CHAPTER VII BROWNING'S INTERPRETATION OF THE INCARNATION Mr. Browning was a thoroughgoing idealist. On the solid English earth, his mind was above the mists and the malaria of a too practical earthly life. His shrewd, kindly, human eyes saw the passing show of life, noted every transient form and grace; but ever tried to penetrate to their deeper meaning. He was a humanist, friendly to all humankind, but the ladder of life did not lie flat along the earth, but rose to the heavens. He tried to measure the movement of mankind, to understand the purpose and the goal of human life. Like a poet hidden In the light of thought, To sympathy with hopes and fears it heeded not. In four ways Mr. Browning is ever showing his idealism. (1) The importance of the inner and spiritual life over the outer and material. (2) The sense of a personal God in all the life of the world, not to be demonstrated but accepted as one's own life, without whom life is unaccountable and the world a ship of fools. (3) This world the vestibule of the eternal, immortality an inevitable inference from the fact of God and man's relation to God. All that is, at all, Lasts ever, past recall; Earth changes, but thy soul and God stand sure: That was, is, and shall be: Time's wheel runs back or stops: Potter and clay endure. (4) And therefore the significance of life is in its growth. Whatever checks, dwarfs the life is evil; whatever contributes to the freedom, fulness, growth of life is good, is God's way of training a soul. And so to Browning, life is tested by its desire and struggle. Ah! but a man's reach should exceed his grasp, Real life is positive, not negative, a passion for the higher. It is violence that taketh the kingdom of heaven. The sin of life is inaction and low content, "the unlit lamp, and the ungirt loin." And here we have the key to Browning's interpretation of the Incarnation. God reveals Himself in Christ not simply to overcome evil, to forgive a man's sin and purge it away, so that life shall be free from defect. Sin is not the great fact. It is an obstacle, an incident, "a silence signifying sound," a thing to be resisted that strength may be gained, to be fought that the warrior may be crowned. The center of all is man's life, and that means man's growth. And the Incarnation is needed for the revelation, and freedom and joy and growth of a man's life. The Incarnation, to Browning, is God's way of making a man. I Take first, the Demand for the Incarnation. (A) The growth of life, the progress of man, demands the revelation of God to show the meaning of each life and the goal of growth. As man is a living soul, a self-directing, responsible life, the ideal of this life must be ever before him if a true growth is to be attained, to make the way plain. "Cleon" is the cry of the human heart for a manifest God. There must be some purpose in all the work of life beyond the work itself. Cleon, the Greek poet from whom Paul quotes in his speech on Mars Hill, draws this lesson from the work of the king to whom he writes: Thou, in the daily building of thy tower, Whence, all the tumult of the building hushed, Thou first of men might'st look out to the East: And so of his own work, Cleon says. He had been a great artist and wrought well. All arts are mine; Thus much the people know and recognize, |