The best comment upon his faith is the saying of Meredith, "The fact that character can be and is developed by the clash of circumstances is to me a warrant for infinite hope."[45] Only, for Browning, that "infinite hope" translates itself into a sense of present divine energies bending all the clashing circumstance to its benign end, till the walls of the world take on the semblance of the shattered Temple, and the crowded life within them the semblance of the seemingly vanished Face, which "far from vanish, rather grows, Or decomposes but to recompose, Become my universe that feels and knows."[46] [Footnote 45: Quoted _Int.Journ.of Ethics_, April 1902.] [Footnote 46: The last line is pantheistic in expression, and has been so understood by some, particularly by Mr J.M.Robertson.

But pantheism was at most a tendency, which the stubborn concreteness of his mind held effectually in check; a point, one might say, upon which his thinking converges, but which it never even proximately attains.

God and the Soul never mingle, however intimate their communion.Cf.chap.x.

below.].