better of them by getting strength and stature. Being is exalted above doing, purpose above service, and what man aspires to be, but fails to reach, becomes an eternal comfort to the soul.

No view of Browning's philosophy of life is complete which does not present his conception of God. Browning was philosopher and theologian, and in no poem shall we be better able to see Browning's God than in Saul. Browning saw God everywhere. Thus in Saul David comes back from his search for God to tell

"God is seen God

In the star, in the stone, in the flesh, in the soul, and the clod."

us,

Browning's basal conception of God was that of intelligent power. He began with God and power as synonymous; he ended with God and love as synonymous. How finely he puts God's power and man's importance in these two lines in Saul:

"From Thy will stream the worlds, life, and nature, Thy dread Sabaoth: I will? the mere atoms despise me!"

It is a God of power of whom David brings back intelligence as he goes "the whole round of creation":

"I have gone the whole round of creation; I saw and I spoke; I, a work of God's hand for that purpose, received in my brain And pronounced on the rest of his handwork

"Each faculty tasked

To perceive Him, has gained an abyss where a dewdrop was asked.
Have I knowledge? confounded it shrivels at Wisdom laid bare.
Have I forethought? how purblind, how blank, to the Infinite Care!
Do I task any faculty highest to image success?

I but open my eyes-and perfection, no more and no less,

In the kind I imagined full-fronts me."

"And, thus looking within and around me, I ever renew

The submission of man's nothing-perfect to God's all-complete." But Browning's God was preeminently a God of love. With him everything in the world was love. And just as we have found his optimistic nature coloring his view of human life so we may

expect his theory of love to determine his conception of the Divine nature. "Life," Browning says, in A Death in A Desert,

"For life, with all it yields of joy and woe,
And hope and fear-believe the aged friend-
Is just our chance o' the prize of learning love;
How love might be, hath been, indeed, and is.”

In Asolando he says:

"From the first Power was, I knew.

Life has made clear to me
That, strive but for closer view,

Love were as plain to see."

In Saul we are told, "All's love-yet all's law." From a universe of love, therefore, to a Supreme Love was a perfectly natural and inevitable conclusion for Browning.

"A loveless worm, within its clod,
Were diviner than a loveless God
Amid his worlds."

The doctrine of divine love is deduced in Saul from man's ideal of love in himself. Thus David, his harp set aside, his songs ended, reasons up from his own love for Saul to the divine compassion:

"Do I find love so full in my nature, God's ultimate gift,

That I doubt his own love can compete with it? here the parts shift? Here the creatures surpass the Creator? The end what Began?" There could be but one inference from such reasoning, God must be love. And the next step was inevitable: God's love must surpass the human even as the infinite surpasses the finite. So on the minstrel is led in his reasoning until, full-visioned, God's love is declared:

"O, speak through me now!

Would I suffer for him that I love? So wouldst thou-so wilt thou!
So shall crown thee the topmost, ineffablest, uttermost crown-
And thy love fill infinitude wholly, nor leave, up nor down,
One spot for the creature to stand in!"

Here is the sublime crisis of the poem. David, reaching out from the human, has found the divine love, but his discovery sweeps him on and in this infinite Love he sees not only relief for Saul but redemption for man. The immortal hope, and Christ, the incarnate Love, burst upon the vision of the minstrel-seer. In

the passionate yearnings of David for the salvation of Saul Browning gives us the deeper reason, grounded in love, for a future hope. With strong crying and pleading David pours his soul out for Saul's redemption. That splendid wreck he would save not only for this life but for the next. What he would fain do is prophetic of what may be done. What he would fain do, but cannot in his weakness, the Divine, all-powerful and all-loving, can and will do. David, the human lover, would give life and immortal reward; God, the divine lover, can do no less.

"Would I fain, in my impotent yearning, do all for this man.

And dare doubt he alone shall not help him who yet alone can?
Would it ever have entered my mind-the bare will, much less power-
To bestow on this Saul what I sang of, the marvelous dower
Of the life he was gifted and filled with? to make such a soul,
Such a body, and then such an earth for insphering the whole?
And doth it not enter my mind (as my warm tears attest),
These good things being given, to go on, and give one more, the best:
Ay, to save and redeem and restore him, maintain at the height
This perfection-succeed with life's dayspring, death's minute of night?"

What is the value of such a poem as Saul? What is its meaning? What does it teach?

Saul is a study of character in the struggle of a great crisis. A human soul is face to face with a mighty problem-the saving of a ruined life. The situation is desperate the opportunity sublime! Tact, sympathy, faith, courage, every resource in David is taxed to its utmost. Magnanimous himself, he claims from God for the King whom he loves the largest sympathy, the most complete redemption. David triumphs, Saul is rescued, and man, in the higher conflicts of the soul, is seen a grander conqueror than the victor on martial field. The poem is a sublime expression of the soul's deep longing for a God of love. It is the cry of the human heart for its greatest need-love human, love divine! The minstrel felt the passion of love in his own soul but recognized its inadequacy. The bitterness of life-life's sin, sorrow, and remorse-needed more than human sympathy: a divine compassion. Naught else could satisfy. In Saul's condition human wretchedness is seen appealing, out of its awful despair, for divine help; in David's sympathy human love is heard passionately

pleading for the sinner's redemption-and thus, in sublimest imagery, is expressed the world's uttermost need. It is, further, an illustration of how man's nature is an authority for interpreting the divine. If from the flower of beauty we mount to God, the Creator, how much more from man, of reason, will, and love, to God, of wisdom and compassion. Does David love? God must. Would David do all for Saul? So must God. Would David surrender his life for the saving of the King? God can do no less. Can the creature surpass the Creator? man excel God? The conclusion is irresistible, the authority final, and man interprets God in terms of his own life and character. The poem is, finally, a "powerful exposition of the central problem of Christianity. The experiences of sorrow and sin raise for us the greatest questions, force upon us the mightiest problems. Face to face with Saul's wretchedness the problem of evil stares at us, and the questions of its being, and of man's redemption from sin, plead for answer. What is evil? What useful purposes can it serve? How shall man be saved from its dire consequences? Philosophy is incompetent, but love is found supreme. In David love is facing the problem of evil: love compassionate, love self-denying, love self-sacrificing! It beholds suffering as essential to the divine excellence, and divine sacrifice as alone adequate for the awful blight of sin. And to love's inspired vision is given the sublime revelation of the incarnate God as the suffering Redeemer. Saul is a voice of human love crying up to God for help, and a voice of divine love answering back to man." "Though your sins be as scarlet, they shall be as white as snow; though they be red like crimson, they shall be as wool." "But God commendeth his love toward us, in that, while we were yet sinners, Christ died for us."

A.J. Coulias

ART. X.-WALTER PATER AND HIS PHILOSOPHY OF

LIFE.

ON July 30, 1894, after a brief illness, Walter Pater died suddenly at his home in Oxford, and was buried in Holywell churchyard. For thirty-six years his life was associated with the old university town-first as student at Queen's, then as tutor, and for thirty years as Fellow of Brasenose College.

In 1873 a set of essays in criticism, which at intervals had appeared in reviews, were collected and, with additional papers, published as The Renaissance: Studies in Art and Poetry. The little volume chiefly because of the Conclusion-immediately produced a vivid sensation in certain circles, chiefly churchly, and the young "Fellow" found himself the center of widespread denunciation as a "hedonist," a Greek pagan, a Cyrenaic, and pious persons ignorant of Greek and confounding "hedonist" and heathen, became livid at the thought that an Oxford fellowship was held by a man who, at the heart of him, was an unbeliever in the Christian religion as a philosophy of life. So violent grew the protest that when the second issue of The Renaissance appeared it was noted that the Conclusion had been omitted; but scarcely had the religious mind regained its equanimity, in view of the supposed retractation, before Marius the Epicurean appeared, and it was discovered that that piece of elaborate philosophic fiction was in fact only the Conclusion in another form-a sort of "Apologia pro Vita Sua." Besides, the third edition of The Renaissance itself contained the Conclusion, somewhat modified "to prevent misunderstanding"! The Marius contained a chapter on The New Cyrenaicism-an exposition of the ideas expressed in the Conclusion. But readers were puzzled to know just where to place the book; because while it seemed to be a reiteration of Pater's paganism-the "hedonism" that had excited such opposition-it seemed also to hint that the author was on his way to the "Church;" for Marius, the hero, after wide ranging, died at last on the threshold of the Catholic Church-the holy wafer between his lips and the holy oil upon his brow.