but will not give up faith in God.  “Let us fly hence to our dear country!” We hear the words already in Plotinus—­nay, even in Plato.  The sun still shone in heaven, but on earth he was eclipsed.  Mysticism cuts too deep to allow us to live comfortably on the surface of life; and so all “the heavy and the weary weight of all this unintelligible world” pressed upon men and women till they were fain to throw it off, and seek peace in an invisible world of which they could not see even a shadow round about them.

But I do not think that the negative road is a pure error.  There is a negative side in religion, both in thought and practice.  We are first impelled to seek the Infinite by the limitations of the finite, which appear to the soul as bonds and prison walls.  It is natural first to think of the Infinite as that in which these barriers are done away.  And in practice we must die daily, if our inward man is to be daily renewed.  We must die to our lower self, not once only but continually, so that we may rise on stepping stones of many dead selves to higher things.[178] We must die to our first superficial views of the world around us, nay, even to our first views of God and religion, unless the childlike in our faith is by arrest of growth to become the childish.  All the good things of life have first to be renounced, and then given back to us, before they can be really ours.  It was necessary that these truths should be not only taught, but lived through.  The individual has generally to pass through the quagmire of the “everlasting No,” before he can set his feet on firm ground; and the Christian races, it seems, were obliged to go through the same experience.  Moreover, there is a sense in which all moral effort aims at destroying the conditions of its own existence, and so ends logically in self-negation.  Our highest aim as regards ourselves is to eradicate, not only sin, but temptation.  We do not feel that we have won the victory until we no longer wish to offend.  But a being who was entirely free from temptation would be either more or less than a man—­“either a beast or a God,” as Aristotle says.[179] There is, therefore, a half truth in the theory that the goal of earthly striving is negation and absorption.  But it at once becomes false if we forget that it is a goal which cannot be reached in time, and which is achieved, not by good and evil neutralising each other, but by death being swallowed up in victory.  If morality ceases to be moral when it has achieved its goal, it must pass into something which includes as well as transcends it—­a condition which is certainly not fulfilled by contemplative passivity.[180]

These thoughts should save us from regarding the saints of the cloister with impatience or contempt.  The limitations incidental to their place in history do not prevent them from being glorious pioneers among the high passes of the spiritual life, who have scaled heights which those who talk glibly about “the mistake of asceticism” have seldom even seen afar off.