multitude of the lesser lights of heaven. And centuries roll past while
the forsaken watchers vainly question the heavenly vault for the sign of
love no longer visible there.

This lament assumes that Theism, having grown into Christianity, must
disappear with it; and the pathetic sense of bereavement gives way to
shuddering awe, as the farther significance of the sceptical position
reveals itself. _Man_ becomes the summit of creation; the sole successor
to the vacant throne of God.

The "THIRD SPEAKER," Mr. Browning himself, corrects both the material
faith of the Old Testament, and the scientific doubt of the nineteenth
century, by the idea of a more mystical and individual intercourse
between God and man. Observers have noted in the Arctic Seas that the
whole field of waters seem constantly hastening towards some central
point of rock, to envelope it in their playfulness and their force; in
the blackness they have borrowed from the nether world, or the radiance
they have caught from heaven; then tearing it up by the roots, to sweep
onwards towards another peak, and make _it_ their centre for the time
being. So do the forces of life and nature circle round the individual
man, doing in each the work of experience, reproducing for each the
Divine Face which is inspired by the spirit of creation. And, as the
speaker declares, he needs no "Temple," because the world is that. Nor,
as he implies, needs he look beyond the range of his own being for the
lost Divinity.

"That one Face, far from vanish, rather grows,
Or decomposes but to recompose,
Become my universe that feels and knows!" (vol. vii. p. 255.)