s:

I starve in soul:
So may mankind: and since men congregate
In towns, not woods--to Ispahan forthwith!

Such is the lesson of energetic charity. And the lesson for the
acceptance of providential gifts is that put in words by the poor
melon-seller, once the Shah's Prime Minister--words spoken in the spirit
of the afflicted Job--"Shall we receive good at the hand of God and
shall we not receive evil?"[143] Or rather--Shall not our hearts even in
the midst of evil be lifted up in gratitude at the remembrance of the
good which we have received? Browning proceeds, under a transparent veil
of Oriental fable, to consider the story of the life of Christ. Do we
believe in that tale of wonder in the full sense of the word belief?
The more it really concerns us, the more exacting grow our demands for
evidence of its truth; an otiose assent is easy, but this has none of
the potency of genuine conviction. And, after all, intellectual assent
is of little importance compared with that love for the Divine which may
co-exist as truly with denial as with assent. _The Family_ sets forth,
through a parable, the wisdom of accepting and living in our human views
of things transcendent. Why pray to God at all? Why not rather accept
His will and His Providential disposition of our lives as absolutely
wise, and right? That, Browning replies, may be the way of the angels.
We are men, and it is God's will that we should feel and think as men:

Be man and nothing more--
Man who, as man conceiving, hopes and fears,
And craves and deprecates, and loves and loathes,
And bids God help him, till death touch his eyes
And show God granted most, denying all.

The same spirit of acceptance of our intellectual and moral limitations
is applied in _The Sun_ to the defence of anthropomorphic religion. Our
spirit, burdened with the good gifts of life, looks upward for relief in
gratitude and praise; but we can praise and thank only One who is
righteous and loving, as we conceive righteousness and love. Let us not
strive to pass beyond these human feelings and conceptions. Perhaps they
are wholly remote from the unknown reality. They are none the less the
conceptions proper to humanity; we have no capacities with which to
correct them; let us hold fast by our human best, and preserve, as the
preacher very correctly expressed it, "the integrity of our
anthropomorphism." The "magnified non-natural man," and "the three Lor