly touched with the gorgeous and solemn realism which distinguishes the Old Testament from the new.

The most striking feature of Rabbi Ben Ezra’s philosophy is his estimate of age.  According to him the soul is eternal, but it completes the first stage of its experience in the earthly life; and the climax of the earthly life is attained, not in the middle of it, but at its close.  Age is therefore a period, not only of rest, but of fruition.

“Spiritual conflict is appropriate to youth.  It is well that youth should sigh for the impossible, and, if needs be, blunder in the endeavour to improve what is.  He would be a brute whose body could keep pace with his soul.  The highest test of man’s bodily powers is the distance to which they can project the soul on the way which it must travel alone.”