Between man and God there is no intermediate form of being for us, for we cannot sink back into the ancient cult of heroes. If Jesus, therefore, is not God, if Christ is not the second person in the Trinity, then he is a man; not a man like any average man among ourselves, but still man. We can therefore honor him as a leader, a hero, a martyr, but we cannot directly bind ourselves to him or root ourselves in him; we cannot submit to him unconditionally. Still less can we make him the centre of a cult. To do so from our point of view would be nothing else than an intolerable deification of a human being." The comment at the end of "The Death in the Desert" puts a similar question, and answers, "Call Christ, then, the illimitable God, Or Lost!" But the final word which casts a light back upon the previous conclusion is "But, 'twas Cerinthus that is lost"--the man, in other words, who held the heresy that the Christ part only resided in Jesus, who was merely human, and that the divine part was not crucified, having flown away before. Thus it is implied that neither those who believe Jesus divine, nor those who believe him human, are lost, but those who try as Cerinthus did to make a compromise. The same note is struck in "Christmas Eve," and now Professor Eucken takes an exactly similar ground in regard to any sort of compromise, coming out boldly, however, as Browning does not in this poem, though he makes no strong argument against it--in the acceptance of Christ as human. Browning's own attitude is expressed as clearly as it is anywhere in his work in the epilogue to "Dramatis Personæ," in which the conclusion is entirely in sympathy with that of Eucken: "When you see what I tell you--nature dance About each man of us, retire, advance, As though the pageant's end were to enhance "His worth, and--once the life, his product gained-- Roll away elsewhere, keep the strife sustained, And show thus real, a thing the North but feigned-- "When you acknowledge that one world could do All the diverse work, old yet ever new, Divide us, each from other, me from you-- "Why, where's the need of Temple, when the walls O' the world are that? What use of swells and falls From Levites' choir, Priests' cries, and trumpet calls? "That one Face, far from vanish, rather grows, Or decomposes but to recompose, Become my universe that feels and knows." The hold which the philosophy of Eucken seems to have taken upon the minds of many people all over the world shows that it must have great elements of strength. That there is a partial resemblance between his thought, which belongs to the end of the nineteenth and the beginning of the twentieth century, and Browning's is certain, but the fact remains that the poet made a synthesis of the elements which must go to the forming of any complete religious conceptions of the future so far in advance of his own century that even Eucken is in some respects behind it.