These charges, then, do not seem to form a grave indictment against the type of Mysticism of which Wordsworth is the best representative.  But he does fall short of the ideal held up by St. John for the Christian mystic, in that his love and sympathy for inanimate Nature were (at any rate in his poetry) deeper than for humanity.  And if there is any accusation which may justly be brought against the higher order of mystics (as opposed to representatives of aberrant types), I think it is this:  that they have sought and found God in their own souls and in Nature, but not so often in the souls of other men and women:  theirs has been a lonely religion.  The grand old maxim, “Vides fratrem, vides Dominum tuum,” has been remembered by them only in acts of charity.  But in reality the love of human beings must be the shortest road to the vision of God.  Love, as St. John teaches us, is the great hierophant of the Christian mysteries.  It gives wings to contemplation and lightens the darkness which hides the face of God.  When our emotions are deeply stirred, even Nature speaks to us with voices unheard before; while the man who is without human affection is either quite unmoved by her influences, or misreads all her lessons.

The spiritualising power of human love is the redeeming principle in many sordid lives.  Teutonic civilisation, which derives half of its restless energy from ideals which are essentially anti-Christian, and tastes which are radically barbarous, is prevented from sinking into moral materialism by its high standard of domestic life.  The sweet influences of the home deprive even mammon-worship of half its grossness and of some fraction of its evil.  As a schoolmaster to bring men and women to Christ, natural affection is without a rival.  It is in the truest sense a symbol of our union with Him from whom every family in heaven and earth is named.  It is needless to labour a thesis on which nearly all are agreed; but it may be worth pointing out that, though St. Paul felt the unique value of Christian marriage as a symbol of the mystical union of Christ and the Church, this truth was for the most part lost sight of by the mediaeval mystics, who as monks and priests were, of course, cut off from domestic life.  The romances of true love which the Old Testament contains were treated as prophecies wrapped up in riddling language, or as models for ecstatic contemplation.  Wordsworth, though his own home was a happy one, does not supply this link in the mystical chain.  The most noteworthy attempt to do so is to be found in the poetry of Robert Browning, whose Mysticism is in this way complementary to that of Wordsworth.[392] He resembles Wordsworth in always trying “to see the infinite in things,” but considers that “little else (than the development of a soul) is worth study.”  This is not exactly a return to subjective Mysticism, for Browning is as well aware as Goethe that if “a talent grows best in solitude,” a character is perfected