Some semblance of a woman yet,
With eyes to help me to forget,
Shall look on me. (ll. 941-943.)
The love of “parents, brothers, children, friends”: the seeker has stopped short of Pippa’s final decision,[69] “Best love of all is God’s.” Why has he failed to realize this until Time has passed? Why, but because, with Cleon, he deemed it “a doctrine to be held by no sane man,” that divine Love should prove commensurate with divine Power; that He “who made the whole,” should love the whole, should
Undergo death in thy stead
In flesh like thine. (ll. 974-975.)
But this scepticism, based upon the ground that in the Gospel story is found “too much love,” is illogical, since it suggests by implication the belief of man that his fellow mortals, in whom he daily discerns abundant capacity for ill-will, have been yet capable of inventing a scheme of perfect love such as that involved in the history of the Incarnation. The doctrine that this was the divine work is assuredly less difficult of credence than that which assigns it to the invention of the human imagination? Disbelief on this the ground of “too much love,” revealed in the Gospel story, is dealt with also by the Evangelist in A Death in the Desert. There, too, is presented a position similar to that occupied by the soliloquist of Easter Day. Through satiety, man
Has turned round on himself and stands,[70]
Which in the course of nature is, to die.
When man demanded proof of the existence of a God, the representative of Power and Will, evidence of all was granted—
And when man questioned, “What if there be love
Behind the will and might, as real as they?”—
He needed satisfaction God could give,
And did give, as ye have the written word.
But when the written word no longer sufficed, when (following the argument of this thirtieth Section of Easter Day) man believed himself to be the originator of love, when
Beholding that love everywhere,
He reasons, “Since such love is everywhere,
And since ourselves can love and would be loved,
We ourselves make the love, and Christ was not.”
Then, asks the Evangelist,