law of God, though constantly overruled and made an instrument of good.  On this subject we must say more later.  Here I need only add that a sunny confidence in the ultimate triumph of good shines from the writings of most of the mystics, especially, I think, in our own countrymen.  The Cambridge Platonists are all optimistic; and in the beautiful but little known Revelations of Juliana of Norwich, we find in page after page the refrain of “All shall be well.”  “Sin is behovable,[42] but all shall be well, and all manner of thing shall be well.”

Since the universe is the thought and will of God expressed under the forms of time and space, everything in it reflects the nature of its Creator, though in different degrees.  Erigena says finely, “Every visible and invisible creature is a theophany or appearance of God.”  The purest mirror in the world is the highest of created things—­the human soul unclouded by sin.  And this brings us to a point at which Mysticism falls asunder into two classes.

The question which divides them is this—­In the higher stages of the spiritual life, shall we learn most of the nature of God by close, sympathetic, reverent observation of the world around us, including our fellow-men, or by sinking into the depths of our inner consciousness, and aspiring after direct and constant communion with God?  Each method may claim the support of weighty names.  The former, which will form the subject of my seventh and eighth Lectures, is very happily described by Charles Kingsley in an early letter.[43] “The great Mysticism,” he says, “is the belief which is becoming every day stronger with me, that all symmetrical natural objects ... are types of some spiritual truth or existence....  Everything seems to be full of God’s reflex if we could but see it....  Oh, to see, if but for a moment, the whole harmony of the great system! to hear once the music which the whole universe makes as it performs His bidding!  When I feel that sense of the mystery that is around me, I feel a gush of enthusiasm towards God, which seems its inseparable effect.”

On the other side stand the majority of the earlier mystics.  Believing that God is “closer to us than breathing, and nearer than hands and feet,” they are impatient of any intermediaries.  “We need not search for His footprints in Nature, when we can behold His face in ourselves,[44]” is their answer to St. Augustine’s fine expression that all things bright and beautiful in the world are “footprints of the uncreated Wisdom.[45]” Coleridge has expressed their feeling in his “Ode to Dejection”—­

“It were a vain endeavour,
Though 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.”

“Grace works from within outwards,” says Ruysbroek, “for God is nearer to us than our own faculties.  Hence it cannot come from images and sensible forms.”  “If thou wishest to search out the deep things of God,” says Richard of St. Victor, “search out the depths of thine own spirit.”