ity, of self-sacrifice, except where
there is misery? How can good, the good which is highest, find itself,
and give utterance and actuality to the power that slumbers within it,
except as resisting evil? Are not good and evil relative? Is not every
criminal, when really known, working out in his own way the salvation of
himself and the world? Why cannot he, then, take his stand on his right
to move towards the good by any path that best pleases himself: since
move he must. It is easy for the religious conscience to admit with
Pippa that

"All service ranks the same with God--
With God, whose puppets, best and worst,
Are we: there is no last or first."[A]

[Footnote A: _Pippa Passes_.]

But, if so, why do we admire her sweet pre-eminence in moral beauty, and
in what is she really better than Ottima? The doctrine that

"God's in His heaven--
All's right with the world!"[B]

[Footnote B: _Ibid_.]

finds its echo in every devout spirit from the beginning of the world:
it is of the very essence of religion. But what of its moral
consequences? Religion, when thoroughly consistent, is the triumphant
reconciliation of all contradictions. It is optimism, the justification
of things as the process of evolving the good; and its peace and joy are
just the outcome of the conviction, won by faith, that the ideal is
actual, and that every detail of life is, in its own place, illumined
with divine goodness. But morality is the condemnation of things as they
are, by reference to a conception of a good which ought to be. The
absolute identification of the actual and ideal extinguishes morality,
either in something lower or something higher. But the moral ideal, when
reached, turns at once into a stepping-stone, a dead self; and the good
formulates itself anew as an ideal in the future. So that morality is
the sphere of discrepancy, and the moral life a progressive realization
of a good that can never be complete. It would thus seem to be
irreconcilably different from religion, which must, in some way or
other, find the good to be present, actual, absolute, without shadow of
change, or hint of limit or imperfection.

How, then, does the poet deal with the apparently fundamental
discrepancy between religion, which postulates the absolute and
universal supremacy of God, and morality, which postulates the absolute
supremacy of man within the sphere of his own action, in so far as it is
called right or wrong?

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