the same. The story and the teaching of Christ had alike one
end--to plant in the human consciousness the assurance of Divine Love,
and to make us, in our degree, conscious partakers of that love. Where
love is, there is Christ. Our conceptions of God are relative to our own
understanding; but God as power, God as a communicating intelligence,
God as love--Father, Son and Spirit--is the utmost that we can conceive
of things above us. Let us now put that knowledge--imperfect though it
may be--to use. Power, intelligence, love--these surround us everywhere;
they are not mere projections from our own brain or hand or heart; and
by us they are inconceivable otherwise than as personal attributes. The
historical story of Christ is not lost, for it has grown into a larger
assurance of faith. We are not concerned with the linen clothes and
napkins of the empty sepulchre; Christ is arisen. Why revert to discuss
miracles? The work of miracles--whatever they may have been--was long
ago accomplished. The knowledge of the Divine Love, its appropriation by
our own hearts, and the putting forth of that love in our lives--such
for us is the Christian faith, such is the work of Christ accomplishing
itself in humanity at the present time. And the Christian story is no
myth but a reality, not because we can prove true the beliefs of the
first century, but because those beliefs contained within them a larger
and more enduring belief. The acorn has not perished because it has
expanded into an oak.

This, reduced here to the baldest statement, is in substance the dying
testimony of Browning's St John. It is thrown into lyrical form as his
own testimony in the _Epilogue_ to the volume of 1864. The voices of
singers, the sound of the trumpets of the Jewish Dedication Day, when
the glory of the Lord in His cloud filled His house, have fallen silent.
We are told by some that the divine Face, known to early Christian days
as love, has withdrawn from earth for ever, and left humanity enthroned
as its sole representative:

Oh, dread succession to a dizzy post,
Sad sway of sceptre whose mere touch appals.

Browning's reply is that to one whose eyes are rightly informed the
whole of nature and of human life shows itself as a perpetual mystery of
providential care:

Why, where's the need of Temple, when the walls
O' the world are that? What use of swells and falls
From Levites' choir, Priests' cries, and trumpet calls?