be effective.  The Bishop frankly admits that the unqualified believer, the enthusiast, is more fortunate than he; he, Sylvester Blougram, is what he is, and all that he can do is to make the most of the nature allotted to him.  That there has been a divine revelation he cannot absolutely believe; but neither can he absolutely disbelieve.  Unbelief is sterile; belief is fruitful, certainly for this world, probably for the next, and he elects to believe.  Having chosen to believe, he cannot be too pronounced and decisive in his faith; he will never attempt to eliminate certain articles of the credenda, and so “decrassify” his faith, for to this process, if once begun, there is no end; having donned his uniform, he will wear it, laces and spangles and all.  True, he has at times his chill fits of doubt; but is not this the probation of faith?  Does not a life evince the ultimate reality that is within us?  Are not acts the evidence of a final choice, of a deepest conviction?  And has he not given his vote for the Christian religion?

    With me faith means perpetual unbelief
    Kept quiet like the snake ’neath Michael’s foot,
    Who stands calm just because he feels it writhe.

When the time arrives for a beatific vision Blougram will be ready to adapt himself to the new state of things.  Is not the best pledge of his capacity for future adaptation to a new environment this—­that being in the world he is worldly?  We must not lose the training of each successive stage of evolution by for ever projecting ourselves half way into the next.  So rolls on the argument to its triumphant conclusion—­

     Fool or knave? 
    Why needs a bishop be a fool or knave
    When there’s a thousand diamond weights between?

Only at the last, were it not that we know that there is a firmer ground for Blougram than this on which he takes his stand in after-dinner controversy, we might be inclined to close the subject by adapting to its uses the title of a pamphlet connected with the Kingsley and Newman debate—­“But was not Mr Gigadibs right after all?” Worsted in sword-play he certainly was; but the soul may have its say, and the soul, armed with its instincts of truth, is a formidable challenger.

FOOTNOTES: 

[Footnote 63:  Letters of R.B. and E.B.B., i. 388.]

[Footnote 64:  Mrs Orr’s Handbook to Browning’s Works, 266, note.  For the horse, see stanzas xiii. xiv. of the poem.]

[Footnote 65:  This poem is sometimes expounded as a sigh for the infinite, which no human love can satisfy.  But the simpler conception of it as expressing a love almost but not altogether complete seems the truer.]

[Footnote 66:  Browning’s delight a few years later in modelling in clay was great.]

[Footnote 67:  Mrs Andrew Crosse, in her article, “John Kenyon and his Friends” (Temple Bar Magazine, April 1900), writes:  “When the Brownings were living in Florence, Kenyon had begged them to procure for him a copy of the portrait in the Pitti of Andrea del Sarto and his wife.  Mr Browning was unable to get the copy made with any promise of satisfaction, and so wrote the exquisite poem of Andrea del Sarto—­and sent it to Kenyon!”]