Browning as a Philosophical and Religious Teacher

by Sir Henry Jones

The weight from scale to scale, do justice to the drift

Of nature, and explain the glories by the shames

Mixed up in man, one stuff miscalled by different names."^A

We are told that—

"Force, guile were arms which earned

My praise, not blame at all."

A: Fifine at the Fair, cviii.

Confronted with such utterances as these, it is only natural that, rather than entangle the poet in them, we should regard them as the sophistries of a philosophical Don Juan, powerful enough, under the stress of self-defence, to confuse the distinctions of right and wrong. But, as we shall try to show in the next chapter, such an apparent justification of evil cannot be avoided by a reflective optimist; and it is implicitly contained even in those religious utterances of Rabbi Ben Ezra, Christmas Eve, and A Death in the Desert, with which we not only identify the poet but ourselves, in so far as we share his faith that

"God's in His heaven,—