Browning as a Philosophical and Religious Teacher

by Sir Henry Jones

Good struggles but evil reigns."^A

A: Reverie—Asolando.

But love in man is a suggestion of a love without; a proof, in fact, that God is love, for man's love is God's love in man. The source of the pity that man shows, and of the apparent evils in the world which excite it, is the same. The power which called man into being, itself rises up in man against the wrongs in the world. The voice of the moral consciousness, approving the good, condemning evil, and striving to annul it, is the voice of God, and has, therefore, supreme authority. We do wrong, therefore, in thinking that it is the weakness of man which is matched against the might of evil in the world, and that we are fighting a losing battle. It is an incomplete, abstract, untrue view of the facts of life which puts God as irresistible Power in the outer world, and forgets that the same irresistible Power works, under the higher form of love, in the human heart.

"Is not God now i' the world His power first made?

Is not His love at issue still with sin,

Visibly when a wrong is done on earth?

Love, wrong, and pain, what see I else around?"^B

B: A Death in the Desert.

In this way, therefore, the poet argues back from the moral consciousness of man to the goodness of God. And he finds the ultimate proof of this goodness in the very pessimism and scepticism and despair, that come with the view of the apparently infinite waste in the world and the endless miseries of humanity. The source of this despair, namely, the recognition of evil and wrong, is just the Godhood in man. There is no way of accounting for the fact that "Man hates what is and loves what should be," except by "blending the quality of man with the quality of God." And "the quality of God" is the fundamental fact in man's history. Love is the last reality the poet always reaches. Beneath the pessimism is love: without love of the good there were no recognition of evil, no condemnation of it, and no despair.

But the difficulty still remains as to the permission of evil, even though it should prove in the end to be merely apparent.