of God
and ultimately indissolubly united to God in love. God is at once the
Creator and the Restorer of man's soul, He is the Origin as well as the
End of all existence; and He is also the Way to that End. In Christian
mysticism, CHRIST is the Pattern, towards which the mystic strives;
CHRIST also is the means towards the attainment of this end.

By mystical philosophy I mean that system of philosophical thought which
emphasises the unity of the Cosmos, asserting that God and the spiritual
may be perceived immanent in the things of this world, because all
things natural are symbols and emblems of spiritual verities. As one of
the _Golden Verses_ attributed to PYTHAGORAS, which I have quoted in a
previous essay, puts it: "The Nature of this Universe is in all things
alike"; commenting upon which, HIEROCLES, writing in the fifth or sixth
century, remarks that "Nature, in forming this Universe after the Divine
Measure and Proportion, made it in all things conformable and like to
itself, analogically in different manners. Of all the different species,
diffused throughout the whole, it made, as it were, an Image of the
Divine Beauty, imparting variously to the copy the perfections of the
Original."(1) We have, however, already encountered so many instances of
this belief, that no more need be said here concerning it.

(1) _Commentary of_ HIEROCLES _on the Golden Verses of_ PYTHAGORAS
(trans. by N. ROWE, 1906), pp. 101 and 102.

In fine, as Dean INGE well says: "Religious Mysticism may be defined as
the attempt to realise the presence of the living God in the soul and in
nature, or, more generally, as _the attempt to realise, in thought
and feeling, the immanence of the temporal in the eternal, and of the
eternal in the temporal_."(2)

(2) WILLIAM RALPH INGE, M.A.: _Christian Mysticism_ (the Bampton
Lectures, 1899), p. 5.

Now, doctrines such as these were not only very prevalent during the
Middle Ages, when alchemy so greatly flourished, but are of great
antiquity, and were undoubtedly believed in by the learned class in
Egypt and elsewhere in the East in those remote days when, as some
think, alchemy originated, though the evidence, as will, I hope, become
plain as we proceed, points to a later and post-Christian origin for the
central theorem of alchemy. So far as we can judge from their writings,
the more important alchemists were convinced of the truth of these
doctrines, and it was with such beliefs in mi