Is it not plain that the poet of Nature amid the Cumberland hills, the Spanish ascetic in his cell, and the Platonic philosopher in his library or lecture-room, have been climbing the same mountain from different sides?  The paths are different, but the prospect from the summit is the same.  It is idle to speak of collusion or insanity in the face of so great a cloud of witnesses divided by every circumstance of date, nationality, creed, education, and environment.  The Carmelite friar had no interest in confirming the testimony of the Alexandrian professor; and no one has yet had the temerity to question the sanity of Wordsworth, or of Tennyson, whose description of the Vision in his “Ancient Sage” is now known to be a record of personal experience.  These explorers of the high places of the spiritual life have only one thing in common—­they have observed the conditions laid down once for all for the mystic in the 24th Psalm, “Who shall ascend into the hill of the Lord? or who shall stand in His holy place?  He that hath clean hands and a pure heart; who hath not lifted up his soul unto vanity, nor sworn deceitfully.  He shall receive the blessing from the Lord, and righteousness from the God of his salvation.”  The “land which is very far off” is always visible to those who have climbed the holy mountain.  It may be scaled by the path of prayer and mortification, or by the path of devout study of God’s handiwork in Nature (and under this head I would wish to include not only the way traced out by Wordsworth, but that hitherto less trodden road which should lead the physicist to God); and, lastly, by the path of consecrated life in the great world, which, as it is the most exposed to temptations, is perhaps on that account the most blessed of the three.[389]

It has been said of Wordsworth, as it has been said of other mystics, that he averts his eyes “from half of human fate.”  Religious writers have explained that the neglected half is that which lies beneath the shadow of the Cross.  The existence of positive evil in the world, as a great fact, and the consequent need of redemption, is, in the opinion of many, too little recognised by Wordsworth, and by Mysticism in general.  This objection has been urged both from the scientific and from the religious side.  It is held by many students of Nature that her laws affirm a Pessimism and not an Optimism.  “Red in tooth and claw with ravine,” she shrieks against the creed that her Maker is a God of love.  The only morality which she inculcates is that of a tiger in the jungle, or at best that of a wolf-pack.  “It is not strange (says Lotze) that no nature-religions have raised their adherents to any high pitch of morality or culture.[390]” The answer to this is that Nature includes man as well as the brutes, and the merciful and moral man as well as the savage.  Physical science, at any rate, can exclude nothing from the domain of Nature.  And the Christian may say with all reverence that