I have decided to end my survey of Christian Mysticism with these two English poets.  It would hardly be appropriate, in this place, to discuss Carlyle’s doctrine of symbols, as the “clothing” of religious and other kinds of truth.  His philosophy is wanting in some of the essential features of Mysticism, and can hardly be called Christian without stretching the word too far.  And Emerson, when he deals with religion, is a very unsafe guide.  The great American mystic, whose beautiful character was as noble a gift to humanity as his writings, is more liable than any of those whom we have described to the reproach of having turned his back on the dark side of life.  Partly from a fastidiousness which could not bear even to hear of bodily ailments, partly from the natural optimism of the dweller in a new country, and partly because he made a principle of maintaining an unruffled cheerfulness and serenity, he shut his eyes to pain, death, and sin, even more resolutely than did Goethe.  The optimism which is built on this foundation has no message of comfort for the stricken heart.  To say that “evil is only good in the making,” is to repeat an ancient and discredited attempt to solve the great enigma.  And to assert that perfect justice is meted out to individuals in this world, is surely mere dreaming.  Moreover, we can hardly acquit him of playing with pantheistic Mysticism of the Oriental type, without seeing, or without caring, whither such speculations logically lead.  “Within man,” he tells us, “is the soul of the whole, the wise silence, the universal beauty, to which every part and particle is equally related—­the eternal One.”  This is genuine Pantheism, and should carry with it the doctrine that all actions are equally good, bad, or indifferent.  Emerson says that his wife kept him from antinomianism; but this is giving up the defence of his philosophy.  He also differs from Christianity, and agrees with many Hegelians, in teaching that God, “the Over-Soul,” only attains to self-consciousness in man; and this, combined with his denial of degrees in Divine immanence, leads him to a self-deification of an arrogant and shocking kind, such as we find in the Persian Sufis, and in some heretical mystics of the Middle Ages.  “I, the imperfect, adore my own Perfect.  I am receptive of the great soul.  I become a transparent eyeball.  I am nothing.  I see all.  The currents of the universal Being circulate through me.  I am part of God”; and much more to the same effect.  This is not the language of those who have travelled up the mystical ladder, instead of only writing about it.  It is far more objectionable than the bold phrases about deification which I quoted in my fifth Lecture from the fourteenth century mystics; because with them the passage into the Divine glory is the final reward, only to be attained “by all manner of exercises”; while for Emerson it seems to be a state already existing, which we can realise by a mere act of intellectual apprehension.