ds nor sit nor stand but go!
Be our joys three-parts pain!
Strive, and hold cheap the strain;
Learn, nor account the pang; dare, never grudge the throe!"[A]

[Footnote A: _Rabbi Ben Ezra._]

And he prolongs the battle beyond time, for the battle is the moral life
and man's best, and therefore God's best in man. The struggle upward
from the brute, may, indeed end with death. But this only means that man
"has learned the uses of the flesh," and there are in him other
potencies to evolve:

"Other heights in other lives, God willing."

Death is the summing up of this life's meaning, stored strength for new
adventure.

"The future I may face now I have proved the past;" and, in view of it,
Browning is

"Fearless and unperplexed
When I wage battle next,
What weapons to select, what armour to indue."

He is sure that it will be a battle, and a winning one. There is no
limiting here of man's possibility, or confining of man's endeavour
after goodness.

"Strive and Thrive! cry 'Speed,' fight on, fare ever
There as here,"

are the last words which came from his pen.

Now, it may fairly be argued that these allusions to what death may
mean, and what may lie beyond death, valuable as they may be as poetry,
cannot help in philosophy. They do not solve the problem of the relation
between morality and religion, but merely continue the antagonism
between them into a life beyond, of which we have no experience. If the
problem is to be solved, it must be solved as it is stated for us in the
present world.

This objection is valid, so far as it goes. But Browning's treatment is
valuable all the same, in so far as it indicates his unwillingness to
limit or compromise the conflicting truths. He, by implication, rejects
the view, ordinarily held without being examined, that the moral life is
preliminary to the joy and rest of religion; a brief struggle, to be
followed by a sudden lift out of it into some serene sphere, where man
will lead an angel's life, which knows no imperfection and therefore no
growth. He refuses to make morality an accident in man's history and "to
put man in the place of God," by identifying the process with the ideal;
he also refuses to make man's struggle, and God's achievement within
man, mutually exclusive alternatives. As I shall show in the sequel,
movement towards an ideal, actualizing but never actualized, is for the
poet the very nature of man. And to speak about either God