I say

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Symbolists. In their thought every visible and invisible creature may become to us an appearance of God. There is no part of human experience, in the widest sense of the word experience, which may not come to be both felt and known as a direct manifestation of the Divine Life. felt and known"; for our experiences may become a manifestation of God not merely as a matter of inference, or of speculative thought, but of feeling, this being the least unsatisfactory term which our language provides. Any experience may become a religious experience. This is not to say that all experiences are of equal value for this purpose; "to assert that one, on the whole, is worth no more than another, is fundamentally vicious," as Mr F. H. Bradley curtly says in this connection. The presence of God may be discerned in the manifold experiences of life, in different degrees and with diverse values; and the highest value as a Divine manifestation belongs to the Ideals which humanity forms, in advance of all its past experience and attainment.

There

The varying degrees of truth in self-knowledge are well known; hence as I have ventured to express it in another place, "nothing follows from the mere fact that this or that man, or most men, do not recognise in their Ideals anything which they are inclined to call the presence and self-revelation of the Divine. It is fatal blindness to deny that in such Ideals there is an experience which can only so be described. is a conscious self-surrender in man's earnest scientific work,-in his sincerest and profoundest philosophic thinking, in his devotion to that which has real and abiding beauty, above all, in his yielding to the promptings of humanity and love. Herein he is not merely realising himself in the light of an idea of what is highest and best; he is also consciously surrendering himself to what is the Everlasting Real. The human race is constantly beset by such experience; aroused, it may be, by thinking over the achievements of intellectual, moral, and spiritual genius, or by the personal appeals of such, or by the mysterious yet very real

influences of the beautiful and sublime in Nature or in human life.”1 Hence the Symbolist need not be, and ought not to be, an "individualist" in religion. He can tell us what he has experienced, and how he has tried to interpret his experience, of the everlasting realities of God; and his witness may be valid for other men, because the sources of his experience lie in the universal characteristics of humanity, whose deeper meaning all men are capable of feeling and knowing as he feels and knows them.

From Symbolism we must carefully distinguish Mysticism, although both have been called by the same name. Mysticism has always supposed that the experience of God can only be reached by means which are independent of the ordinary experiences of life. In its extreme form this attitude of mind takes the whole world-the world of sensible objects and of human interests -to be a barrier placed between the Soul and God; the way of perfection consists in

1 See Philosophical Criticism and Construction, ch. vii. § 4, where this conception is discussed from the specially philosophical point of view.

escaping from all these things until the impassioned soul in its upward flight loses itself in the formless and viewless light or God. The secrets of such a life are all within. The beauty of Nature has no ministry for it; and it regards the witness. of man's moral and affectional life and its daily multiplied grace with indifference. There is a touch of this feeling in Coleridge's lines:

"It were a vain endeavour

That I should gaze for ever

On that green light that lingers in the West;
I may not hope from outward forms to win

The passion and the life whose fountains are within.”

There is a touch of the same pure Mysticism in many a sincere religious soul who is ready to say that the realisation of God "will come if you try to have it." We cannot sincerely try to have a sense of God's presence; for the very attempt makes the thought of self so prominent as to obscure not only the divine relation which we seek, but even our relation to the ordinary interests of life.

Mr W. R. Inge, in his valuable and sug

gestive Bampton Lectures on Christian Mysticism, has shown the dangers of this method of belief,-if such it may be called, -which is not limited to Christendom or even to the Western World. It encourages, of necessity, the via negativa both in thought and action. It leaves the mind with a thought of God which is simply the negation of all positive meaning. "Nearly all that repels us," says Mr Inge, "in medieval mysticism-its 'other-worldliness' and passive hostility to civilisation, the emptiness of its ideal life, its maltreatment of the body, its disparagement of family life, the respect which it paid to indolent contemplationsprings from this one root."

But Symbolism teaches that the experience of God's real existence is not something apart from all the human interests and natural experiences of life. It can come only through these natural experiences by deepening them. The roots that join man to God are the same as those that join men to one another and to Nature; only they go deeper. Hence if we seek the realisation of God, it will not come by "try