e, which are also defective life; and this is why we find in
his men and women those vivid, various, and subtly compounded motives
and feelings, which make our contact with them a slight, but continuous
electric shock.

And since the belief in personality is the belief in human life in its
fullest and truest form, it includes the belief in love and
self-sacrifice. It may, indeed, be said that while Mr. Browning's
judgments are leavened by the one idea, they are steadily coloured by
the other; this again being so evident to his serious renders that I
need only indicate it here. But the love of love does more than colour
his views of life; it is an essential element in his theology; and it
converts what would otherwise be a pure Theism into a mystical
Christianity which again is limited by his rejection of all dogmatic
religious truth. I have already alluded to his belief that, though the
Deity is not to be invested with human emotions, He can only be reached
through them. Love, according to him, is the necessary channel; since a
colourless Omnipotence is outside the conception as outside the
sympathies of man. Christ is a message of Divine love, indispensable and
therefore true; but He is, as such, a spiritual mystery far more than a
definable or dogmatic fact. A definite revelation uttered for all men
and for all time is denied by the first principles of Mr. Browning's
religious belief. What Christianity means for him, and what it does not,
we shall also see in his works.

It is almost superfluous to add that Mr. Browning's dramatic sympathies
and metaphysical or religious ideas constitute him an optimist. He
believes that no experience is wasted, and that all life is good in its
way. We also see that his optimism takes the individual and not the race
for its test and starting point; and that he places the tendency to good
in a _conscious_ creative power which is outside both, and which deals
directly with each separate human soul. But neither must we forget that
the creative purpose, as he conceives it, fulfils itself equally through
good and evil; so that he does not shrink from the contemplation of evil
or by any means always seek to extenuate it. He thinks of it
philosophically as a condition of good, or again, as an excess or a
distortion of what is good; but he can also think of it, in the natural
sense, as a distinct mode of being which a bad man may prefer for its
own sake, as a good man prefers its opposite, a