We cannot establish ourselves on rationalism, and make it bear fruit to us.

Faith itself is capable of becoming the darkest and most revolutionary of doubts.
Then comes the passage:-- "Just when we are safest, there's a sunset-touch, A fancy from a flower-bell, some one's death, A chorus ending from Euripides,-- And that's enough for fifty hopes and fears As old and new at once as Nature's self, To rap and knock and enter in our soul, Take hands and dance there, a fantastic ring, Round the ancient idol, on his base again,-- The grand Perhaps!" Nobler diction and a nobler meaning could not have been put into the mouth of Pompilia, or Rabbi Ben Ezra.

It is in reality put into the mouth of a vulgar, fashionable priest, justifying his own cowardice over the comfortable wine and the cigars.
Along with this tendency to poetry among Browning's knaves, must be reckoned another characteristic, their uniform tendency to theism.
These loose and mean characters speak of many things feverishly and vaguely; of one thing they always speak with confidence and composure, their relation to God.

It may seem strange at first sight that those who have outlived the indulgence, and not only of every law, but of every reasonable anarchy, should still rely so simply upon the indulgence of divine perfection.

Thus Sludge is certain that his life of lies and conjuring tricks has been conducted in a deep and subtle obedience to the message really conveyed by the conditions created by God.