But even as, throughout all nature, a state of death is an imprisoned fire, so throughout all nature is there only one way of kindling life.  You might as well write the word “flame” on the outside of a flint and expect it to emit sparks as to imagine that any speculations of your reason will kindle divine life in your soul.

No; Would you have Fire from a Flint; its House of Death must be shaken, and its Chains of Darkness broken off by the Strokes of a Steel upon it.  This must of all Necessity be done to your Soul, its imprisoned Fire must be awakened by the sharp Strokes of Steel, or no true Light of Life can arise in it.[2]

All life, whether physical or spiritual, means a death to some previous condition, and must be generated in pain. 6 1:  An Appeal, Works, vol. vi. pp. 166. 2 Ibid., p, 82.

If this mystical view of Fire be clear, it will be easy enough to follow what Law says about Light and Darkness, or Air, Water, and Earth, interpreting them all in the same way as “eternal Things become gross, finite, measurable, divisible, and transitory."[47]

The Spirit of Prayer is of all Law’s works the one most steeped in mystic ardour, and it possesses a charm, a melody of rhythm, and an imaginative quality rarely to be found in his earlier work.  It should be read by those who would see Law under a little known aspect, and who do not realise that we have an English mystic who expresses, with a strength and beauty which Plotinus himself has rarely surpassed, the longing of the soul for union with the Divine.

Burke, Coleridge, and Carlyle are three very different writers who are alike in the mystical foundations of their belief, and who, through their writings, for over a hundred years in England carry on the mystical attitude and diffuse much mystical thought.

Burke, the greatest and most philosophic of English statesmen, was so largely because of his mystic spirit and imagination.  Much of the greatness of his political pamphlets and speeches and of their enduring value is owing to the fact that his arguments are based on a sense of oneness and continuity, of oneness in the social organism and of continuity in the spirit which animates it.  He believes in a life in the Universe, in a divine order, mysterious and inscrutable in origins and in ends, of which man and society are a part.

This society is linked together in mutual service from the lowest to the highest.  “Society is indeed a contract,” he says in a memorable passage,

It is a partnership in all science; a partnership in all art; a partnership in every virtue, and in all perfection.  As the ends of such a partnership cannot be obtained in many generations, it becomes a partnership not only between those who are living, but between those who are living, those who are dead, and those who are to be born.  Each contract of each particular state is but a clause in the great primaeval