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That he was more or less right–that there is nothing in the essence of Mysticism contrary to practical morality, Mr. Vaughan himself fully confesses. In his fair and liberal chapters on Fox and the Early Quakers, he does full justice to their intense practical benevolence; to the important fact that Fox only lived to do good, of any and every kind, as often as a sorrow to be soothed, or an evil to be remedied, crossed his path. We only wish that he had also brought in the curious and affecting account of Fox’s interview with Cromwell, in which he tells us (and we will take Fox’s word against any man) that the Protector gave him to understand, almost with tears, that there was that in Fox’s faith which he was seeking in vain from the “ministers” around him.

All we ask of Mr. Vaughan is, not to be afraid of his own evident liking for Fox; of his own evident liking for Tauler and his school; not to put aside the question which their doctrines involve, with such half-utterances as–

The Quakers are wrong, I think, in separating particular movements and monitions as Divine. But, at the same time, the “witness of the Spirit,” as regards our state before God, is something more, I believe, than the mere attestation to the written word.

As for the former of these two sentences, he may be quite right, for aught we know. But it must be said on the other hand, that not merely Quakers, but decent men of every creed and age, have–we may dare to say, in proportion to their devoutness–believed in such monitions; and that it is hard to see how any man could have arrived at the belief that a living person was working on him, and not a mere impersonal principle, law, or afflatus–(spirit of the universe, or other metaphor for hiding materialism)–unless by believing, rightly or wrongly, in such monitions. For our only inductive conception of a living person demands that that person shall make himself felt by separate acts.

But against the second sentence we must protest. The question in hand is not whether this “witness of the Spirit” “is something more” than, anything else, but whether it exists at all, and what it is. Why was the book written, save to help toward the solution of this very matter? The question all through has been: Can an immediate influence be exercised by the Spirit of God on the spirit of man? Mr. Vaughan assents, and says (we cannot see why) that there is no mysticism in such a belief. Be that as it may, what that influence is, and how exercised, is all through the de quo agitur of Mysticism. Mr. Vaughan, however, seems here for awhile to be talking realism through an admirable page, well worth perusal (pp. 264, 265). Yet his grasp is not sure. We soon find him saying what More and Fox would alike deny, that “The story of Christ’s life and death is our soul’s food.” No; Christ Himself is–would the Catholic Church and the Mystic alike answer. And here again the whole matter in dispute is (unconsciously to Mr. Vaughan) opened up in one word. And if this sentence does not bear directly on that problem, on what does it bear? It was therefore with extreme disappointment that on reading this, and saying to ourselves: “Now we shall hear at last what Mr. Vaughan himself thinks on the matter,” we found that he literally turned the subject off, as if not worth investigation, by making the next speaker answer, apropos of nothing, that “the traditional ascetism of the Friends is their fatal defect as a body.”

Why, too, has Mr. Vaughan devoted a few lines only to the great English Platonists, More, Norris, Smith of Jesus, Gale, and Cudworth? He says, indeed, that they are scarcely Mystics, except in as far as Platonism is always in a measure mystical. In our sense of the word they were all of them Mystics, and of a very lofty type; but surely Henry More is a Mystic in Mr. Vaughan’s sense also. If the author of “Conjectura Cabbalistica” be not a mystical writer (he himself uses the term without shame), who is?

We hope to see much in this book condensed, much modified, much worked out, instead of being left fragmentary and embryotic; but whether our hope be fulfilled or not, a useful and honourable future is before the man who could write such a book as this is, in spite of all defects.

*****

Since the above was written, Mr. Vaughan’s premature death has robbed us of a man who might have done brave work, by lessening, through his own learning, the intellectual gulf which now exists between English Churchmen and Dissenters. Dis aliter visum. But Mr. Vaughan’s death does not, I think, render it necessary for me to alter any of the opinions expressed here; and least of all that in the last sentence, fulfilled now more perfectly than I could have foreseen.