"Then life is--to wake not sleep, Rise and not rest, but press From earth's level where blindly creep Things perfected more or less, To the heaven's height, far and steep, "Where, amid what strifes and storms May wait the adventurous quest, Power is Love--transports, transforms, Who aspired from worst to best, Sought the soul's world, spurned the worms! "I have faith such end shall be: From the first, Power was--I knew. Life has made clear to me That, strive but for closer view, Love were as plain to see. "When see? When there dawns a day, If not on the homely earth, Then yonder, worlds away, Where the strange and new have birth And Power comes full in play." Browning has, far more than Tennyson, put religious speculation upon a basis where it may stand irrespective of a belief in the revelations of historical Christianity. For the central doctrine of Christianity he had so profound a reverence that he recurs to it again and again in his poetry, and at times his feeling seems to carry him to the verge of orthodox belief. So near does he come to it that many religious critics have been convinced that he might be claimed as a Christian in the orthodox sense of the word. A more careful reading, however, of such poems as "The Death in the Desert," and "Christmas Eve and Easter Day," upon which rest principally the claim of the poet's orthodoxy, will reveal that no certain assertion of a belief in supernaturalism is made, even though the poems are dramatic and it might be made without necessarily expressing the feeling of the poet. What Browning felt was that in historical Christianity the highest symbol of divine love had been reached. Though he may at times have had moods in which he would fain have believed true an ideal which held for him great beauty, his worth for his age was in saving religion, _not_ upon a basis of faith, but upon the ground of logical arguments deduced from the failure of knowledge, of his personal intuition of God and his mystical vision in regard to the nature of God. So complete a synthesis is this that only in the present century is its full purport likely to be realized. The thought of the century is showing everywhere a strong reaction away from materialism and toward religious thought. Even in the latest stronghold of science, psychology, as we have already seen, there is no formula which will explain the existence of individuality. While the scientists themselves plod on, often quite unconscious that they are not dealing with ultimates, the thinkers are no longer satisfied with a philosophy of materialism, and once more it is being recognized that the province of philosophy is to give us God, the soul and immortality.