for her own. The laws of nature are now recognised as the
laws of God, and for that very reason they cannot be broken or
arbitrarily suspended. Redemption is a law of life. There will come a
time[356], "the time of the lilies," as Boehme calls it, when all
nature will be delivered from bondage. "All the design of Christian
redemption," says Law, "is to remove everything that is unheavenly,
gross, dark, wrathful, and disordered from every part of this fallen
world." No text is oftener in his mouth than the words of St. Paul
which I read as the text of this Lecture. That "dim sympathy" of the
human spirit with the life of nature which Plotinus felt, but which
mediaeval dualism had almost quenched, has now become an intense and
happy consciousness of community with all living things, as subjects
of one all-embracing and unchanging law, the law of perfect love.
Magic and portents, apparitions and visions, the raptures of "infused
contemplation" and their dark Nemesis of Satanic delusions, can no
more trouble the serenity of him who has learnt to see the same God in
nature whom he has found in the holy place of his own heart.

It was impossible to separate Law from the "blessed Behmen," whose
disciple he was proud to profess himself. But in putting them together
I have been obliged to depart from the chronological order, for the
Cambridge Platonists, as they are usually called, come between. This,
however, need cause no confusion, for the Platonists had no direct
influence upon Law. Law, Nonjuror as well as mystic, remained a High
Churchman by sympathy, and hated Rationalism; while the Platonists
sprang from an Evangelical school, were never tired of extolling
Reason, and regarded Boehme as a fanciful "enthusiast.[357]" And yet,
we find so very much in common between the Platonists and William Law,
that these party differences seem merely superficial. The same exalted
type of Mysticism appears in both.

The group of philosophical divines, who had their centre in some of
the Cambridge colleges towards the middle of the seventeenth century,
furnishes one of the most interesting and important chapters in the
history of our Church. Never since the time of the early Greek Fathers
had any orthodox communion produced thinkers so independent and yet so
thoroughly loyal to the Church. And seldom has the Christian temper
found a nobler expression than in the lives and writings of such men
as Whichcote and John Smith.[358]

These m