Here lay, in short, the supreme worth for him of the Christian idea.

"The revelation of God in Christ" was for him the consummate example of that union of divine love with the world--"through all the web of Being blindly wove"-- which Shelley had contemplated in the radiant glow of his poetry; accepted by the reason, as he wrote a few years later, it solved "all problems in the earth and out of it." To that solution Shelley seemed to Browning to be on the way, and his incomplete grasp of it appealed to him more powerfully than did the elaborate dogmatisms professedly based upon it.

Shelley had mistaken "Churchdom" for Christianity; but he was on the way, Browning was convinced, to become a Christian himself.

"I shall say what I think,--had Shelley lived he would have finally ranged himself with the Christians." This emphatic declaration is of great importance for Browning's intellectual history.

He may have overlooked the immense barriers which must have always divided Shelley from the Christian world of his time; he may have overlooked also that the Christian thought of our time has in some important points "ranged itself with" Shelley; so that the Christianity which he might finally have adopted would have been sufficiently unlike that which he assailed.