nal, not to cease to be in it, but to live in it more fully; for
spirits necessarily commune. He dies to the temporal interests and
narrow ends of the exclusive self, and lives an ever-expanding life in
the life of others, manifesting more and more that spiritual principle
which is the life of God, who lives and loves in all things. "God is a
being in whom we exist; with whom we are in principle one; with whom the
human spirit is identical, in the sense that He _is_ all which the human
spirit is capable of becoming."[B]

[Footnote B: Green's _Prolegomena to Ethics_, p. 198.]

From this point of view, and in so far as Browning is loyal to the
conception of the community of the divine and human, he is able to
maintain his faith in God, not in spite of knowledge, but through the
very movement of knowledge within him. He is not obliged, as in his
later works, to look for proofs, either in nature, or elsewhere; nor to
argue from the emotion of love in man, to a cause of that emotion. He
needs no syllogistic process to arrive at God; for the very activity of
his own spirit as intelligence, as the reason which thinks and acts, is
the activity of God within him. Scepticism, is impossible, for the very
act of doubting is the activity of reason, and a profession of the
knowledge of the truth.

"I
Put no such dreadful question to myself,
Within whose circle of experience burns
The central truth, Power, Wisdom, Goodness,--God:
I must outlive a thing ere know it dead:
When I outlive the faith there is a sun,
When I lie, ashes to the very soul,--
Someone, not I, must wail above the heap,
'He died in dark whence never morn arose.'"[A]

[Footnote A: _The Ring and the Book--The Pope_, 1631-1639.]

And this view of God as immanent in man's experience also forecloses all
possibility of failure. Beneath the failure, the possibility of which is
involved in a moral life, lies the divine element, working through
contradiction to its own fulfilment. Failure is necessary for man,
because he grows: but, for the same reason, the failure is not final.
Thus, the poet, instead of denying the evidence of his intellect as to
the existence of evil, or casting doubt on the distinction between right
and wrong, or reducing the chequered course of human history into a
phantasmagoria of mere mental appearances, can regard the conflict
between good and evil as real and earnest. He can look evil in the fa