ive
phases of man's life. There is not first the pain of the moral struggle,
and then the joy and rest of religion. The meat and drink is "to do the
will of Him that sent Me, to finish His work." Heaven is the service of
the good. "There is nothing in the world or out of it that can be called
unconditionally good, except the good will." The process of willing--the
moral activity--is its own reward; "the only jewel that shines in its
own light."

It may seem to some to be presumptuous thus to identify the divine and
the human; but to separate them makes both morality and religion
impossible. It robs morality of its ideal, and makes God a mere name for
the "unknown." Those who think that this identification degrades the
divine, misapprehend the nature of spirit; and forget that it is of its
essence to communicate itself. And goodness and truth do not become less
when shared; they grow greater. Spiritual possessions imply community
wherein there is no exclusion; and to the Christian the glory of God is
His communication of Himself. Hence the so-called religious humility,
which makes God different in nature from His work, really degrades the
object of its worship. It puts mere power above the gifts of spirit, and
it indicates that the worshipper has not been emancipated from the
slavishness, which makes a fetish of its God. Such a religion is not
free, and the development of man destroys it.

"I never realized God's birth before--
How He grew likest God in being born."[A]

[Footnote A: _The Ring and the Book--Pompilia_, 1690-1691.]

The intense love of the young mother drew the divine and the human
together, and set at nought the contrast which prose ever draws between
them. This thought of the unity of God and man is one which has frequent
utterance from the poet when his religious spirit is most deeply moved;
for it is the characteristic of religious feeling that it abolishes all
sense of separation. It removes all the limitations of finitude and
lifts man into rapturous unity with the God he adores; and it gives such
completeness to his life that it seems to him to be a joyous pulse of
the life that is absolute. The feeling of unity may be an illusion. This
we cannot discuss here; but, in any case, it is a feeling essential to
religion. And the philosophy which seeks to lift this feeling into clear
consciousness and to account for its existence, cannot but recognize
that it implies and presupposes the essential a