to nourish
it. Man was spiritually living, when he shrank appalled from the
spectacle of Nature, and needed to be assured that there was a might
beyond _its_ might. But when he says, 'Since Might is everywhere, there
is no need of Will;' though he knows from his own experience how Might
may combine with Will, then is he spiritually dead. And man is
spiritually living, when he asks if there be love

"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