being understood.  Among others, it has been degraded into superstition by the same cause.  When an appetite for the mysterious has been cherished, it becomes easy to attribute spiritual results to material causes, to the confusion of the first principles alike of morality and of knowledge.  Some, through an ambition of understanding the unintelligible, have wasted their energies in a labyrinth of scholastic subtleties; others have surrendered themselves to a vague unpractical mysticism.

But, whatever may have been the errors common in other ages, it was certainly no characteristic of the eighteenth century to linger unhealthily upon the contemplation of mysteries.  The predominant fault was one of a directly opposite nature.  There was apt to be an impatience of all mystery, a contemptuous neglect of all that was not self-evident or easy to understand.  ‘The Gospel,’ it was said, ’professes plainness and uses no hard words.’[236] Whatever was obscure was only the imperfection of the old dispensation, or the corruption of the new, and might be excluded from the consideration of rational beings.  Even in the natural world there was most mystery in the things which least concern us; Divine providence had ordered that what was most necessary should be least obscure.  Much too was added about the priestcraft and superstition which had commonly attended the inculcation of mysterious doctrines.  In all such arguments there was a considerable admixture of truth.  But in its general effect it tended greatly to depress the tone of theological thought, to take away from it sublimity and depth, and to degrade religion into a thing of earth.[237] Even where it did not controvert any of the special doctrines of revealed religion, it inclined men to pass lightly over them, or at all events to regard them only in their directly practical aspects, and so to withdraw from the soul, as if they were but idle speculations, some of the most elevating subjects of contemplation which the Christian faith affords.  Such reasoners were strangely blind to the thought that few could be so inertly commonplace in mind and feeling, as to rest satisfied with being fired to virtuous deeds by the purely practical side of transcendental truths, without delighting in further reflection on the very nature of those mysteries themselves.  Nor did they at all realise, that independently of any direct results in morality and well-being, it is no small gain to a man to be led by the thought of Divine mysteries to feel that he stands on the verge of a higher world, a higher nature, of which he may have scarcely a dim perception, but to which creatures lower than himself in the scale of being are wholly insensible.  There was little feeling that truths which baffle reason may be, and must be, nevertheless accordant with true reason.  It was left to William Law, a writer who stood much apart from the general spirit of his age, to remark:  ’This is the true ground and nature of the mysteries of Christian redemption.  They are, in themselves, nothing else but what the nature of things requires them to be ... but they are mysteries to man, because brought into the scheme of redemption by the interposition of God to work in a manner above and superior to all that is seen and done in the things of this world.’[238]