I. In both _Christmas Eve_ and _Easter Day_ the most prominent position in the thoughts and dissertations of the soliloquist is necessarily--so the title would suggest--afforded the Doctrine of the Incarnation. Its introduction may not, in the single instance, be incontrovertibly significant as to Browning's attitude towards Christianity. But, when we find the same subject dealt with repeatedly from different points of view, by speakers widely separated from one another by time, place, nationality, and personal character; and when, in spite of the variety of external conditions, we yet find the arguments employed ever converging towards the same goal; here even the hypercritical student is surely bound to conclude that Browning did, indeed, realize, and was anxious to make plain his realization of, the value to the individual life of the belief involved, and of the intelligibility and reasonableness of such belief. To notice a few amongst the numerous aspects in which this Doctrine of the Incarnation has been presented. In _Saul_, the logical inevitableness of its acceptance by the seeker after God, as revealed, first in Nature, then in His dealings with Humanity, is traced by the seer of a remote past before the historic fact has been accomplished. In _Cleon_, the demand for a direct revelation of God in man is the result of the cravings of a nature unable to rest satisfied in the merely deistic creed hitherto responsible for its theories of life. The very pagan character of the treatment of subject by the soliloquist, in this instance, is so handled by the poet as to lend additional force to the negative deductions from the suggestions advanced. In _An Epistle of Karshish_, once more as in _Saul_, the speaker, though an onlooker only where Christianity is concerned, is yet a believer in a divine order of the universe, and in a personal God revealed in His creation. The subject of which Karshish treats in his letter is no longer, however, as with David, an expectation to be realized in a distant future, but a matter comprehending a series of historic events recently enacted. Nevertheless, he too, whilst nominally rejecting the evidence of the witnesses as to fact, forces upon the reader the conviction that not only is it possible, but inevitable, that the "All-Great" shall be "the All-Loving too"; and must have revealed His love through the life lived by the Physician of Galilee, whose deeds Lazarus reported. Later, when that Life has become still further a thing of the past, when "what first were guessed as points," have become known as "stars," in _A Death in the Desert_ are put into the mouth of the dying Evangelist, St. John, arguments which reach the final culmination towards which those of David and of Cleon alike tended. And St. John, in imagination confronting opponents of Christianity, sees not only his own contemporaries, but those of Browning: his reasoning would refute not so much the heresy of the