What is most clearly personal and most deeply felt in it is the
exaltation of love, which seems to have determined the whole imaginative
fabric. Love, Browning's highest expression of spiritual vitality, was
the cardinal principle of his creed; God was vital to him only as a
loving God, and Christ only as the human embodiment and witness of God's
love. The traditional story of Christ was in this sense of profound
significance for him, while he turned away with indifference or disgust
from the whole doctrinal apparatus of the Atonement, which, however
closely bound up with the popular conception of God's love, had nothing
to do with his conception of it, and he could thus consistently decline
the name of Christian, as some witnesses aver that he did.[42] It was
thus in entire keeping with his way of approaching Christianity that he
imagined this moving episode,--the dying apostle whose genius had made
that way so singularly persuasive, the little remnant of doomed and
hunted fugitives who seem to belong to earth only by the spiritual bond
of their love to him, as his own physical life is now a firebrand all
but extinct,--"all ashes save the tip that holds a spark," but that still
glowing with undiminished soul. The material fabric which enshrines this
fine essence of the Christian spirit is of the frailest; and the
contrast is carried out in the scenic setting,--the dim cool cavern,
with its shadowy depth and faint glimmerings of day, the hushed voices,
the ragged herbage, and the glory in the face of the passing saint
within; without, the hard dazzling glare of the desert noon, and the
burning blue, and the implacable and triumphant might of Rome.

[Footnote 42: Other testimony, it is true, equally strong, asserts that
he accepted the name; in any case he used it in a sense of his own.]

The discourse of the "aged friend" is full of subtle and vivid thinking,
and contains some of Browning's most memorable utterances about Love, in
particular the noble lines--

"For life with all it yields of joy and woe ...
Is just our chance of the prize of learning love,
How love might be, hath been indeed, and is."

Nowhere, either, do we see more clearly how this master-conception of
his won control of his reasoning powers, framing specious ladders to
conclusions towards which his whole nature yearned, but which his vision
of the world did not uniformly bear out. Man loved, and God would not be
above man if He di