"Recognized truths, obedient to some truth
Unrecognized yet, but perceptible,--
Correct the portrait by the living face,
Man's God, by God's God in the mind of man."[A]

[Footnote A: _The Ring and the Book--The Pope_, 1871-1874.]

Thus the poet ever returns to the conception of God in the mind of man.
God is the beginning and the end; and man is the self-conscious worker
of God's will, the free process whereby the last which is first, returns
to itself. The process, the growth, is man's life and being; and it
falls within the ideal, which is eternal and all in all. The spiritual
life of man, which is both intellectual and moral, is a dying into the
eternal, not to cease to be in it, but to live in it more fully; for
spirits necessarily commune. He dies to the temporal interests and
narrow ends of the exclusive self, and lives an ever-expanding life in
the life of others, manifesting more and more that spiritual principle
which is the life of God, who lives and loves in all things. "God is a
being in whom we exist; with whom we are in principle one; with whom the
human spirit is identical, in the sense that He _is_ all which the human
spirit is capable of becoming."[B]

[Footnote B: Green's _Prolegomena to Ethics_, p. 198.]

From this point of view, and in so far as Browning is loyal to the
conception of the community of the divine and human, he is able to
maintain his faith in God, not in spite of knowledge, but through the
very movement of knowledge within him. He is not obliged, as in his
later works, to look for proofs, either in nature, or elsewhere; nor to
argue from the emotion of love in man, to a cause of that emotion. He