that is unheavenly, gross, dark, wrathful, and disordered from every part of this fallen world.”  No text is oftener in his mouth than the words of St. Paul which I read as the text of this Lecture.  That “dim sympathy” of the human spirit with the life of nature which Plotinus felt, but which mediaeval dualism had almost quenched, has now become an intense and happy consciousness of community with all living things, as subjects of one all-embracing and unchanging law, the law of perfect love.  Magic and portents, apparitions and visions, the raptures of “infused contemplation” and their dark Nemesis of Satanic delusions, can no more trouble the serenity of him who has learnt to see the same God in nature whom he has found in the holy place of his own heart.

It was impossible to separate Law from the “blessed Behmen,” whose disciple he was proud to profess himself.  But in putting them together I have been obliged to depart from the chronological order, for the Cambridge Platonists, as they are usually called, come between.  This, however, need cause no confusion, for the Platonists had no direct influence upon Law.  Law, Nonjuror as well as mystic, remained a High Churchman by sympathy, and hated Rationalism; while the Platonists sprang from an Evangelical school, were never tired of extolling Reason, and regarded Boehme as a fanciful “enthusiast.[357]” And yet, we find so very much in common between the Platonists and William Law, that these party differences seem merely superficial.  The same exalted type of Mysticism appears in both.

The group of philosophical divines, who had their centre in some of the Cambridge colleges towards the middle of the seventeenth century, furnishes one of the most interesting and important chapters in the history of our Church.  Never since the time of the early Greek Fathers had any orthodox communion produced thinkers so independent and yet so thoroughly loyal to the Church.  And seldom has the Christian temper found a nobler expression than in the lives and writings of such men as Whichcote and John Smith.[358]

These men made no secret of their homage to Plato.  And let it be noticed that they were students of Plato and Plotinus more than of Dionysius and his successors.  Their Platonism is not of the debased Oriental type, and is entirely free from self-absorbed quietism.  The via negativa has disappeared as completely in their writings as in those of Boehme; the world is for them as for him the mirror of the Deity; but, being philosophers and not physicists, they are most interested in claiming for religion the whole field of intellectual life.  They are fully convinced that there can be no ultimate contradiction between philosophy or science and Christian faith; and this accounts not only for their praise of “reason,” but for the happy optimism which appears everywhere in their writings.  The luxurious and indolent Restoration clergy, whose lives were shamed by the