Feeling for foot-hold through a blank profound,
Along with unborn people in strange lands,
Who say--I hear said or conceive they say-- {195}
`Was John at all, and did he say he saw?
Assure us, ere we ask what he might see!'

--
156. I saw, I heard, I knew: expressions which occur throughout
John's Revelation.

188-197. The poet provides, in these lines, for the prophetic character
of John's discourse, its solution of the difficulties destined to beset
Christianity in the future, and especially of those which have been
raised in our own times. The historical bulwarks which the Strausses
and the Renans have endeavored to destroy, Christianity,
in its essential, absolute character, its adaptiveness to
spiritual vitality, and the wants of the soul, can do without.
Indeed, there will be much gained when the historical character
of Christianity is generally disregarded. Its impregnable fortress,
namely, the Personality, Jesus Christ, will remain, and mankind
will forever seek and find refuge in it. Arthur Symons,
in his `Introduction to the Study of Browning', remarks: . . ."it is as
a piece of ratiocination--suffused, indeed, with imagination--
that the poem seems to have its raison d'etre. The bearing of
this argument on contemporary theories, may to some appear a merit,
to others a blemish. To make the dying John refute Strauss or Renan,
handling their propositions with admirable dialectical skill,
is certainly, on the face of it, somewhat hazardous. But I can see
no real incongruity in imputing to the seer of Patmos
a prophetic insight into the future--no real inconsequence
in imagining the opponent of Cerinthus spending his last breath
in the defence of Christian truth against a foreseen scepticism."
--

"And how shall I assure them? Can they share
--They, who have flesh, a veil of youth and strength
About each spirit, that needs must bide its time, {200}
Living and learning still as years assist
Which wear the thickness thin, and let man see--
With me who hardly am withheld at all,
But shudderingly, scarce a shred between,
Lie bare to the universal prick of light? {205}
Is it for nothing we grow old and weak,
We whom God loves? When pain ends, gain ends too.
To me, that story--ay, that Life and Death
Of which I wrote `it was'--to me, it is;
--Is, here and now: I apprehend naught else. {21