!' Cunliffe — Browning’s Idealism. 679 
Browning’s whole view of life as a place of education and 
probation, and the point need not be elaborated further. 
V. Relation to Orthodox Christianity * 
Tt is manifest that in liis leading ideas Browning had much 
in common with orthodox Christianity as its tenets were pro¬ 
fessed by the more liberal section of the Congregationalism 
body in which he was brought up. His attitude towards re¬ 
vealed religion was certainly sympathetic: this is clear from 
his letter in reply to an inquiry on this point from Elizabeth 
Barrett just before their marriage, and without this direct 
testimony, the inference might be surely made from his poems. 
He knew the Bible w T ell and quoted from it frequently, put* 
ting some passages in the original Hebrew into FerishtadPs 
Fancies , as he himself wrote to a friend soon after, “as a di¬ 
rect acknowledgment that certain doctrines may be found in 
the Old Book, w T hich the Concoctors of Hovel Schemes of 
Morality put forth as discoveries of their own.” He was hos¬ 
tile (as the picture of the Goettingen professor in Christmas 
Fve plainly shows) to the German rationalistic criticism of the 
Bible, and in the Epilogue to Dramatis Personae he described 
Renan as “Witless alike of will and way divine;” he was no 
more friendly to the more moderate liberal movement in Eng¬ 
land which made its voice heard in the Essays and Reviews of 
1860. He wrote in Gold Hair (published in Dramatis Per¬ 
sonae. 1864): 
The candid incline to surmise of late 
That the Christian faith proves false, I find; 
For our Essays-and-Reviews’ debate 
Begins to tell on the public mind, 
And Colenso’s words have weight: 
I still, to suppose it true, for my part, 
See reasons and reasons: this, to begin: 
’T is the faith that launched point-blank her dart 
At the head of a lie—taught Original Sin, 
The Corruption of Man’s Heart. 
(141-150) 
The fullest and most direct expression of the poet’s faith 
is to be found in Christmas Eve and Easter Day, in which 
