or man (or
even the absolute philosopher) as "the last term of a development" has
no meaning to him. We are not first moral and then religious, first
struggling with evil and then conscious of overcoming it. God is with us
in the battle, and the victory is in every blow.

But there lies a deeper difficulty than this in the way of reconciling
morality and religion, or the presence of both God and man in human
action. Morality, in so far as it is achievement, might conceivably be
immediately identified with the process of an absolute good; but
morality is always a consciousness of failure as well. Its very essence
and verve is the conviction that the ideal is not actual. And the higher
a man's spiritual attainment, the more impressive is his view of the
evil of the world, and of the greatness of the work pressing to be done.
"Say not ye, there are yet four months, and then cometh harvest? Behold
I say unto you, 'Lift up your eyes and look on the fields; for they are
white already to harvest.'" It looks like blasphemy against morality to
say "that God lives in eternity and has, therefore, plenty of time."
Morality destroys one's contentment with the world; and its language
seems to be, "God is not here, but there; the kingdom is still to come."

Nor does it rest with condemning the world. It also finds flaws in its
own highest achievement; so that we seem ever "To mock ourselves in all
that's best of us." The beginning of the spiritual life seems just to
consist in a consciousness of complete failure, and that consciousness
ever grows deeper.

This is well illustrated in Browning's account of Caponsacchi; from the
time when Pompilia's smile first "glowed" upon him, and set him--

"Thinking how my life
Had shaken under me--broken short indeed
And showed the gap 'twixt what is, what should be--
And into what abysm the soul may slip"--[A]

[Footnote A: _The Ring and the Book_--_Giuseppe Caponsacchi_, 485-488.]

up to the time when his pure love for her revealed to him something of
the grandeur of goodness, and led him to define his ideal and also to
express his despair.

"To have to do with nothing but the true,
The good, the eternal--and these, not alone
In the main current of the general life,
But small experiences of every day,
Concerns of the particular hearth and home:
To learn not only by a comet's rush
But a rose's birth--not by the grandeur, God,
But the comfort, Christ. _All this_