ered from the bondage of
corruption into the liberty of the glory of the children of
God."--ROM. viii. 21.

It would be possible to maintain that all our happiness consists in
finding sympathies and affinities underlying apparent antagonisms, in
bringing harmony out of discord, and order out of chaos. Even the
lowest pleasures owe their attractiveness to a certain temporary
correspondence between our desires and the nature of things.
Selfishness itself, the prime source of sin, misery, and ignorance,
cannot sever the ties which bind us to each other and to nature; or if
it succeeds in doing so, it passes into madness, of which an
experienced alienist has said, that its essence is "concentrated
egoism." Incidentally I may say that the peculiar happiness which
accompanies every glimpse of insight into truth and reality, whether
in the scientific, aesthetic, or emotional sphere, seems to me to have
a greater apologetic value than has been generally recognised. It is
the clearest possible indication that the true is for us the good, and
forms the ground of a reasonable faith that all things, if we could
see them as they are, would be found to work together for good to
those who love God.

"The true Mysticism," it has been lately said with much truth, "is
the belief that everything, in being what it is, is symbolic of
something more.[316]" All Nature (and there are few more pernicious
errors than that which separates man from Nature) is the language in
which God expresses His thoughts; but the thoughts are far more than
the language.[317] Thus it is that the invisible things of God from
the creation of the world may be clearly seen and understood from the
things that are made; while at the same time it is equally true that
here we see through a glass darkly, and know only in part. Nature half
conceals and half reveals the Deity; and it is in this sense that it
may be called a symbol of Him.

The word "symbol," like several other words which the student of
Mysticism has to use, has an ill-defined connotation, which produces
confusion and contradictory statements. For instance, a French writer
gives as his definition of Mysticism "the tendency to approach the
Absolute, morally, by means of symbols.[318]" On the other hand, an
English essayist denies that Mysticism is symbolic.[319] Mysticism, he
says, differs from symbolism in that, while symbolism treats the
connexion between symbol and substance as something accidental