atheist in his unbelief.  He dwelt upon the unruly power of imagination, its deceptive character, its intimate connection with varying states of physical temperament—­upon the variety of emotional causes which can produce quakings and tremblings and other convulsive forms of excitement—­upon the delusiveness of visions, and revelations, and ecstasies, and their near resemblance to waking dreams—­upon the sore temptations which are apt to lead into sin those who so closely link spirituality with bodily feelings, making religion sensual.  He warned his readers against that sort of intoxication of the understanding, when the imagination is suffered to run wild in allegorical interpretations of Scripture, in fanciful allusions, in theories of mystic influences and properties which carry away the mind into wild superstitions and Pagan pantheism.  He spoke of the self-conceit of many fanatics, their turbulence, their heat and narrow scrupulosity, and asked how these things could be the fruits of heavenly illumination.  He suggested as the proper remedies against enthusiasm, temperance (by which he meant temperate diet, moderate exercise, fresh air, a due and discreet use of devotion), humility, and the sound tests of reason—­practical piety, and service to the Church of God.  Such is the general scope of his treatise; but the most interesting and characteristic portion is towards the close and in the Scholia appended to it, in which he speaks of ’that true and warrantable enthusiasm of devout and holy souls,’ that ’delicious sense of the Divine life’[473] which the spirit of man is capable of receiving.  If space allowed, one or two fine passages might be quoted in which he describes these genuine emotions.  He has also some good remarks upon the value, within guarded limits, of disturbed and excited religious feelings in rousing the soul from lethargy, and acting as external aids to dispose the mind for true spiritual influences.

Henry More died the year before King William’s accession.  But his opinions were, no doubt, shared by some of the best and most cultivated men in the English Church during the opening years of the eighteenth century.  After a time his writings lost their earlier popularity.  Wesley, to his credit, recommended them in 1756 to the use of his brother clergymen.[474] As a rule, they appear at that time to have been but little read; their spiritual tone is pitched in too high a key for the prevalent religious taste of the period which had then set in.  Some years had to pass before the rise of a generation more prepared to draw refreshment from the imaginative and somewhat mystical beauties of his style and sentiment.[475]