roup of spiritual poets in England who interpreted in beautiful,
often immortal, form this religion of the spirit, this glowing
consciousness that the world and all its fulness is God's and that
eternity is set within the soul of man, who never is himself until he
finds his Life in God.

E'en like two little bank-dividing brooks,
That wash the pebbles with their wanton streams,
And having rang'd and search'd a thousand nooks,
Meet both at length in silver-breasted Thames,
Where in a greater current they conjoin:
So I my best beloved's am; so He is mine.

E'en so we met: and after long pursuit,
E'en so we joined; we both became entire:
No need for either to renew a suit,
For I was flax and He was flames of fire.
Our firm united souls did more than twine;
So I my best beloved's am; so He is mine.[5]

Whatever these poets, Herbert, Vaughan, Traherne, Crashaw, Quarles, say
of the soul and its fuller life, they say quite naturally in terms of
love and wonder. Religion has become for them the flowering of the
soul; the flooding of the whole being with health and joy; the
consummation of life; and they tell of it as lovers tell of their
discovery and their joy.

Oh mightie love! man is one world and hath
Another to attend him.[6]

We have here in these poets, as in the writings of Whichcote and Smith,
a type of religion which is primarily concerned with the liberation and
winning of the whole of life, a thing which, they all tell us, can be
done only in conscious parallelism with the set of eternal currents.

These minor prophets of seventeenth century English literature have
often been treated as mystics, and there {323} is in all of them,
except George Herbert, a rich strand of mystical religion, but their
mysticism is only an element, a single aspect, of a very much wider and
completer type of religion which includes all the strands that compose
what I have been calling "spiritual religion"--an inner flooding of the
life with a consciousness of God, a rational apprehension of the soul's
inherent relation to the Divine, and a transforming discovery of the
meaning of life through the revelation in Christ, which sets all one's
being athrob with love and wonder.

Eternal God! O thou that only art
The sacred fountain of eternal light,
And blessed loadstone of my better part,
O thou, my heart's desire, my soul's delight,
Reflect upon my soul and touch my heart,
And t