Thou hast no power, nor mayest conceive of mine,
But love I gave thee, with myself to love,
And thou must love me who have died for thee!’”
It is idle to assert that these are only dramatic presentations of the Christian faith. No poet could have imagined such utterances without feeling their significance; and the piercing splendour of their expression discloses his sympathy. He reveals it yet more unmistakably in Christmas Eve, (strophe XVII) and in Easter Day, (strophe XXX.) In the Epilogue to Dramatis Personæ it flashes out clearly. The second speaker, as Renan, has bewailed the vanishing of the face of Christ from the sorrowful vision of the race. The third speaker, the poet himself, answers:
“That one Face, far from vanish, rather grows,
Or decomposes but to recompose
Become my universe that feels and knows!”
“That face,” said Browning to a friend, “that face is the face of Christ: that is how I feel Him.”
Surely this is the religious message that the world most needs to-day. More and more everything in Christianity hangs upon the truth of the Incarnation. The alternative declares itself. Either no God whom we can know and love at all, or God personally manifest in Christ!
3. The third religious element in Browning’s poetry is his faith that this life is a probation, a discipline for the future. He says, again and again,