The faith of these latter days is the same as that of the first century, and is not the same. The story and the teaching of Christ had alike one end--to plant in the human consciousness the assurance of Divine Love, and to make us, in our degree, conscious partakers of that love. Where love is, there is Christ. Our conceptions of God are relative to our own understanding; but God as power, God as a communicating intelligence, God as love--Father, Son and Spirit--is the utmost that we can conceive of things above us. Let us now put that knowledge--imperfect though it may be--to use. Power, intelligence, love--these surround us everywhere; they are not mere projections from our own brain or hand or heart; and by us they are inconceivable otherwise than as personal attributes. The historical story of Christ is not lost, for it has grown into a larger assurance of faith. We are not concerned with the linen clothes and napkins of the empty sepulchre; Christ is arisen. Why revert to discuss miracles? The work of miracles--whatever they may have been--was long ago accomplished. The knowledge of the Divine Love, its appropriation by our own hearts, and the putting forth of that love in our lives--such for us is the Christian faith, such is the work of Christ accomplishing itself in humanity at the present time. And the Christian story is no myth but a reality, not because we can prove true the beliefs of the first century, but because those beliefs contained within them a larger and more enduring belief. The acorn has not perished because it has expanded into an oak. This, reduced here to the baldest statement, is in substance the dying testimony of Browning's St John. It is thrown into lyrical form as his own testimony in the _Epilogue_ to the volume of 1864. The voices of singers, the sound of the trumpets of the Jewish Dedication Day, when the glory of the Lord in His cloud filled His house, have fallen silent. We are told by some that the divine Face, known to early Christian days as love, has withdrawn from earth for ever, and left humanity enthroned as its sole representative: Oh, dread succession to a dizzy post, Sad sway of sceptre whose mere touch appals. Browning's reply is that to one whose eyes are rightly informed the whole of nature and of human life shows itself as a perpetual mystery of providential care: 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.[91] In the great poem of 1868-69, _The Ring and the Book_, one speaker, the venerable Pope, like St John of _A Death in the Desert_, has almost reached the term of a long life: he is absorbed in the solemn weighing of truth and falsehood, good and evil; his soul, like the soul of the dying Evangelist: