A touchstone for God’s purposes,
Even as ourselves conceive of them.
Could he acquit us or condemn
For holding what no hand can loose,
Rejecting when we can’t but choose?
As well award the victor’s wreath
To whosoever should take breath
Duly each minute while he lived—
Grant heaven, because a man contrived
To see its sunlight every day
He walked forth on the public way. (E. D., iv, ll. 59-70.)
So La Saisiaz
Thenceforth neither good nor evil does man, doing what he must.
Lay but down that law as stringent “wouldst thou live again, be just!”
As this other “wouldst thou live now, regularly draw thy breath!
For, suspend the operation, straight law’s breach results in death—”
And (provided always, man, addressed this mode, be sound and sane)
Prompt and absolute obedience, never doubt, will law obtain! (ll. 497-502.)
The difference between the sanction attaching to laws moral and spiritual, and to those of Nature is not, Reason would hold, the result of defective power on the part of the legislator. Some definite purpose is existent in the scheme of the universe in accordance with which
Certain laws exist already which to hear means to obey;
Therefore not without a purpose these man must, while those man may
Keep and, for the keeping, haply gain approval and reward. (ll. 515-517.)
C. In short, the conclusion reached is that already propounded as the outcome of experience—that uncertainty is one of the essential attributes of life temporal. That in its probationary character lies its educative influence. That since “assurance needs must change this life to [him]” the author of La Saisiaz, no less than the soliloquist of Easter Day, would willingly continue in that state of probation which fosters growth and development; would cling to that uncertainty which allows of the existence of hope.
As employed by Reason, and generally throughout the poem, the word hope possesses more than the comparatively vague significance commonly attaching to it: it becomes practically synonymous with faith. In a similar sense the term occurs in the Epistle to the Romans,[93] when the writer asserts that “we are saved by hope: but hope that is seen is not hope” (the argument which Browning is here using). “For what a man seeth, why doth he yet hope for? But if we hope for that we see not, then do we with patience wait for it.” It is further noticeable that here, as elsewhere in Browning, is rejected the belief in a future which shall, in the words of Paracelsus, reduce the present world to the position of “a mere foil ... to some fine life to come.”[94] The necessity for a future life is throughout the argument based upon the fact that immortality is needed to render intelligible the conditions attendant upon life temporal. It is the unintelligibility of life, if cut short by death, which demands its renewal beyond the grave.
The concluding lines of the poem proper (immediately preceding the supplementary stanza), although not directly essential to the argument, are especially interesting from the allusions contained in them and the resulting inferences which have met with some diversity of interpretation.
Thanks, thou pine-tree of Makistos, wide thy giant torch I wave. (l. 579.)
is thus explained by Dr. Berdoe in his Browning Cyclopaedia.