beams into the earth, and death is a grasshopper chirruping among its meadows. The quietness of God rests on the peaks of flames, whose tongues are the chanting of angels, whose lights are the symphonies of trees, rocks and birds, whose coals are the transfigured minds of men. The quietness of God came like a cry upon the earth, and the earth was beaten flat with it, and out of the desolation of all the agonies and passions and ideas and raptures since the beginning of the world, higher than the highest heavens, went up the thin blade of perfect and thanksgiving silence.

And evil? It is the noise which builds a prison about the quietness of God. Generation upon generation, labouring in the sweat of years, is encamped at the foot of the wall. There are some who make bricks, and their noise is like the forge of the proud giants; there are some who carry the bricks to the wall, and their tumult is the shock of uncounted armies outbrazening hate; there are some who climb upon the dizzy edges of the wall, and their steps are like the deep falling of tears of stone. The captains stand by the wall with whips (whose hissing is like the anger of destroying comets). Their arms are weary with blows, their eyes strain from their sockets, their faces are scored with the lash of desire and triumph, their hearts crack with the rending of earthquakes, and they are delivered into the quietness of God. For thousands of ages they have built the wall with bricks so hard that the furnaces of sacrificial beauty cannot melt them, so tempered that the sword of Gabriel cannot break them, so smooth and well-fitting that the javelin wind of light cannot pierce them. It is thicker than lethargy, stouter than folly, broader than power,

and loftier than ambition. It is called a temple of holiness, hung with arms and votive offerings, and God cannot escape, because within is the shrine that hums with the loudness of prayers. But the quietness of God is not within the temple.

Sharp discord bursts through his peace in terrible lightnings, the engines of confusion hurl their bolts into its bosom. Time brands his evil upon the forehead of the living with the stamp of his iron hoof, more blasting than the encounter of chaos, and the sparks have consumed us. But the quietness of God sings upon the spray of Heaven.

XXII

MYSTICISM OLD AND NEW (1)

MY DEAR X,

You, no doubt, have more data on the subject than I have, or for the matter of that any of us mortal puppets who dance at the end of the strings of the law of gravity. At any rate, I am quite sure that the old materialist science which confined us to this earthly brief span of existence, which has made us idolatrous to externals, for the sake of externals, is becoming senile. Partly because we are once more trailing at the tired and ragged end of a period of civilization and are dimly conscious of its approaching dissolution; partly because the ghastly holocaust of the European War has jerked us out of the arm-chair of comfortable dogma; partly because the failure of man's will to make the world fit to live in is a sharp reminder of his impotence to account for his own significance and destiny-these and other reasons are driving the few people who are conscious of our present nescience back again to metaphysics. I do not think the faint symptoms of a revival in seventeenthcentury literature are irrelevant to this renewed concern in spiritual things. In our literature, the seventeenth century is the great age of mystical exploration. Burton's

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Anatomy," Sir Thomas Browne's "Vulgar Errors,' and Donne's" Sermons," to mention only three of the most obvious prose works, are full of the boldest and abstrusest speculations as to the transcendental meaning of life; and the Christian orthodoxy of these writers and their kin only a passport for adventure. The seventeenth century, of course, has had a scarcely perceptible influence as yet, and only upon the poets of whom Ralph Hodgson is the best; but I am surprised at the number of average novels which, in greater or less degree and from very different angles of perception, deal with the supernatural. Modern literature is without doubt turning its mind towards the symbolic expression of ultra-consciousness. The attitude is, of course, tentative at present, and this ghost of a new religious feeling, by being loaded (owing to the war) with the Mrs. Radcliffian chains of gross superstition, ugly credulity, and the morbid itch for sensation, has come to haunt rather than to bless us. But reaction against a materialism which even thoughtless people dimly feel to be responsible for the mockery of God which is modern war, will bring with it both violence and sanity. And this approach to mystical sanity is one of the most interesting things in contemporary life. Have we here the germ of a new-old religion which will attempt to fuse the by no means incompatible and irreconcilable significations of Paganism and Christianity? Why should not a potential religious revival correspond with, actuate, or depend upon a revival of literature ?

Personally I do not see why a belief in a plurality of lives, past and future, should not one day become of commonplace acceptance. The writers of "Ecclesias

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tical Sonnets" and of "Evelyn Hope" were not censored for positively affirming it. Christianity indeed, while admitting the immortality of man, is reluctant to grant him pre-existence-as though this terrestrial life were his jumping-board into ether-or the abyss. But that conjecture is based on an ethical concept, and I see no reason why Christianity should not in time accept man's present span of years as a portion in a periodic mortality instead of conceiving it as an anticipation of a final eternity. Is the absolute of God disintegrated because the potential lot of man may be many lives rather than one life, many deaths rather than one death? Such a doctrine would not abolish but postpone the ultimate consummation of man in God. Ah, what would not the generations of men give for an assurance that after multiple experience, after æonic pilgrimage, after the flux of centuries, after the defeats of the unconquerable spirit and the triumphs of immediate matter, they might in an undiscovered future more remote than death, more desirable than life, redeem the frustrations of their several efforts? But who is there, who has there ever been, so conscious of the unspeakable radiance of perfection that he can leap from the tomb of this present life full into the bosom of Abraham ?

Yet some, who all this while did weep, and sing,
And sing and weep, soar'd up into the Ring,
But most would use no wing:

O fools (said I) thus to prefer dark night
Before true light,

To live in grots, and caves, and hate the day
Because it shews the way,