needs no syllogistic process to arrive at God; for the very activity of
his own spirit as intelligence, as the reason which thinks and acts, is
the activity of God within him. Scepticism, is impossible, for the very
act of doubting is the activity of reason, and a profession of the
knowledge of the truth.

"I
Put no such dreadful question to myself,
Within whose circle of experience burns
The central truth, Power, Wisdom, Goodness,--God:
I must outlive a thing ere know it dead:
When I outlive the faith there is a sun,
When I lie, ashes to the very soul,--
Someone, not I, must wail above the heap,
'He died in dark whence never morn arose.'"[A]

[Footnote A: _The Ring and the Book--The Pope_, 1631-1639.]

And this view of God as immanent in man's experience also forecloses all
possibility of failure. Beneath the failure, the possibility of which is
involved in a moral life, lies the divine element, working through
contradiction to its own fulfilment. Failure is necessary for man,
because he grows: but, for the same reason, the failure is not final.
Thus, the poet, instead of denying the evidence of his intellect as to
the existence of evil, or casting doubt on the distinction between right
and wrong, or reducing the chequered course of human history into a
phantasmagoria of mere mental appearances, can regard the conflict
between good and evil as real and earnest. He can look evil in the face,
recognize its stubborn resistance to the good, and still regard the
victory of the latter as sure and complete. He has not to reduce it into