idual and the Infinite without hope or guide. He has a constant
disposition to crush the human being by comparing him with God," said
Mazzini, with marvellous penetration. "From his lips, at times so
daring, we seem to hear every instant the cry of the Breton Mariner--'My
God protect me! My bark is so small, and Thy ocean so vast.'" His
reconciliation of God and man was incomplete: God seemed to him to have
manifested Himself _to_ man but not _in_ man. He did not see that "the
Eternity which is before and behind us is also within us."

But the moral law which commands is just the reflection of the
aspirations of progressive man, who always creates his own horizon. The
extension of duty is the objective counterpart of man's growth; a proof
of victory and not of failure, a sign that man is mounting upwards. And,
if so, it is irrational to infer the impossibility of success from the
magnitude of the demands of a moral law, which is itself the promise of
a better future. The hard problems set for us by our social environment
are recognized as set by ourselves; for, in matters of morality, the eye
sees only what the heart prompts. The very statement of the difficulty
contains the potency of its solution; for evil, when understood, is on
the way towards being overcome, and the good, when seen, contains the
promise of its own fulfilment. It is ignorance which is ruinous, as when
the cries of humanity beat against a deaf ear; and we can take a
comfort, denied to Carlyle, from the fact that he has made us awake to
our social duties. He has let loose the confusion upon us, and it is
only natural that we should at first be overcome by a sense of
bewildered helplessness. But this very sense contains the germ of hope,
and England is struggling to its feet to wrestle with its wrongs.
Carlyle has brought us within sight of our future, and we are now taking
a step into it. He has been our guide in the wilderness; but he died
there, and was denied the view from Pisgah.

Now, this view was given to Robert Browning, and he broke out into a
song of victory, whose strains will give strength and comfort to many in
the coming time. That his solution of the evils of life is not final,
may at once be admitted. There are elements in the problem of which he
has taken no account, and which will force those who seek light on the
deeper mysteries of man's moral nature, to go beyond anything that the
poet has to say. Even the poet himself grows, at l