Believe me, than in half the creeds.

Browning, as always, takes a hopeful view of human stupidity when he
expresses his belief that men will not long "persist in confounding, any
more than God confounds, with genuine infidelity and atheism of the
heart those passionate impatient struggles of a boy toward truth and
love." [Footnote: _Preface_ to the Letters of Shelley (afterwards
proved spurious).]

The reluctance of the world to give honor too freely to the poet who
prefers solitary doubt to common faith is, probably enough, due to a
shrewd suspicion that the poet finds religious perplexity a very
satisfactory poetic stimulus. In his character as man of religion as in
that of lover, the poet is apt to feel that his thirst, not the
quenching of it, is the aesthetic experience. There is not much question
that since the beginning of the romantic movement, at least, religious
doubt has been more prolific of poetry than religious certainty has
been. Even Cowper, most orthodox of poets, composed his best religious
poetry while he was tortured by doubt. One does not deny that there is
good poetry in the hymn books, expressing settled faith, but no one will
seriously contend, I suppose, that any contentedly orthodox poet of the
last century has given us a body of verse that compares favorably, in
purely poetical merit, with that of Arnold.

Against the imputation that he deliberately dallies with doubt, the poet
can only reply that, again as in the case of his human loves, longing is
strong enough to spur him to poetic achievement, only when it is a
thirst driving him mad with its intensity. The poet, in the words of a
recent poem, is "homesick after God," and in the period of his blackest
doubt beats against the wall of his reason with the cry,