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In all this, I think Browning suggests a more sufficient definition of religion than that given by Matthew Arnold who describes it as transfigured morality. Browning teaches us that, apart from the effects of an action in this world, there is the religious question of what we have made of ourselves in the light of the Ideal; and if we have been disloyal to that Ideal, no matter what the verdict of the world, we have failed in our life work. He says:

There is no duty patent in the world

Like trying to be good and true oneself,

Leaving the shows of things to the Lord of show
And Prince o' the Power of the Air.

That is the one end of all the discipline of life :

Namely, that just the creature I was bound
To be, I should become, nor thwart at all
God's purpose in creation. I conceive
No other duty possible to man,—

Highest mind, lowest mind,- -no other law
By which to judge life failure or success,
What folks call being saved or cast away.

That is the one test by which life must be tried,—the
result of the earthly life upon the soul:-

No matter what the object of a life,

Small work or large, the making thrive a shop,

Or seeing that an empire take no harm,—

There are known fruits to judge obedience by.

Man's relation to his fellows constitutes his morality, his

consciousness of personal relation to the living God opens up to him the vistas of religious faith.

And yet, when you reach his largest doctrine, you find his moral and religious teachings blend into one

glorious affirmation of the supremacy of Love. When a perfect love becomes the highest impulse, then the vocation of life is achieved, religion and morality combine into one unbroken harmony. The Supreme Being is revealed under three manifestations:-POWER, KNOWLEDGE, LOVE; but until you reach the Love, you cannot truly apprehend the Knowledge and the Power. Love is the immediate presence of the divine in the human. You can never attain to omniscience and omnipotence; but, in his own bold way, Browning says:A man may o'ertake

God's own speed, in the one way of Love.

He affirms that :—

Love leads the soul to the highest perfection.

You may have all knowledge and all power, but without Love you are nothing.

Were Knowledge all thy faculty-then God

Must be ignored. Love gains Him by first leap.

Some one may be inclined to object to all this, and say :—This teaching is very beautiful and poetic; but it is hard to believe that in such a world as this Love is the deepest, strongest force; it often looks as though strength and cleverness and cunning ruled despotically the course of history. And so, to show us how Love may be the secret of many of the crises that make history, Browning wrote one of his most perfect poems, called Pippa Passes.

A little ignorant, bare-footed factory girl of Asolo goes out for her new year's holiday, her heart full of joy

in God, and overflowing with love to all God's creatures. And, as she passes on her way, singing her tender songs, she unconsciously enacts a final judgment on some of the men and women who listen to her childish voice. Pippa passes, the murderer hears her song, instantly he flings his guilty paramour from his side and renounces his ill-gotten gains. Pippa passes with her simple human song, and the despairing man at once resolves to devote his life to a service of love. Pippa passes with her rousing ballad,—and the patriot is inspired to risk all for his country's good. Pippa passes with her hymn of holy childhood, and the crafty Cardinal casts out the tempter to whom he has been listening all too long. Then Pippa passes to her garret and her bed, unconscious of the influence of her words,-words through which heaven has pronounced judgment and appointed destiny. By her pure love that maiden reposes on the breast of God; and, all unknown to herself, she acts as His vicegerent in the world. That unsophisticated love drinks at the very fountain of the divine, and has a secret wisdom which baffles the subtlety of sin and the trickery of clever worldliness. From that exquisite poem we strengthen our faith in the omnipotence of Love, the conquering power of Goodness even when it seems most weak.

7. THE HOPE OF IMMORTALITY.

In closing these introductory remarks, I notice that Browning is the poet of the immortal hope. Indeed, to him immortality is more than a hope, it is a certainty bound up with man's progressive nature, and even

prophesied by his imperfection and failures. If a man's life could be rounded into a perfect circle within the limits of time, then no thought of another world would disturb the placid consciousness of completeness here. But since the greatest men are those whose endeavours and deeds always seem to them incomplete, our human life appears not so much a circle as an endless SPIRAL, sweeping into wider, loftier realms, beyond the clouds of time into the azure of eternity. He contends that there is an infinite element in human nature, that man is not a mere creature of time and space, that he is able to look from the gift

To the Giver,

And from the cistern to the river,

And from the finite to infinity,

And from man's dust to God's divinity.

Many remarkable passages might be quoted in which the spiritual significance of man's progressive nature is enforced. It is impossible to conceive of a full step to the spirit's flight; every limit melts at last into a wider horizon. In Luria, Domizia cries:

How inexhaustible the spirit grows!

One object, she seemed erewhile born to reach
With her whole energies and die content,-
So like a wall at the world's edge it stood,
With naught beyond to live for,-is that reached?-
Already are new undreamed of energies
Outgrowing under, and extending farther
To a new object ;-there's another world!

The very failures of this life become transfigured into prophecies of immortal victory. From all the contradictions and losses and sufferings of earth there is being

distilled an elixir of life, whose brimming cup shall not be dashed even by the hand of death.

Only grant a second life, I acquiesce

In this present life a failure, count misfortune's worst assaults Triumph, not defeat; assured that loss so much the more exalts Gain about to be. For at what moment did I so advance

Near to knowledge, as when frustrate of escape from ignorance? Did not beauty prove most precious when its opposite obtained Rule, and truth seemed more than ever potent because falsehood

reigned?

While for love-oh how but losing love, does whoso loves succeed By the death-pang to the birth-throe-learning what is love

indeed?

Only grant my soul may carry high through death her cup unspilled,

Brimming though it be with knowledge, life's loss drop by drop distilled,

I shall boast it mine-the balsam, bless each kindly wrench that

wrung

From life's tree its inmost virtue, tapped the root whence

pleasure sprung,

Barked the bole, and broke the bough, and bruised the berry, left all grace

Ashes in death's stern alembic, loosed elixir in its place!

Death is the breaking up of the narrow prison of time, that the spirit may be free :

And stung by straitness of our life made strait
On purpose to make sweet the life at large,
Freed by the throbbing impulse we call death,
We burst there, as the worm into the fly,

Who, while a worm still, wants his wings.

After a life of failure, when Paracelsus feels the shadows of death deepening upon him he bursts into that rapture of faith: