He does not use it as a means of exercising his brains only.

It is steeped in true and vital feeling, and the deep friendship he had for his friend fills even the theological argument with a passionate intensity.

Nevertheless, the argument is perilously near the work of the understanding alone--as if a question like that of immortality could receive any solution from the hands of the understanding.

Only each man, in the recesses of his own spirit with God, can solve that question for himself, and not for another.

That is Browning's position when he writes as a poet, and no one has written more positively on the subject.