I was ever a fighter, so—one fight more,
The best and the last!
I would hate that death bandaged my eyes, and forbore,
And bade me creep past.
Thus the first speaker in Easter Day refers to his childish aversion to uncertainty, even though uncertainty meant present safety.
I would always burst
The door ope, know my fate at first. (ll. 417-418.)
This then is the man, a fearless fighter, an uncompromising investigator who, whilst he would “fain be a Christian,” is yet bound to reject a mere uncritical acceptance of the tenets of Christianity. Opposed to him in the first twelve Sections is a second speaker to whom, somewhat strangely it would seem, the designation sceptic has been applied. The title in its virtual sense, is, indeed, justly applicable, but in the ordinary acceptation might possibly prove misleading. It is a fact of common experience that among professing Christians, of whatever form of creed, are to be found those who, in that peculiar crisis of life when death removes from sight those dearest to them, go back from the fundamental tenets of a faith in which hitherto their confidence appeared to have been unshaken. Even that main pillar of faith, a belief in the immortality of the soul, lies temporarily shattered. Such failure suggests itself as the result of an insufficiently considered acceptance of dogma; an acceptance without question, rather than in spite of doubts and questionings. This distinction we have seen Bishop Blougram drawing between the position of the man who implicitly believes, since, his logical and reasoning faculties being undeveloped or inactive, no cause for question arises; and the position of him who, in the midst of spiritual perplexity, makes “doubt occasion still more faith.” To Browning, with whom half-heartedness was the one unpardonable sin, this so-called faith would necessarily be far more dangerous than downright acknowledged scepticism. Hence the succeeding argument of Easter Day becomes one, not between a pronounced sceptic and a would-be Christian, but rather between two nominal Christians whose outward profession may be similar but the motives inspiring it wholly at variance—This in accordance with Browning’s peculiar attraction towards problems involving the establishment of connection between motive and action. As in Bishop Blougram’s Apology his psychological analysis would reconcile two apparently irreconcilable aspects of the mind of a prelate whose position had perplexed the world. As by a method closely akin to this treatment, he offers explanation of the presence, amongst the illiterate and bigoted congregation of Zion Chapel, of a man whose intellectual capacity should have led him to assume a position of wider tolerance: so here, too, he would discover and reveal the link between the outward form of creed and the widely differing spiritual acceptance of the same in two individual cases.
I. The arguments of Sections I to XII are not always easy to follow closely; but, in passing with Section XIII to the history of the Vision, all obscurity vanishes, and we have no difficulty in tracing the line of thought of the first speaker, resulting in his willing reconcilement to the uncertainties inseparable from human life as at present constituted. A brief attempt to follow the preceding course of argument will afford an explanation of the speaker’s position at the opening of Section XIII. (1) The difficulty advanced at the outset of attaining to even a moderate realization of the possibilities of the Christian life is ascribed by the first speaker (at the close of Section I) to the essential indefiniteness in things spiritual implied in the very suggestion of advance, of growth. That which we believed yesterday to be the mountain-top proves to-day but the vantage-ground for a yet higher ascent:
And where we looked for crowns to fall,
We find the tug’s to come. (ll. 27-28.)
In reply, the second speaker admits the existence of difficulty, but of one differing somewhat in character from that recognized by his interlocutor. The Christian life were a sufficiently straightforward matter, if belief pure and simple were possible: if, as he puts the case, the relative worth of things temporal and eternal were once rendered clear and unmistakable. Even martyrdom itself would then become as nothing to the believer.
(2) The first speaker, or the soliloquist (since he it is who actually advances the arguments consistent with the position of his imaginary companion), whilst accepting the truth of the proposition, reasserts the theory, little more than suggested in Section I, that such fixity and definiteness of belief is, under existing conditions, an impossibility. If not in the visible world, granting so much, yet beyond it, is that which may not be grasped by the finite intelligence. Such limitations may perchance serve for the term of mortal life; but in the light thrown upon life by the approach of death a change will inevitably pass over the aspect of all things, and
Eyes, late wide, begin to wink
Nor see the path so well. (ll. 57-58.)
Again, the Christian who does not wish his position of moderate faith to be disturbed, agrees; but attributes the shifting ground of belief to the self-evident truth that faith would no longer be faith were the objects with which it deals mere matters of common and proved knowledge, belief in them as inevitable as the necessity of breath to the living creature.