contemporary once called ’the holiest of God’s children now living on the earth,’[628] could yet say of the higher elevation of the Christian life that, ’where this comes to pass, outward works become of no moment.’[629] What wonder that the fanatical Beghards, or Brethren of the Free Spirit, against whom he contended with all his energies,[630] should seek to confuse his principles with theirs, and assert that, having attained the higher state, they were not under subjection to moral commandments?  So, again, of the early Quakers Henry More[631] observed that, although their doctrine of special illumination had guided many into much sanctity of life, the more licentious sort had perverted it into a cloke for all kinds of enormity, on the ground that they were inspired by God, and could be guilty of no sin, as only exercising their rights of liberty.  Madame de Bourignon was an excellent woman, but Leslie and Lavington[632] showed that some of her writings seem dangerously to underrate good works.  Moravian principles, lightly understood, made Herrnhut a model Christian community; misunderstood, they became pretexts for the most dangerous Antinomianism.[633] An example may even be quoted from the last century where the nobler elements of mystic enthusiasm were found in one mind combined with the pernicious tendency in question.  In that very remarkable but eccentric genius, William Blake, mysticism was rich in fruits of faith and love, and it is needless, therefore, to add that he was a good man, of blameless morals; yet, by a strange flaw or partial derangement in his profoundly spiritual nature, ’he was for ever, in his writings, girding at the “mere moral law” as the letter that killeth.  His conversation, his writings, his designs, were equally marked by theoretic licence and virtual guilelessness.’[634]

Bishop Berkeley’s name could not be passed over even in such a sketch as this without a sense of incompleteness.  He was, it is true, strongly possessed with the prevalent feeling of aversion to anything that was called enthusiasm.  When, for example, his opinion was asked about John Hutchinson—­a writer whose mystic fancies as to recondite meanings contained in the words of the Hebrew Bible[635] possessed a strange fascination for William Jones of Nayland, Bishop Horne, and other men of some note[636]—­he answered that he was not acquainted with his works, but ’I have observed him to be mentioned as an enthusiast, which gave me no prepossession in his favour.’[637] But the Christianity of feeling, which lies at the root of all that is sound and true in what the age called enthusiasm, was much encouraged by the theology and philosophy of Berkeley.  It may not have been so to any great extent among his actual contemporaries.  A thoroughly prosaic generation, such as that was in which he lived, was too unable to appreciate his subtle and poetic intellect to gain much instruction from it.  He was much admired, but little understood.  ‘He is indeed,’ wrote Warburton to Hurd, ’a great man, and the only visionary I ever knew that was.’[638] It was left for later reasoners, in England and on the Continent, to separate what may be rightly called visionary in his writings from what may be profoundly true, and to feel the due influence of his suggestive and spiritual reflections.