Bunyan might at first sight appear to have many of the characteristics of the mystic, for he had certain very intense psychic experiences which are of the nature of a direct revelation of God to the soul; and in his vivid religious autobiography, Grace Abounding, he records sensations which are akin to those felt by Rolle, Julian, and many others.  But although psychically akin, he is in truth widely separated from the mystics in spirit and temperament and belief.  He is a Puritan, overwhelmed with a sense of sin, the horrors of punishment in hell, and the wrath of an outside Creator and Judge, and his desire is aimed at escape from this wrath through “election” and God’s grace.  But he is a Puritan endowed with a psychopathic temperament sensitive to the point of disease and gifted with an abnormally high visualising power.  Hence his resemblance to the mystics, which is a resemblance of psychical temperament and not of spiritual attitude.

In the eighteenth century the names of William Law and William Blake shine out like stars against a dark firmament of “rationalism” and unbelief.  Their writings form a remarkable contrast to the prevailing spirit of the time.  Law expresses in clear and pointed prose the main teachings of the German seer Jacob Boehme;[6] whereas Blake sees visions and has knowledge which he strives to condense into forms of picture and verse which may be understood of men.  The influence of Boehme in the eighteenth and nineteenth centuries is very far-reaching.  In addition to completely subjugating the strong intellect of Law, he profoundly influenced Blake.  He also affected Thomas Erskine of Linlathen, and through him, Carlyle, J. W. Farquhar, F. D. Maurice, and others.  Hegel, Schelling, and Schlegel are alike indebted to him, and through them, through his French disciple St Martin, and through Coleridge—­who was much attracted to him—­some of his root-ideas returned again to England in the nineteenth century, thus preparing the way for a better understanding of mystical thought.  The Swedish seer Emmanuel Swedenborg (1688-1772) was another strong influence in the later eighteenth and the nineteenth centuries.  Swedenborg in some ways is curiously material, at any rate in expression, and in one point at least he differs from other mystics.  That is, he does not seem to believe that man has within him a spark of the divine essence, but rather that he is an organ that reflects the divine life.  He is a recipient of life, but not a part of life itself.  God is thought of as a light or sun outside, from which spiritual heat and light (= love and wisdom) flow into men.  But, apart from this important difference Swedenborg’s thought and teaching are entirely mystical.  He believes in the substantial reality of spiritual things, and that the most essential part of a person’s nature, that which he carries with him into the spiritual world, is his love.  He teaches that heaven is not a place, but a condition, that there is no question of outside rewards or punishments, and man makes his own heaven or hell; for, as Patmore pointedly expresses it—­