And this pre-ordained object of the Divine Love may assert with confidence—
I have God’s warrant, could I blend
All hideous sins, as in a cup,
To drink the mingled venoms up;
Secure my nature will convert
The draught to blossoming gladness fast.
Thus happiness assured, inevitable, for the elect. For those excluded from the sacred number—
I gaze below on hell’s fierce bed,
And those its waves of flame oppress,
Swarming in ghastly wretchedness;
Whose life on earth aspired to be
One altar-smoke, so pure!—to win
If not love like God’s love for me,
At least to keep his anger in;
And all their striving turned to sin.
It is difficult to believe that the author of this poem, at any rate, would willingly have identified himself with the Calvinistic creed. To Caliban, a creature so largely devoid of moral sense, we have, indeed, seen him assigning a belief closely akin to that involved in the meditations of Johannes, when he refers to the difference of the fates irrevocably allotted by Setebos to himself and to Prospero; both theories in curious contrast with the reflections of the Book of Wisdom: “For thou lovest all the things that are, and abhorrest nothing which thou hast made: for never wouldest thou have made anything, if thou hadst hated it.... But thou sparest all, for they are thine, O Lord, thou lover of souls.”[62]
Thus is explained “the trick of exclusiveness.” What of the “fine irreverence” of the preacher? Here the success of the sermon as a means of spiritual conviction, is held to be dependent upon the attitude of mind of the listener.
’Tis the taught already that profits by teaching. (l. 255.)
The method employed is only “abundantly convincing” to “those convinced before.” To the critic possessed of unprejudiced intellectual faculties, the arbitrary collection of texts and chapters brought into connection by the capricious choice of the preacher is deserving of condemnation as a misrepresentation of the truth, by “provings and parallels twisted and twined,” which would draw from even the more obvious Old Testament narrative proof of some doctrinal mystery of his creed—that Pharaoh received a demonstration
By his Baker’s dream of Baskets Three,
Of the doctrine of the Trinity. (ll. 230-233.)
Those of us who are inclined to reproach Browning for the severity of the condemnation of Roman Catholic ritual ascribed to the soliloquist in Section XI will do well to read again Sections I to IV, which assuredly place the service of Zion Chapel in a far less attractive light than that thrown upon the ceremony in progress beneath the dome of St. Peter’s.