spiritual life, shall we learn most of the nature of God by close,
sympathetic, reverent observation of the world around us, including
our fellow-men, or by sinking into the depths of our inner
consciousness, and aspiring after direct and constant communion with
God? Each method may claim the support of weighty names. The former,
which will form the subject of my seventh and eighth Lectures, is very
happily described by Charles Kingsley in an early letter.[43] "The
great Mysticism," he says, "is the belief which is becoming every day
stronger with me, that all symmetrical natural objects ... are types
of some spiritual truth or existence.... Everything seems to be full
of God's reflex if we could but see it.... Oh, to see, if but for a
moment, the whole harmony of the great system! to hear once the music
which the whole universe makes as it performs His bidding! When I feel
that sense of the mystery that is around me, I feel a gush of
enthusiasm towards God, which seems its inseparable effect."

On the other side stand the majority of the earlier mystics. Believing
that God is "closer to us than breathing, and nearer than hands and
feet," they are impatient of any intermediaries. "We need not search
for His footprints in Nature, when we can behold His face in
ourselves,[44]" is their answer to St. Augustine's fine expression
that all things bright and beautiful in the world are "footprints of
the uncreated Wisdom.[45]" Coleridge has expressed their feeling in
his "Ode to Dejection"--


"It were a vain endeavour,
Though I should gaze for ever
On that green light that lingers in the West;
I may not hope from outward forms to win