A fuller realization of Truth has become possible in these later days than in the past of Jewish ritual, when
The presence of the Lord,
In the glory of His cloud,
Had filled the House of the Lord.
Of Easter Day it has been remarked in this connection, “If Mr. Browning has meant to say ... that religious certainties are required for the undeveloped mind, but that the growing intelligence walks best by a receding light, he denies the positive basis of Christian belief.”[72] Comparing this criticism with the treatment in A Death in the Desert of the subject of faith in relation to the Incarnation, it becomes sufficiently clear that an acceptance of “the positive basis of Christian belief” was to Browning’s mind perfectly compatible, not indeed with “a receding light,” but with that absence of certainty in matters spiritual which the First Speaker of Easter Day accepts as inevitable. And surely the suggestion in Easter Day, as elsewhere in Browning, is that the development of the “religious intelligence” is best advanced, not by a receding light, but by that ever-increasing illuminative power which shall effect gradually the revelation presented in the Vision of the Judgment as the work of a moment. The revelation of the true relation between things temporal and spiritual, between the divine and the human. For, whilst St. John bases his arguments upon the central assurance that “God the Truth” is, of all things, alone unchangeable, immediately upon the assurance follows the assertion—
Man apprehends Him newly at each stage
Whereat earth’s ladder drops, its service done.[73]
Since “such progress” as is the peculiar characteristic of human nature
Could no more attend his soul
Were all it struggles after found at first
And guesses changed to knowledge absolute,
Than motion wait his body, were all else
Than it the solid earth on every side,
Where now through space he moves from rest to rest.[74]
Thus with Christianity itself
Will [man] give up fire
For gold or purple once he knows its worth?
Could he give Christ up were His worth as plain?
Therefore, I say, to test man, the proofs shift,
Nor may he grasp that fact like other fact,
And straightway in his life acknowledge it,
As, say, the indubitable bliss of fire.[75]
The effect on human nature and life of the change of “guesses” to “knowledge absolute” is elsewhere exhibited in concrete form where Lazarus, in An Epistle of Karshish, is represented, as Browning’s imagination would visualize him, in the years succeeding his resurrection from the dead. There the need for faith is accounted as no longer existing. During those four days of the spirit’s sojourn beyond the limits of the visible world, the unveiled light of eternity had thrown into their true relative positions the things of time. Thenceforth, for him who had once known, the hopes and fears attendant upon uncertainty were no longer a possibility. In view of that which is eternal, temporal prosperity or adversity had become of small moment. The advance of a hostile force upon the sacred city, centre of the national life, was to the risen nature an event trifling as “the passing of a mule with gourds.” Sickness, death, were alike met by the imperturbable “God wills.” Yet this apparently immovable serenity was at once overthrown by contact with “ignorance and carelessness and sin.” To the non-Christian onlooker, the attitude thus attained was attributable to the peculiar condition of life by which heaven was
Opened to a soul while yet on earth,
Earth forced on a soul’s use while seeing heaven.