orms of truth employed by St. Paul and St. John. This last poem,
concerning humility as the house in which charity dwells, is very truth.
A repentant sinner feels that he is making himself little when he prays
to be made humble: the Christian philosopher sees such a glory and
spiritual wealth in humility that it appears to him almost too much to
pray for.

The very essence of these mystical writers seems to me to be poetry. They
use the largest figures for the largest spiritual ideas--_light_ for
_good, darkness_ for _evil_. Such symbols are the true bodies of the true
ideas. For this service mainly what we term _nature_ was called into
being, namely, to furnish forms for truths, for without form truth cannot
be uttered. Having found their symbols, these writers next proceed to use
them logically; and here begins the peculiar danger. When the logic
leaves the poetry behind, it grows first presumptuous, then hard, then
narrow and untrue to the original breadth of the symbol; the glory of the
symbol vanishes; and the final result is a worship of the symbol, which
has withered into an apple of Sodom. Witness some of the writings of the
European master of the order--Swedenborg: the highest of them are rich in
truth; the lowest are poverty-stricken indeed.

In 1615 was born Richard Baxter, one of the purest and wisest and
devoutest of men--and no mean poet either. If ever a man sought between
contending parties to do his duty, siding with each as each appeared
right, opposing each as each appeared wrong, surely that man was Baxter.
Hence he fared as all men too wise to be partisans must fare--he pleased
neither Royalists nor Puritans. Dull of heart and sadly unlike a mother
was the Church when, by the Act of Uniformity of Charles II., she drove
from her bosom such a son, with his two thousand brethren of the clergy!

He has left us a good deal of verse--too much, perhaps, if we consider
the length of the poems and the value of condensation. There is in many
of them a delightful fervour of the simplest love to God, uttered with a
plain half poetic, half logical strength, from which sometimes the poetry
breaks out clear and fine. Much that he writes is of death, from the
dread of which he evidently suffered--a good thing when it drives a man
to renew his confidence in his Saviour's presence. It has with him a very
different origin from the vulgar fancy that to talk about death is
religious. It was refuge from the fear of deat