his own deepest nature, he is obeying
God. The unity of divine and human within the spiritual life of man is a
real unity, just because man is free; the identity manifests itself
through the difference, and the difference is possible through the
unity.

Thus, in the light of an ideal which is moral, and therefore perfect--an
ideal gradually realizing itself in a process which is endless--the poet
is able to maintain at once the community between man and God, which is
necessary to religion, and their independence, which is necessary to
morality. The conception of God as giving, which is the main doctrine of
Christianity, and of man as akin with God, is applied by him to the
whole spiritual nature of man, and not merely to his emotion. The
process of evolution is thus a process towards truth, as well as
goodness; in fact, goodness and truth are known as inseparable.
Knowledge, too, is a Divine endowment. "What gift of man is not from God
descended?" What gift of God can be deceptive?

"Take all in a word: the truth in God's breast
Lies trace for trace upon ours impressed:
Though He is so bright and we so dim,
We are made in His image to witness Him."[A]

[Footnote A: _Christmas-Eve_.]

The Pope recognizes clearly the inadequacy of human knowledge; but he
also recognizes that it has a Divine source.

"Yet my poor spark had for its source, the sun;
Thither I sent the great looks which compel
Light from its fount: all that I do and am
Comes from the truth, or seen or else surmised,
Remembered or divined, as mere man may."[B]

[Footnote B: _The Ring and the Book_--_The Pope_, 1285-1289.]

The last words indicate a suspicion of a certain defect in knowledge,
which is not recognized in human love; nevertheless, in these earlier
poems, the poet does not analyze human nature into a finite and
infinite, or seek to dispose of his difficulties by the deceptive
solvent of a dualistic agnosticism. He treats spirit as a unity, and
refuses to set love and reason against each other. Man's _life_, for the
poet, and not merely man's love, begins with God, and returns back to
God in the rapt recognition of God's perfect being by reason, and in the
identification of man's purposes with His by means of will and love.

"What is left for us, save, in growth
Of soul, to rise up, far past both,
From the gift looking to the giver,
And from the cistern to the river,
And from the finite to infinity
And fro