"[A]

[Footnote A: _Grammarian's Funeral_.]

There are other "adventures brave and new" for man, "more lives yet,"
other ways of warfare, other depths of goodness and heights of love. The
poet lifts the moral ideal into infinitude, and removes all limits to
the possibility and necessity of being good. Nay, the process itself is
good. Moral activity is its own bountiful reward; for moral progress,
which means struggle, is the best thing in the world or out of it. To
end such a process, to stop that activity, were therefore evil. But it
cannot end, for it is the self-manifestation of the divine life. There
is plenty of way to make, for the ideal is absolute goodness. The
process cannot exhaust the absolute, and it is impossible that man
should be God. And yet this process is the process of the absolute, the
working of the ideal, the presence of the highest in man as a living
power realizing itself in his acts and in his thoughts. And the absolute
cannot fail; not in man, for the process is the evolution of his
essential nature; and not in the world, for that is but the necessary
instrument of the evolution. By lifting the moral ideal of man to
infinitude, the poet has identified it with the nature of God, and made
it the absolute law of things.

Now, this idea of the identity of the human and the divine is a
perfectly familiar Christian idea.

"Thence shall I, approved
A man, for aye removed
From the developed brute; a God though in the germ."[A]

[Footnote A: _Rabbi Ben Ezra._]

This idea is involved in the ordinary expressions of religious thought.
But, nevertheless, both theology and philosophy shrink from giving to it
a clear and unembarrassed utterance. Instead of rising to the sublime
boldness of the Nazarene Teacher, they set up prudential differences
between God and man--differences not of degree only but of nature; and,
in consequence, God is reduced into an unknowable absolute, and man is
made incapable not only of moral, but also of intellectual life. The
poet himself has proved craven-hearted in this, as we shall see. He,
too, sets up insurmountable barriers between the divine and the human,
and thereby weakens both his religious and his moral convictions. His
moral inspiration is greatest just where his religious enthusiasm is
most intense. In _Rabbi Ben Ezra, The Death in the Desert_, and _The
Ring and the Book_, there prevails a constant sense of the community of
God and man within the realm o