ld Barclay seems to
have got hold of and pressed into the service of his sect, taking it
for literal truth.

The twelfth book is devoted to Swedenborg, and a very valuable little
sketch it is, and one which goes far to clear up the moral character,
and the reputation for sanity also, of that much-calumniated
philosopher, whom the world knows only as a dreaming false prophet,
forgetting that even if he was that, he was also a sound and severe
scientific labourer, to whom our modern physical science is most
deeply indebted.

This is a short sketch of the contents of a book which is a really
valuable addition to English literature, and which is as interesting
as it is instructive. But Mr. Vaughan must forgive us if we tell him
frankly that he has not exhausted the subject; that he has hardly
defined Mysticism at all--at least, has defined it by its outward
results, and that without classifying them; and that he has not
grasped the central idea of the subject. There were more things in
these same mystics than are dreamt of in his philosophy; and he has
missed seeing them, because he has put himself rather in the attitude
of a judge than of an inquirer.

He has not had respect and trust enough for the men and women of whom
he writes; and is too much inclined to laugh at them, and treat them
de haut en bas. He has trusted too much to his own great power of
logical analysis, and his equally great power of illustration, and is
therefore apt to mistake the being able to put a man's thoughts into
words for him, for the being really able to understand him. To
understand any man we must have sympathy for him, even affection. No
intellectual acuteness, no amount even of mere pity for his errors,
will enable us to see the man from within, and put our own souls into
the place of his soul. To do that, one must feel and confess within
oneself the seed of the same errors which one reproves in him; one
must have passed more or less through his temptations, doubts, hunger
of heart and brain; and one cannot help questioning, as one reads Mr.
Vaughan's book, whether he has really done this in the case of those
of whom he writes. He should have remembered too how little any
young man can have experienced of the terrible sorrows which branded
into the hearts of these old devotees the truths to which they clung
more than to life, while they too often warped their hearts into
morbidity, and caused alike their folly and their wisdom.