For him the mere revelation of Pompilia would suffice.

His inmost feeling is summed up with perfect adequacy in a word to the Judges: "You know this is not love, Sirs--it is faith." There is another kind of faith which comes not suddenly through passion but slowly through thought and action and trial, and the long fidelity of a life.

It is that of which Milton speaks in the lines: Till old experience do attain To something of Prophetic strain.
This is the faith of Browning's Pope Innocent, who up to extreme old age has kept open his intelligence both on the earthward and the Godward sides, and who, being wholly delivered from self by that devotion to duty which is the habit of his mind, can apprehend the truth of things and pronounce judgment upon them almost with the certitude of an instrument of the divine righteousness.

And yet he is entirely human, God's vicegerent and also an old man, learned in the secrets of the heart, patient in the inquisition of facts, weighing his documents, scrutinising each fragment of evidence, burdened by the sense of responsibility, cheered also by the opportunity of true service, grave but not sad-- Simple, sagacious, mild yet resolute, With prudence, probity and--what beside From the other world he feels impress at times; a "grey ultimate decrepitude," yet visited by the spiritual fire which touches a soul whose robe of flesh is worn thin; not unassailed by doubts as to the justice of his final decision, but assured that his part is confidently to make the best use of the powers with which he has been entrusted; young of heart, if also old, in his rejoicing in goodness and his antipathy to evil.
_The Ring and the Book_ is a great receptacle into which Browning poured, with an affluence that perhaps is excessive, all his powers--his searchings for truth, his passion, his casuistry, his feeling for beauty, his tenderness, his gift of pity, his veiled memories of what was most precious in the past, his hopes for the future, his worldly knowledge, his unworldly aspirations, his humour, such as it was, robust rather than delicate.

Could the three monologues which tell how in various ways it strikes a Roman contemporary have been fused into a single dialogue, could the speeches of the two advocates have been briefly set over, one against the other, instead of being drawn out at length, we might still have got the whole of Browning's mind.