In explanation of the fact, that nothing given in our experience affords a stable truth—­that the black or white of one moment is always the darker or lighter grey of another—­Ferishtah refers his disciples to the will of God.  Our very scheme of goodness is a fiction, which man the impotent cannot, God the all-powerful does not, convert into reality.  But it is a fiction created by God within the human mind, that it may work for truth there; so also is it with the fictitious conceptions which blend the qualities of man with those of God.  To the objection

       “A power, confessed past knowledge, nay, past thought,
       —­Thus thought and known!” (vol. xvi. p. 84.)

Ferishtah replies that to know the power by its operation, is all we need in the case of a human benefactor or lord:  all we can in the case of those natural forces which we recognize in every act of our life.  And when reminded that the sense of indebtedness implies a debtor—­one ready to receive his due:  and that we need look no farther for the recipient than the great men who have benefited our race:  his answer is, that such gratitude to his fellow-men would be gratitude to himself, in whose perception half their greatness lies.  “He might as well thank the starlight for the impressions of colour, which have been supplied by his own brain.”

The Lyric disclaims, in the name of one of the world’s workers, all excessive—­i.e., loving recognition of his work.  The speaker has not striven for the world’s sake, nor sought his ideals there.  “Those who have done so may claim its love.  For himself he asks only a just judgment on what he has achieved.”

Mr. Browning here expresses for the first time his feeling towards the “Religion of Humanity;” and though this was more or less to be inferred from his general religious views, it affords, as now stated, a new, as well as valuable, illustration of them.  The Theistic philosophy which makes the individual the centre of the universe, is, perhaps, nowhere in his works, so distinctly set forth as in this latest of them.  But nowhere either has he more distinctly declared that the fullest realization of the individual life is self-sacrifice.

       “Renounce joy for my fellows sake?  That’s joy
       Beyond joy;”
                                (Two Camels, vol. xvi p. 50.)

The lyrical supplement to Fancy 12 somewhat obscures the idea on which it turns, by presenting it from a different point of view.  But here, as in the remainder of the book, we must regard the Lyric as suggested by the argument, not necessarily as part of it.

The EPILOGUE is a vision of present and future, in which the woe and conflict of our mortal existence are absorbed in the widening glory of an eternal day.  The vision comes to one cradled in the happiness of love; and he is startled from it by a presentiment that it has been an illusion created by his happiness.  But we know that from Mr. Browning’s point of view, Love, even in its illusions, may be accepted as a messenger of truth.