,
That prayed or praised, all unaware
Of its fitness for aught but praise or prayer,
Made perfect as a thing of course."[B]

[Footnote B: _Christmas-Eve_.]

Man must find his law within himself, be the source of his own activity,
not passive or receptive, but outgoing and effective.

"Rejoice we are allied
To That which doth provide
And not partake, effect and not receive!
A spark disturbs our clod;
Nearer we hold of God
Who gives, than of His tribes that take, I must believe."[C]

[Footnote C: _Rabbi Ben Ezra_.]

This near affinity between the divine and human is just what Browning
seems to repudiate in his later poems, when he speaks as if the
absolute, in order to maintain its own supremacy over man, had to stint
its gifts and endow him only with a defective reason. In the earlier
period of the poet there is far less timidity. He then saw that the
greater the gift, the greater the Giver; that only spirit can reveal
spirit; that "God is glorified in man," and that love is at its fullest
only when it gives itself.

In insisting on such identity of the human spirit with the divine, our
poet does not at any time run the risk of forgetting that the identity
is not absolute. Absolute identity would be pantheism, which leaves God
lonely and loveless, and extinguishes man, as well as his morality.

"Man is not God, but hath God's end to serve,
A Master to obey, a course to take,
Somewhat to cast off, somewhat to become."[A]

[Footnote A: _A Death in the Desert_.]

Man, at best, only moves _towards_ his ideal: God is conceived as the
ever-existing ideal. God, in short, is the term which signifies for us
the Being who is eternally all in all, and who, therefore, is hidden
from us who are only moving _towards_ perfection, in the excess of the
brightness of His own glory. Nevertheless, as Browning recognizes, the
grandeur of God's perfection is just His outflowing love. And that love
is never complete in its manifestation, till it has given itself. Man's
life, as spirit, is thus one in nature with that of the absolute. But
the unity is not complete, because man is only potentially perfect. He
is the process _of_ the ideal; his life is the divine activity within
him. Still, it is also man's activity. For the process, being the
process of spirit, is a _free_ process--one in which man himself
energizes; so that, in doing God's will, he is doing his own highest
will, and, in obeying the law of