ll his active powers to
become absorbed and swallowed up in the Infinite.[130] Plato and his
followers sought by an immediate abstraction to apprehend "the
unchangeable and permanent Being," and, by a loving contemplation, to
become "assimilated to the Deity," and in this way to attain the
immediate consciousness of God. The Neo-Platonic mystic sought by
asceticism and self-mortification to prepare himself for divine
communings. He would contemplate the divine perfections in himself; and
in an _ecstatic_ state, wherein all individuality vanishes, he would
realize a union, or identity, with the Divine Essence.[131] While the
universal Church of God, indeed, has in her purest days always taught
that man may, by inward purity and a believing love, be rendered capable
of spiritually apprehending, and consciously feeling, the presence of
God. Some may be disposed to pronounce this as all mere mysticism. We
answer, The living internal energy of religion is always _mystical_, it
is grounded in _feeling_--a "_sensus numinis_" common to humanity. It is
the mysterious sentiment of the Divine; it is the prolepsis of the human
spirit reaching out towards the Infinite; the living susceptibility of
our spiritual nature stretching after the powers and influences of the
higher world. It is upon this inner instinct of the supernatural that
all religion rests. I do not say every religious idea, but whatever is
positive, practical, powerful, durable, and popular. Everywhere, in all
climates, in all epochs of history, and in all degrees of civilization,
man is animated by the sentiment--I would rather say, the
presentiment--that the world in which he lives, the order of things in
the midst of which he moves, the facts which regularly and constantly
succeed each other, are not _all_. In vain he daily makes discoveries
and conquests in this vast universe; in vain he observes and learnedly
verifies the general laws which govern it; _his thought is not inclosed
in the world surrendered to his science_; the spectacle of it does not
suffice his soul, it is raised beyond it; it searches after and catches
glimpses of something beyond it; it aspires higher both for the universe
and itself; it aims at another destiny, another master.

[Footnote 130: Vaughan, "Hours with the Mystics," vol. i. p. 44.]

[Footnote 131: Id. ib., vol. i. p. 65.]

"'Par dela tous ces cieux le Dieu des cieux reside.'"[132]

So Voltaire has said, and the God who is