ffinity of the divine
nature with the nature of man.

Thus, both from the side of morality and from that of religion, we are
brought to recognize the unity of God with man as a spiritual being. The
moral ideal is man's idea of perfection, that is, his idea of God. While
theology and philosophy are often occupied with the vain task of
bridging a chasm between the finite and the infinite, which they assume
to be separated, the supreme facts of the life of man as a spirit spring
from their unity. In other words, morality and religion are but
different manifestations of the same principle. The good that man
effects is, at the same time, the working of God within him. The
activity that man is,

"tending up,
Holds, is upheld by, God, and ends the man
Upward in that dread point of intercourse
Nor needs a place, for it returns to Him."[A]

[Footnote A: _A Death in the Desert_.]

"God, perchance,
Grants each new man, by some as new a mode,
Inter-communication with Himself
Wreaking on finiteness infinitude."[B]

[Footnote B: _Prince Hohenstiel-Schwangau._]

And while man's moral endeavour is thus recognized as the activity of
God within him, it is also implied that the divine being can be known
only as revealed, and incarnated, if one may so say, in a perfect human
character. It was a permanent conviction of Browning, that

"the acknowledgment of God in Christ
Accepted by thy reason, solves for thee
All questions in the earth and out of it."

So far from regarding the Power in the world which makes for
righteousness, as "not-ourselves," as Matthew Arnold did in his haste,
that Power is known to be the man's true self and more, and morality is
the gradual process whereby its content is evolved. And man's state of
perfection, which is symbolized for the intelligent by the term Heaven,
is, for Browning,

"The equalizing, ever and anon,
In momentary rapture, great with small,
Omniscience with intelligency, God
With man--the thunder glow from pole to pole
Abolishing, a blissful moment-space,
Great cloud alike and small cloud, in one fire--
As sure to ebb as sure again to flow
When the new receptivity deserves
The new completion."[A]

[Footnote A: _Prince Hohenstiel-Schwangau_.]

Thus, therefore, does the poet wed the divine strength with human
weakness; and the principle of unity, thus conceived, gives him at once