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?
That one Face, far from vanish, rather grows,
Or decomposes but to recompose,
Become my universe that feels and knows.[[91]]
In the great poem of 1868-69, The Ring and the Book, one speaker, the venerable Pope, like St John of A Death in the Desert, has almost reached the term of a long life: he is absorbed in the solemn weighing of truth and falsehood, good and evil; his soul, like the soul of the dying Evangelist:
Lies bare to the universal prick of light.
He, if any of the speakers in that sequence of monologues, expresses Browning's own highest thought. And the Pope's exposition of the Christianity of our modern age is identical with that of John. Man's mind is but "a convex glass" in which is represented all that by us can be conceived of God, "our known unknown." The Pope has heard the Christian story which is abroad in the world; he loves it and finds it credible. God's power—that is clearly discernible in the universe; His intelligence—that is no less evidently present. What of love? The dread machinery of sin and sorrow on this globe of ours seems to negative the idea of divine love. The surmise of immortality may indeed justify the ways of God to man; this "dread machinery" may be needed to evolve man's highest moral qualities. The acknowledgment of God in Christ, the divine self-sacrifice of love, for the Pope, as for St John, solves
All questions in the earth and out of it.
But whether the truth of the early centuries be an absolute historic fact,
Or only truth reverberate, changed, made pass
A spectrum into mind, the narrow eye—
The same and not the same, else unconceived—
the Pope dare not affirm. Nor does he regard the question as of urgent importance at the present day; the effect of the Christian tale—historic fact, or higher fact expressed in myth—remains:
So my heart be struck,
What care I,—by God's gloved hand or the bare?