We saw how his theology is double-faced between the pantheistic yearning to find God everywhere and the individualist’s resolute maintenance of the autonomy of man.  God’s Love, poured through the world, inextricably blended with all its power and beauty, thrilled with answering rapture by all its joy, and striving to clasp every human soul, provided the nearest approach to a solution of that conflict which Browning’s mechanical metaphysics permitted.  One comprehends, then, the profound significance for him of the actual solution apparently presented by Christian theology.  In one supreme, crucial example the union of God with man in consummate love had actually, according to Christian belief, taken place, and Browning probably uttered his own faith when he made St John declare that

     “The acknowledgment of God in Christ
      Acknowledged by thy reason solves for thee
      All questions in the earth and out of it."[139]

[Footnote 139:  Death in the Desert.  These lines, however “dramatic,” mark with precision the extent, and the limits, of Browning’s Christian faith.  The evidence of his writings altogether confirms Mrs Orr’s express statement that Christ was for him, from first to last, “a manifestation of divine love,” by human form accessible to human love; but not the Redeemer of the orthodox creed.]

For to acknowledge this was to recognise that love was divine, and that mankind at large, in virtue of their gift of love, shared in God’s nature, finite as they were; that whatever clouds of intellectual illusion they walked in, they were lifted to a hold upon reality as unassailable as God’s own by the least glimmer of love.  Whatever else is obscure or elusive in Browning, he never falters in proclaiming the absolute and flawless worth of love.  The lover cannot, like the scientific investigator, miss his mark, he cannot be baffled or misled; the object of his love may be unworthy, or unresponsive, but in the mere act of loving he has his reward.

                       “Knowledge means
      Ever renewed assurance by defeat
      That victory is somehow still to reach;
      But love is victory, the prize itself."[140]

[Footnote 140:  Pillar of Sebzevir.]

This aspect of Browning’s doctrine of love, though it inspired some of his most exalted lyrics, throws into naked relief the dearth of social consciousness in Browning’s psychology.  Yet it is easy to see that the absolute self-sufficiency into which he lifted the bare fact of love was one of the mainsprings of his indomitable optimism.  In Love was concentrated all that emancipates man from the stubborn continuities of Nature.  It started up in corrupt or sordid hearts, and swept all their blind velleities into its purifying flame of passion—­

              “Love is incompatible
      With falsehood,—­purifies, assimilates
      All other passions to itself."[141]