most, in our own time,
have to go content with a simple, incomplete enough Suppression of this
controversy: to a few Solution of it is indispensable."

Solution, and not Suppression, is what Browning sought; he did, in fact,
propound a solution, which, whether finally satisfactory or not, at
least carries us beyond the easy compromises of ordinary religious and
ethical teaching. He does not deny the universality of God's beneficence
or power, and divide the realm of being between Him and the adversary:
nor, on the other hand, does he limit man's freedom, and stultify ethics
by extracting the sting of reality from sin. To limit God, he knew, was
to deny Him; and, whatever the difficulties he felt in regarding the
absolute Spirit as realising itself in man, he could not be content to
reduce man into a temporary phantom, an evanescent embodiment of
"spiritual" or natural forces, that take a fleeting form in him as they
pursue their onward way.

Browning held with equal tenacity to the idea of a universal benevolent
order, and to the idea of the moral freedom of man within it. He was
driven in opposite directions by two beliefs, both of which he knew to
be essential to the life of man as spirit, and both of which he
illustrates throughout his poems with an endless variety of poetic
expression. He endeavoured to find God in man and still to leave man
free. His optimistic faith sought reconciliation with morality. The
vigour of his ethical doctrine is as pre-eminent, as the fulness of his
conviction of the absolute sway of the Good. Side by side with his
doctrine that there is no failure, no wretchedness of corruption that
does not conceal within it a germ of goodness, is his sense of the evil
of sin, of the infinite earnestness of man's moral warfare, and of the
surpassing magnitude of the issues at stake for each individual soul. So
powerful is his interest in man as a moral agent, that he sees nought
else in the world of any deep concern. "My stress lay," he said in his
preface to _Sordello_ (1863), "on the incidents in the development of a
soul: little else is worth study. I, at least, always thought so--you,
with many known and unknown to me, think so--others may one day think
so." And this development of a soul is not at any time regarded by the
poet as a peaceful process, like the growth of a plant or animal.
Although he thinks of the life of man as the gradual realization of a
divine purpose within him, he does not