"'Tis one thing to know, and another to practise.
And thence I conclude that the real God-function
Is to furnish a motive and injunction
For practising what we know already."[A]

[Footnote A: _Christmas-Eve and Easter-Day_.]

Even here, there is implied that the motive comes otherwise than by
knowledge; still, taking these earlier poems as a whole, we may say that
in them knowledge is regarded as means to morality and not as in any
sense contrasted with or destructive of it. Man's motives are rational
motives; the ends he seeks are ends conceived and even constituted by
his intelligence, and not purposes blindly followed as by instinct and
impulse.

"Why live,
Except for love--how love, unless they know?"[B]

[Footnote B: _The Ring and the Book_--_The Pope_, 1327-1328.]

asks the Pope. Moral progress is not secured apart from, or in spite of
knowledge. We are not exhorted to reject the verdict of the latter as
illusive, in order to confide in a faith which not only fails to receive
support from the defective intelligence, but maintains its own integrity
only by repudiating the testimony of the reason. In the distinction
between knowledge as means and love as end, it is easy, indeed, to
detect a tendency to degrade the former into a mere temporary expedient,
whereby moral ends may be served. The poet speaks of "such knowledge as
is possible to man." The attitude he assumes towards it is apologetic,