s
insight into the spiritual essence of fleshly things or silencing its
testimony to it; when, too, he admits that not the least worthy of the
"sacred" ones have been thus betrayed. He still, however, maintains that
the true offender against Art will ever be the mock artist--the
Philistine--who sees cause of offence in it.

After proclaiming the religiousness of Art, Furini is called upon to
unfold his theology: and he then passes to a confession of faith in
which Mr. Browning's known personal Theism is contrasted with the
scientific doctrines of Evolution. The Scientist and the Believer would
as he distinguishes them join issue on the value of the artistic study
of man, since man is for both of them the one essential object of
knowledge; but the study (artistic or scientific) is, Mr. Browning
considers, unrepaying in the one case, while it yields all necessary
results in the other. According to the scientist, Man reigns supreme by
his intelligence; according to the Believer, he is subject to all the
helplessness of his ignorance. In reasoning, therefore, each from his
own consciousness, the one finds his starting point at the summit of
creation, the other virtually at the bottom of it. The Scientist
acknowledges no mind beyond that of man; he seeks the impulse to life
within itself, and can therefore only track it through the descending
scale of being into the region of inorganic atoms and blind force. The
_believer_ refers that impulse to a conscious external First Cause, and
is content to live surrounded by its mystery, entrenched within the
facts of his own existence, guided (i.e., drawn upwards) by the
progressive revelations which these convey to him.

It is so that Furini has lived and learned. He has found his lesson in
the study of the human frame. There, as on a rock of experience, he has
planted his foot, finding confusion and instability wherever he
projected this beyond it; striking out sparks of knowledge at every
stamp on the firm ground. He has learned that the Cause of Life is
external, because he has seen how the soul permeates and impels the
body, how it makes it an instrument of its own raptures and a sharer in
them; and he believes that that which caused the soul and thus gifted it
will ultimately silence the spiritual conflict with Evil and perfect Its
own creation. He believes this because Evil has revealed itself to him
as the necessary complement of Good--the antitype through which alone
the t