It was thus a deeper poetical rather than a religious or doctrinal interest which drew Browning in these Italian years, again and again to seek his revealing experiences of souls amid the eddies and convulsions, the exultations and the agonies, brought into the world by the amazing "revelation of God in Christ." It is true that we nowhere approach this focus of interest, that we have no glimpse, through Browning's art, how that "revelation" shaped itself in the first disciples, far less of Christ himself. But that was at no time Browning's way of bringing to expression what he deeply cared for. He would not trumpet forth truth in his own person, or blazon it through the lips of the highest recognised authority; he let it struggle up through the baffling density, or glimmer through the conflicting persuasions of alien minds, and break out in cries of angry wonder or involuntary recognition. And nowhere is this method carried further than in the Christian poems of the Italian time. The supreme musicians and painters he avoids, but Fra Lippo Lippi and Master Hugues belong at least to the crafts whose secrets they expound; while the Christian idea is set in a borrowed light caught from the souls of men outside the Christian world--an Arab physician, a Greek poet, a Jewish shepherd or rabbi, or from Christians yet farther from the centre than these, like Blougram and the Abbe Deodaet. In method as in conception these pieces are among the most Browningesque things that Browning ever wrote. It is clear, however, that while his way of handling these topics is absolutely his own, his peculiar concern with them is new. The _Karshish_, the _Clean_, and the _Blougram_ have no prototype or parallel among the poems of Browning's previous periods. In the early Dramatic Lyrics and Romances, and in the plays, there is exquisite rendering of religion, and also of irreligion; but the religion is just the simple faith of Pippa or of Theocrite that "God's in his world"; and the irreligion is the Humanist paganism of St Praxed's, not so much hostile to Christianity as unconscious of it. No single poem written before 1850 shows that acute interest in the problems of Christian faith which constantly emerges in the work of this and the following years. _Saul_, which might be regarded as signally refuting this view, strikingly confirms it; the David of the first nine sections, which alone were produced in 1845, being the naïve, devout child, brother of Pippa and of Theocrite; the evolution of this harping shepherd-boy into the illuminated prophet of Christ was the splendid achievement of the later years.[33] And to all this more acutely Christian work the _Christmas-Eve and Easter-Day_ (1850) served as a significant prologue.