ABSTRACT

Divine truth is known not by looking outside the soul, but by watching the permanent residuum left beneath all its own changes. Mr Browning preaches that what men believe only because they desire it, is all human,—the falsehood through which Truth at last manifest itself,—but that the Truth which manifests itself through these falsehoods is that which forces itself back again upon the mind after all its efforts to believe otherwise, and which we could not know to be true till after the falsehoods had tried and failed to supersede it. That which endures in spite of not redounding to men’s vanity and dignity, that which after every effort to magnify humanity forces us into submission to its will, being quite other than our will,—this is divine will. Yet the true is gained through the false,—just as the air was breathed by the swimmer through the help of the water which taken alone would have drowned him,—and could not have been gained without its aid. It is the experience of human dreams which alone enables us to see that that which disappoints and breaks human dreams, and which forces us to mould ourselves into keeping with it, instead of indulging them any longer, is above and beyond all human dreams, and is indeed the permanent to which their transience leads us:

Each lie Redounded to the praise of man, was victory Man’s nature had both right to get, and might to gain, And by no means implied submission to the reign Of other quite as real a nature, that saw fit To have its way with man, not man his way with it. This time, acknowledgment and acquiescencc quell Their contrary in man; promotion proves as well Defeat: and Truth, unlike the False with Truth’s outside, Neither plumes up his will nor puffs him out with pride. I fancy, there must lurk some cogency i’ the claim, Man, such abatement made, submits to, all the same. But, if time’s pressure, light’s Or rather, dark’s approach, wrest thoroughly the rights

There’s something in the fact that such conclusion suits Nowise the pride of man, nor yet chimes in with attributes. Conspicuous in the lord of nature. He receives And not demands-not first likes faith and then believes.