Ring in the valiant man and free,
      The larger heart, the kindlier hand;
      Ring out the darkness of the land,
    Ring in the Christ that is to be.”

The common characteristic of these social ideals is their dependence on the culture of individuals.  With the incoming of “the valiant man and free,” the man of “larger heart and kindlier hand,” there is a reasonable hope that the darkness of the land will disappear.

With that deep look into the inmost secrets of human experience which sounds strangely autobiographical, Browning wrote in “Rabbi Ben Ezra,”

      “Praise be thine! 
      I see the whole design,
    I, who saw power, see love now perfect too;
      Perfect I call thy plan;
      Thanks that I was a man! 
    Maker, remake, complete,—­I trust what Thou shalt do!”

      “Therefore I summon age
      To grant youth’s heritage,
    Life’s struggle having so far reached its term;
      Thence shall I pass, approved
      A man, for aye removed
    From the developed brute; a god though in the germ.”

Those last lines condense Browning’s creed concerning man.  He is “for aye removed from the developed brute,” and is “a god in the germ.”  Browning holds that while in the future there will surely be expansion of soul, evolution as a physical process is at an end.  Henceforward there will be no passing from one species to another.  Species have to do with physical organisms, not with spirits.  Soul in man is but God “in the germ.”

Emerson and Matthew Arnold have written much about education.  The one foretells a day when the soul, after mounting and meliorating, finds that even the hells are turned into benefit; and the other makes his own the thought of Bishop Wilson that culture is a study of perfection, and that the soul must ever seek increased life, increased light, and increased power.

Education is the word of the hour and of the century.  It is believed to be the panacea for all ills, individual and social.  But, precisely, what does this passion for education signify if not that, either intelligently or otherwise, all believe in the perfectibility of the soul, and that it will have all the time that it needs for the process.  The absorbing devotion to intellectual training suggests the inquiry as to whether many who affirm that they are agnostic concerning immortality are not in reality earnest in their faith; for why should they seek the culture of that which fades, as the flowers fade; when it approaches life’s winter?  But, whether faith in continuance of being is firm or frail, few doubt the perfectibility of spirit, because, beyond almost all things, they are seeking its perfection.  Literature, which is but the thoughts of the great souls of successive periods recorded, prophesies a day when all that hinders or taints shall be done away, and when the divine in the germ shall have grown to large and fair proportions.