is thus a movement from reason to reason, from the implicit to the explicit, from the germ to the developed fulness of life and structure.  In this matter, as in all others wherein the human spirit is concerned, that which is first by nature is last in genesis—­[Greek:  nika d’ ho protos kai teleutaios dramon.] The whole history of the moral and religious experience of mankind is comprised in the statement, that the implicit reason which we call “faith” is ever developing towards full consciousness of itself; and that, at its first beginning, and throughout the whole ascending process of this development, the highest is present in it as a self-manifesting power.

But this process from the almost instinctive intuitions of the heart towards the morality and religion of freedom, being a process of evolution, necessarily involves conflict.  There are men, it is true, the unity of whose moral and religious faith is never completely broken by doubt; just as there are men who are not forced by the contradictions in the first interpretation of the world by ordinary experience to attempt to re-interpret it by means of science and philosophy.

Throughout their lives they may say like Pompilia—­

        “I know the right place by foot’s feel,
  I took it and tread firm there; wherefore change?"[A]

[Footnote A:  The Ring and the Book—­The Pope, 1886-1887.]

Jean Paul Richter said that he knew another way of being happy, beside that of soaring away so far above the clouds of life, that its miseries looked small, and the whole external world shrunk into a little child’s garden.  It was, “Simply to sink down into this little garden; and there to nestle yourself so snugly, so homewise, in some furrow, that in looking out from your warm lark-nest, you likewise can discern no wolf-dens, charnel-houses, or thunder-rods, but only blades and ears, every one of which, for the nest-bird, is a tree, and a sun-screen, and rain-screen.”  There is a similar way of being good, with a goodness which, though limited, is pure and perfect in nature.  Nay, we may even admit that such lives are frequently the most complete and beautiful, just as the fairest flowers grow, not on the tallest trees, but on the fragile plants at their foot.  Nevertheless, even in the case of those persons who have never broken from the traditional faith of the past, or felt it to be inadequate, that faith has been silently reconstructed in a new synthesis of knowledge.  Spiritual life cannot come by inheritance; but every individual must acquire a faith for himself, and turn his spiritual environment into personal experience.  “A man may be a heretic in the truth,” said Milton, “and if he believe things only because his pastor says so, or the assembly so determines, without knowing other reason, though his belief be true, yet the very truth he holds becomes his heresy.”  It is truth to another but tradition to him; it is a creed and not a conviction.  Browning fully recognizes the need of this conflict—­