of our own deadness.”  Apart from the unlikelihood of a theory which makes man—­“the roof and crown of things”—­the only diseased and discordant element in the universe, the writer lays himself open to the fatal rejoinder, “Did Christ, then, see no sin or evil in the world?” The doctrines of sacrifice (vicarious suffering) as a blessed law of Nature ("the secret of the universe is learnt on Calvary"), and of the necessity of annihilating “the self” as the principle of evil, are pressed with a harsh and unnatural rigour.  Our blessed Lord laid no such yoke upon us, nor will human nature consent to bear it.  The “atonement” of the world by love is much better delineated by R.L.  Nettleship, in a passage which seems to me to exhibit the very kernel of Christian Mysticism in its social aspect.  “Suppose that all human beings felt permanently to each other as they now do occasionally to those they love best.  All the pain of the world would be swallowed up in doing good.  So far as we can conceive of such a state, it would be one in which there would be no ‘individuals’ at all, but an universal being in and for another; where being took the form of consciousness, it would be the consciousness of ‘another’ which was also ’oneself’—­a common consciousness.  Such would be the ‘atonement’ of the world.”]

[Footnote 392:  Charles Kingsley is another mystic of the same school.]

[Footnote 393:  Browning, Paracelsus, Act i.]

[Footnote 394:  Browning, “Saul,” xvii.]

[Footnote 395:  Browning, “Cristina.”]

[Footnote 396:  Browning, “Christmas Eve and Easter Day,” xxx., xxxiii.]

[Footnote 397:  Browning, “Any Wife to any Husband.”]

[Footnote 398:  Compare Plato’s well-known sentence:  [Greek:  di algedonon kai odynon gignetai he opheleia, ou gar oion te allos adikias apallattesthai].]

[Footnote 399:  Browning, Paracelsus.]

[Footnote 400:  Compare Pascal:  “No one is discontented at not being a king, except a discrowned king.”]

[Footnote 401:  It is almost as prominent in Tennyson as in Browning:  “Give her the wages of going on, and not to die,” is his wish for the human soul.]

[Footnote 402:  I had written these words before the publication of Principal Caird’s Sermons, which contain, in my judgment, the most powerful defence of what I have called Christian Mysticism that has appeared since William Law.  On p. 14 he says:  “Of all things good and fair and holy there is a spiritual cognisance which precedes and is independent of that knowledge which the understanding conveys.”  He shows how in the contemplation of nature it is “by an organ deeper than intellectual thought” that “the revelation of material beauty flows in upon the soul.”  “And in like manner there is an apprehension of God and Divine things which comes upon the spirit as a living reality which it immediately and intuitively perceives.” ...  “There is a capacity of the soul, by which the truths of religion may be apprehended and appropriated.”  See the whole sermon, entitled, What is Religion? and many other parts of the book.]