Browning as a Philosophical and Religious Teacher - Sir Henry Jones

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in obedience to a necessity which is absolute. That morality is the essence of things, that wrong must prove its weakness, that right is the only might, is reiterated and illustrated on all his pages; they are now commonplaces of speculation on matters of history, if not conscious practical principles which guide its makers. But Carlyle never inquired into the character of this moral necessity, and he overlooked the beneficence which places death at the heart of sin. He never saw wrong except on its way to execution, or in the death throes; but he did not look in the face of the gentle power that led it on to death. He saw the necessity which rules history, but not the beneficent character of that necessity.

      The same limitations marred his view of duty, which was his greatest revelation to his age. He felt its categorical authority and its binding force. But the power which imposed the duty was an alien power, awful in majesty, infinite in might, a "great task-master"; and the duty itself was an outer law, written in letters of flame across the high heavens, in comparison with which man's action at its best sank into failure. His only virtue is obedience, and his last rendering even of himself is "unprofitable servant." In this he has much of the combined strength and weakness of the old Scottish Calvinism. "He stands between the individual and the Infinite without hope or guide. He has a constant disposition to crush the human being by comparing him with God," said Mazzini, with marvellous penetration. "From his lips, at times so daring, we seem to hear every instant the cry of the Breton Mariner—'My God protect me! My bark is so small, and Thy ocean so vast.'" His reconciliation of God and man was incomplete: God seemed to him to have manifested Himself to man but not in man. He did not see that "the Eternity which is before and behind us is also within us."

      But the moral law which commands is just the reflection of the aspirations of progressive man, who always creates his own horizon. The extension of duty is the objective counterpart of man's growth; a proof of victory and not of failure, a sign that man is mounting upwards. And, if so, it is irrational to infer the impossibility of success from the magnitude of the demands of a moral law, which is itself the promise of a better future. The hard problems set for us by our social environment are recognized as set by ourselves; for, in matters of morality, the eye sees only what the heart prompts. The very statement of the difficulty contains the potency of its solution; for evil, when understood, is on the way towards being overcome, and the good, when seen, contains the promise of its own fulfilment. It is ignorance which is ruinous, as when the cries of humanity beat against a deaf ear; and we can take a comfort, denied to Carlyle, from the fact that he has made us awake to our social duties. He has let loose the confusion upon us, and it is only natural that we should at first be overcome by a sense of bewildered helplessness. But this very sense contains the germ of hope, and England is struggling to its feet to wrestle with its wrongs. Carlyle has brought us within sight of our future, and we are now taking a step into it. He has been our guide in the wilderness; but he died there, and was denied the view from Pisgah.

      Now, this view was given to Robert Browning, and he broke out into a song of victory, whose strains will give strength and comfort to many in the coming time. That his solution of the evils of life is not final, may at once be admitted. There are elements in the problem of which he has taken no account, and which will force those who seek light on the deeper mysteries of man's moral nature, to go beyond anything that the poet has to say. Even the poet himself grows, at least in some directions, less confident of the completeness of his triumph as he grows older. His faith in the good does not fail, but it is the faith of one who confesses to ignorance, and links himself to his finitude. Still, so thorough is his conviction of the moral purpose of life, of the certainty of the good towards which man is moving, and of the beneficence of the power which is at work everywhere in the world, that many of his poems ring like the triumphant songs of Luther.

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