His vision, which thus symbolizes his own course of emotionalized reasoning, brings hope but not conviction. Like the type in "Christmas Eve," conviction can come to him only through a belief in supernatural revelation. He is evidently a man of broad intellectual endowment, who cannot, as the Tractarians did, lay his mind asleep, and rest in the authority of a church, nor yet can he be satisfied with the unconscious anthropomorphism of the sectarian. He doubts his own reasoning attempts to formulate religious doctrines, he doubts even the revelations of his own mystic states of consciousness; hence there is nothing for him but to flounder on through life as best he can, hoping, fearing, doubting, as many a serious mind has done owing to the nineteenth-century reaction against the supernatural dogmas of Christianity. Like others of his ilk, he probably stayed in the Anglican Church and weakened it through his latitudinarianisms. A study in religious consciousness akin to this is that of Bishop Blougram. Here we have not a generalized type as in "Christmas Eve," nor an imaginary individual as in "Easter Day," but an actual study of a real man, it being no secret that Cardinal Wiseman was the inspiration for the poem. Wiseman's influence as a Catholic in the Tractarian movement was a powerful one, and in the poet's dissection of his psychology an attempt is made to present the reasoning by means of which he made his appeal to less independent thinkers. With faith as the basis of religion, doubt serves as a moral spur, since the will must exercise itself in keeping doubt underfoot. Browning, himself, might agree that aspiration toward faith was one of the tests of its truth, he might also consider doubt as a spur to greater aspiration, but these ideals would connote something different to him from what he makes them mean to Blougram. The poet's aspiration would be toward a belief in Omniscient Love and Power, his doubts would grow out of his inability to make this ideal tally with the sin and evil he beholds in life. Blougram's consciousness is on a lower plane. His aspiration is to believe in the dogmas of the Church, his doubts arise from an intellectual fear that the dogmas may not be true. Where Browning seems to miss comprehension of such a nature as Blougram's is in failing to recognize that on his own plane of consciousness genuine feeling and the perception of beauty play at least as large a part in the basis of his faith as utilitarian and instinctive reasoning do. While this poem shows in its references to the scientific theories of the origin of morals and its allusions to Strauss, as well as in the indirect portrayal of Gigadibs, the man emancipated from the Church, how entirely familiar the poet was with the currents of religious and scientific thought, it falls short as a fair analysis of a man who is acknowledged to have wielded a tremendous religious influence upon Englishmen of the caliber of Cardinal