Lies bare to the universal prick of light. He, if any of the speakers in that sequence of monologues, expresses Browning's own highest thought. And the Pope's exposition of the Christianity of our modern age is identical with that of John. Man's mind is but "a convex glass" in which is represented all that by us can be conceived of God, "our known unknown." The Pope has heard the Christian story which is abroad in the world; he loves it and finds it credible. God's power--that is clearly discernible in the universe; His intelligence--that is no less evidently present. What of love? The dread machinery of sin and sorrow on this globe of ours seems to negative the idea of divine love. The surmise of immortality may indeed justify the ways of God to man; this "dread machinery" may be needed to evolve man's highest moral qualities. The acknowledgment of God in Christ, the divine self-sacrifice of love, for the Pope, as for St John, solves All questions in the earth and out of it. But whether the truth of the early centuries be an absolute historic fact, Or only truth reverberate, changed, made pass A spectrum into mind, the narrow eye-- The same and not the same, else unconceived-- the Pope dare not affirm. Nor does he regard the question as of urgent importance at the present day; the effect of the Christian tale--historic fact, or higher fact expressed in myth--remains: So my heart be struck, What care I,--by God's gloved hand or the bare? By some means, means divinely chosen even if but a child's fable-book, we have got our truth, and it suffices for our training here on earth. Let us give over the endless task of unproving and re-proving the already proved; rather let us straightway put our truth to its proper uses.[92] If the grotesque occupies a comparatively small place in _Dramatis Personae_, the example given is of capital importance in this province of Browning's art. The devil of Notre Dame, looking down on Paris, is more effectively placed, but is hardly a more impressive invention of Gothic fantasy than Caliban sprawling in the pit's much mire, With elbows wide, fists clenched to prop his chin,