ect to be
entirely passed over. Moreover, Cudworth's 'Immutable Morality' was not
published till 1731, at which time it had direct reference to the
controversies excited by Mandeville's 'Fable of the Bees.' The
popularity also of Henry More's writings continued into the century
after his death, and a new edition of his 'Discourse of Enthusiasm'
appeared almost simultaneously with writings of Lord Shaftesbury, Dr.
Hickes, and others upon the same subject. It might have been well if the
works of such men as H. More and Cudworth, J. Smith and Norris, had made
a deeper impression on eighteenth-century thought. Their exalted but
restrained mysticism and their lofty system of morality was the very
corrective which the tone of the age most needed. And it might have been
remembered to great advantage, that the doctrine of an inner light, far
from being only the characteristic tenet of the fanatical disciples of
Fox and Muenzer, had been held in a modified sense by men who, in the
preceding generation, had been the glory of the English Church--a band
of men conspicuous for the highest culture, the most profound learning,
the most earnest piety, the most kindly tolerance. Cudworth, at all
events, held this view. Engaged as he was, during a lengthened period of
intellectual activity, in combating a philosophical system which, alike
in theology, morals, and politics, appeared to him to sap the
foundations of every higher principle in human nature, he was led by the
whole tenour of his mind to dwell upon the existence in the soul of
perceptions not derivable from the senses, and to expatiate on the
immutable distinctions of right and wrong. Goodness, freed from all
debasing associations of interest and expedience, such as Hobbes sought
to attach to it, was the same, he was well assured, as it had existed
from all eternity in the mind of God. To a mind much occupied in such
reflections, and nurtured in the sublime thoughts of Plato, the doctrine
of an inner light naturally commended itself. All goodness of which man
is capable is a participation of the Divine essence--an effluence, as it
were, from God; and if knowledge is communicable through other channels
than those of the outward senses, what is there which should forbid
belief in the most immediate intercourse between, the soul and its
Creator, and in a direct intuition of spiritual truth? We may attain a
certain comprehension of the Deity, 'proportionate to our measure; as we
ma