For ignoble passion her sole remedy was to crush passion altogether.

She calls to the priest to renounce the fleshly woman and cleave to Her, the Bride who took his plighted troth; but it is a scrannel voice sighing from stone lungs:-- "Leave that live passion, come, be dead with me!" From the exalted Pisgah of his "new state" he recognised that the true self-sacrifice, the perfect priesthood, lay by way of life, not death, that life and death "Are means to an end, that passion uses both, Indisputably mistress of the man Whose form of worship is self-sacrifice." Yet it is not this recognition, but the "passion" which ultimately determines his course.

Love is, for Browning, in his maturity, deeper and more secure than thought; Caponsacchi wavers in his thinking, falls back upon the narrower conception of priesthood, persuades himself that his duty is to serve God:-- "Duty to God is duty to her: I think God, who created her, will save her too Some new way, by one miracle the more, Without me." But when once again he is confronted with the strange sad face, and hears once more the pitiful appeal, all hesitations vanish, and he sees no duty "Like daring try be good and true myself, Leaving the shows of things to the Lord of Show." With the security of perfect innocence he flings at his judges as "the final fact"-- "In contempt for all misapprehending ignorance Of the human heart, much more the mind of Christ,-- That I assuredly did bow, was blessed By the revelation of Pompilia." Thus, through all the psychologic subtlety of the portrait the groundwork of spiritual romance subsists.

The militant saint of legend reappears, in the mould and garb of the modern world, subject to all its hampering conditions, and compelled to make his way over the corpses, not of lions and dragons only, but of consecrated duties and treasured instincts.

And the matter-of-course chivalry of professed knighthood is as inferior in art as in ethics to the chivalry to which this priest, vowed to another service, is lifted by the vision of Pompilia.
Pompilia is herself, like her soldier saint, vowed to another service.
But while he only after a struggle overcomes the apparent discrepancy between his duty as a priest and as a knight, she rises with the ease and swiftness of a perfectly pure and spiritual nature from the duty of endurance to the duty of resistance-- "Promoted at one cry O' the trump of God to the new service, not To longer bear, but henceforth fight, be found Sublime in new impatience with the foe!"[54] [Footnote 54: _The Pope_, 1057.] And she carries the same fearless simplicity into her love.