We need no artificial and material presence of Deity. For we believe in That One Eternal and Universal Real Presence-of which it is written ‘He is not far from anyone of us; for in God we live and move and have our being;' and again: Lo, I am with you even to the end of the world;' and again: Wheresoever two or three are gathered together in My Name there am I in the midst of them.' 6 He is the God of nature, as well as the God of grace. Forever He looks down on all things which He has made, and behold, they are very good. And, therefore, we dare offer to Him, in our churches, the most perfect works of naturalistic art, and shape them into copies of whatever beauty He has shown us, in man or woman, in cove or mountain-peak, in tree or flower, even in bird or butterfly. But Himself?-Who can see Him? Except the humble and the contrite heart, to whom He reveals Himself as a Spirit to be worshipped in spirit and in truth, and not in bread, nor wood, nor stone, nor gold, nor quintessential diamond." So we shall obey the sound instinct of our Christian forefathers, when they shaped their churches into forest aisles, and decked them with the boughs of the woodland and the flowers of the field: but we shall obey too, that sounder instinct of theirs, which made them at last cast out of their own temples, as misplaced and unnatural things, the idols which they had inherited from Rome. So we shall obey the sound instinct of our heathen forefathers when they worshipped the unknown God beneath the oaks of the primeval forests: but we shall obey, too, that sounder instinct of theirs, which taught them this, at least, concerning God-That it was beneath His dignity to coop Him within walls; and that the grandest forms of nature, as well as the deepest consciousness of their own souls, revealed to them a mysterious Being, who was to be beheld by faith alone. UNIVERSITY OF HOURS WITH THE MYSTICS.* 66 FEW readers of this magazine probably know anything about "Mystics;" know even what the term means: but as it is plainly connected with the adjective mystical," they probably suppose it to denote some sort of vague, dreamy, sentimental, and therefore useless and undesirable personage. Nor can we blame them if they do so; for mysticism is a form of thought and feeling now all but extinct in England. There are probably not ten thorough mystics among all our millions; the mystic philosophers are very little read by our scholars, and read not for, but in spite of, their mysticism; and our popular theology has so completely rid itself of any mystic elements, that our divines look with utter disfavour upon it, use the word always as a term of opprobrium, and interpret the mystic expressions in our liturgy-which mostly occur in the Collectsaccording to the philosophy of Locke, really ignorant, * Fraser's Magazine, September, 1856.- "Hours with the Mystics." By Robert Alfred Vaughan, B.A. Two Volumes. London: John W. Parker and Son. 1856. |