but also the form in which poetic creation is found at its highest. It is interesting to trace the gradual advance of the prophets of the Old Testament towards this manner. At first there are the isolated visions of an Isaiah, or the succession of disconnected pictures in which the thought of Zechariah expressed itself. But later the prophetic imagination begins to take a wider sweep and constructs the world of the Son of Man, and so lays down some of the lines upon which the author of Revelation was to raise his City of God. In genuine inspiration, however, the vision comes as it were with overflowing hands, and more than suffices the formal requirements of thought; for it ripples over into superfluities of detail, like the exquisitely painted texture of the garments in a picture by Veronese. On the other hand, a povertystricken fancy can scarcely attain to the merest outline, and leaves its thought a vanishing allegory. The divine breath that once made ideas so living that they seemed to have hands and feet, ceases; and the deserted soul half mechanically continues to wreathe itself about with shadowy phantomsdesiccated skeletons-of thought, which are only handed down because they satisfy a craving that owed its rise to more living works. The book of Daniel is followed by the book of Enoch, and the Apocalypse of John by the Shepherd of Hermas. The transition from hallucination to inspired vision is marked by the use of symbolism. This will occupy us in the next chapter (p. 175).

The fulness of the visionary experience depends largely upon the passions of the soul. Without passionate feelings, thought as well as impulse fades away, and the quiet of the feelings is sometimes only purchased at the cost of the cessation of thought. The aspirations in which the soul is attracted to its objects determine both the intensity with which the soul directs itself upon them, and the quarter also towards which it is to turn. Only so far as love fixing itself upon its goal spreads therefrom and annexes to its sovereignty the neighbouring spheres, is inspiration possible. And so there is a very close correspondence between the course of human affection generally and the course of the aspiration of the soul towards divine things. This is the original endowment of the soul; its love. The colour taken by its experiences is borrowed from that which is without; a soul's love is its own.

What guarantee is there, you may ask, against the most arbitrary claims to inspiration? I reply by another question: how have such arbitrary claims been dealt with in the past? They are brought to the bar of an illuminated mind. By the widespread, if not universal consent of the most powerful and enlightened races, there are certain examples which furnish, so to speak, a touchstone of feeling; and as a matter of fact these examples may be summarised for us in the attitude and temper of Jesus. Some have attempted to use the life and death of Jesus as a positive limita

tion to the soul's domain, as though nothing were to be accepted which was not already included in that supreme example. But this has never been affirmed or indeed admitted by the most sympathetic exponents of that life. If we put the rule in another form, and say that every experience is valid which does not positively conflict with the meaning of that life, we shall be guarded against those theologians who claim to confine the free action of the human spirit. In the next chapter [p. 177] we shall see how the spirit of Jesus leaves room for the poetic apprehension of the world in the Christian scheme. Yet in a sense He may claim to have embraced this in Himself in a special manner. Sufficient justice has not always been done to Jesus as poet, that is to say, to His use of life in order to bring out what is truly individual, and at the same time universal, in it. The true poet affirms; and in the light of his affirmation what is unreal is found to lose courage and to slink away, like the accusers of the woman taken in adultery. And so there is really no need for fear lest the insistence upon these principles which Jesus embodied in His earthly career should contract the liberty of the painter and the poet. Of course Jesus belonged to another race than ours, and it is difficult always to allow for racial differences. But I think it might fairly be maintained, as a proposition to be dealt with purely on literary grounds, that

In

His influence is really more universal than the genius of Shakespeare,—I mean universal in the sense of including every aspect of truth. fact, as against the classical world Christianity has created the individual, that is to say, one who is more than the citizen of the ancient state, more than a particular in a whole; and so Jesus may claim that He made possible the course which was taken by the genius of the greatest romantic poet. The sympathies of Jesus were not less realistic than those of Shakespeare. He sought life out through its least guarded forms, in the market, the street and the tavern, in such a way as to offend His more rigid contemporaries; and He detected even in the lowest of the low a spark of the divine. Against Him the life of His time grouped itself in the most sublime and tragic contrasts, and furnished the prophetic fulfilment of Aristotle's famous maxim, in that the most critical event in history was also the most tragic. Those, therefore, have been at war with the religion of the cross who have measured its bounds by their own preferences, and defined the Love of God by their own ignorance. The City of God is inconceivable without the poet and the discoverer.

CHAPTER VIII

HUMAN AND DIVINE LOVE

Religion as controlling emotion-As sustaining emotion by stable sentiments-As affording it an outlet-As diffusing it-Symbolism-Artistic invention-Feeling and intensity of vision— Unity of feeling-Use of Canticles-The religious vocationFriendship-Heroic temper demanded-The unconscious love of God-Impartiality demanded-Family love-The worship of the Virgin-Saint and woman Bunyan - Erasmus and Jowett-Wesley-Whitefield-Intimacy of God-The absolute companion-Wordsworth-Jesus and poetic truth-PrayerFeeling reciprocated by God.

IT

T might fairly be said that one of the main offices of religion was to introduce order into the affections, not by repressing them, but by assigning their limits and affording them also an additional and appropriate outlet. "It is," as Joubert says, "the poetry of the heart." The practices which attach specially to the Christian religion may be ranged, then, under two heads, first, as producing certain feelings; second, as affording relief to other feelings.

Through suggestion in its various forms, and notably by conscious imitation, a certain tone of feeling is gradually diffused through the religious