live," said the Christian
apostle, "yet not I, but Christ liveth in me; and the life which I now
live in the flesh I live by the faith of the Son of God." In these words
there is expressed that highest form of the moral life, in which the
individual is so identified in desire with his ideal, that he lives only
to actualize it in his character. The natural self is represented as
dead, and the victory of the new principle is viewed as complete. This
full obedience to the ideal is the service of a necessity; but the
necessity is within, and the service is, therefore, perfect freedom. The
authority of the law is absolute, but the law is self-imposed. The whole
man is convinced of its goodness. He has acquired something even fuller
than a mere intellectual demonstration of it; for his knowledge has
ripened into wisdom, possessed his sympathies, and become a disposition
of his heart. And the fulness and certainty of his knowledge, so far
from rendering morality impossible, is its very perfection. To bring
about such a knowledge of the good of goodness and the evil of evil, as
will engender love of the former and hatred of the latter, is the aim of
all moral education. Thus, the history of human life, in so far as it is
progressive, may be concentrated in the saying that it is the ascent
from the power of a necessity which is natural, to the power of a
necessity which is moral. And this latter necessity can come only
through fuller and more convincing knowledge of the law that rules the
world, and is also the inner principle of man's nature.

There remains now the third element in Browning's view,--namely, that
the faith in the good, implied in morality and religion, can be firmly
established, after knowledge has turned out deceptive, upon the
individual's consciousness of the power of love within himself. In other
words, I must now try to estimate the value of Browning's appeal from
the intellect to the heart.

Before doing so, however, it may be well to repeat once more that
Browning's condemnation of knowledge, in his philosophical poems, is not
partial or hesitating. On the contrary, he confines it definitely to the
individual's consciousness of his own inner states.

"Myself I solely recognize.
They, too, may recognize themselves, not me,
For aught I know or care."[A]

[Footnote A: _A Bean-Stripe_. See also _La Saisiaz_.]

Nor does Browning endeavour to correct this limited testimony of the
intellec