It is the activity of the ideal.  It is God lifting man up to Himself, or, in the language of philosophy, “returning to Himself in history.”  And yet it is at the same time man’s effort after goodness.  Man is not a mere “vessel of divine grace,” or a passive recipient of the highest bounty.  All man’s goodness is necessarily man’s achievement.  And the realization by the ideal of itself is man’s achievement of it.  For it is his ideal.  The law without is also the law within.  It is the law within because it is recognized as the law without.  Thus, the moral consciousness passes into the religious consciousness.  The performance of duty is the willing service of the absolute good; and, as such, it involves also the recognition of a purpose that cannot fail.  It is both activity and faith, both a struggle and a consciousness of victory, both morality and religion.  We cannot, therefore, treat these as alternative phases of man’s life.  There is not first the pain of the moral struggle, and then the joy and rest of religion.  The meat and drink is “to do the will of Him that sent Me, to finish His work.”  Heaven is the service of the good.  “There is nothing in the world or out of it that can be called unconditionally good, except the good will.”  The process of willing—­the moral activity—­is its own reward; “the only jewel that shines in its own light.”

It may seem to some to be presumptuous thus to identify the divine and the human; but to separate them makes both morality and religion impossible.  It robs morality of its ideal, and makes God a mere name for the “unknown.”  Those who think that this identification degrades the divine, misapprehend the nature of spirit; and forget that it is of its essence to communicate itself.  And goodness and truth do not become less when shared; they grow greater.  Spiritual possessions imply community wherein there is no exclusion; and to the Christian the glory of God is His communication of Himself.  Hence the so-called religious humility, which makes God different in nature from His work, really degrades the object of its worship.  It puts mere power above the gifts of spirit, and it indicates that the worshipper has not been emancipated from the slavishness, which makes a fetish of its God.  Such a religion is not free, and the development of man destroys it.

  “I never realized God’s birth before—­
  How He grew likest God in being born."[A]

[Footnote A:  The Ring and the Book—­Pompilia, 1690-1691.]

The intense love of the young mother drew the divine and the human together, and set at nought the contrast which prose ever draws between them.  This thought of the unity of God and man is one which has frequent utterance from the poet when his religious spirit is most deeply moved; for it is the characteristic of religious feeling that it abolishes all sense of separation.  It removes all the limitations of finitude and lifts man into rapturous unity with the God he adores; and