y approach near to a mountain, and touch it with our hands, though we
cannot encompass it all round and enclasp it within our arms.' In fact,
Cudworth's general train of reasoning and of feeling brought him into
great sympathy with the mystics, though he was under little temptation
of falling into the extravagances which had lately thrown their special
tenets into disrepute. He did not fail, indeed, to meet with some of the
customary imputations of enthusiasm, pantheism, and the like. But an
ordinary reader will find in him few of the characteristic faults of
mystic writers and many of their merits. In him, as in his fellow
Platonists, there is little that is visionary, there is no disparagement
of reason, no exaggerated strain of self-forgetfulness. On the other
hand, he resembles the best mystics in the combination of high
imaginative with intellectual power, in warmth of piety, in fearlessness
and purity of motive. He resembles them too in the vehemence with which
he denies the liberty of interpreting Scripture in any sense which may
appear to attribute to God purposes inconsistent with our moral
perceptions of goodness and justice--in his horror of the more
pronounced doctrines of election--in his deep conviction that love to
God and man is the core of Christianity--in his disregard for
controversy on minor points of orthodoxy, and in the comprehensive
tolerance and love of truth and liberty which should be the natural
outgrowth of such opinions.

The other Cambridge Platonist whose writings may be said to have a
distinct bearing on the subject and period before us, is Henry More.
Even if there were no trace of the interest with which his works
continued to be read in the earlier part of the eighteenth century, it
would still seem like an omission if his treatise upon the question
under notice were passed over. For perhaps there never was an author
more qualified than he was to speak of 'enthusiasm' in a sympathetic but
impartial spirit. He felt himself that the subject was well suited to
him. 'I must,' he said, 'ingenuously confess that I have a natural touch
of enthusiasm in my complexion, but such, I thank God, as was ever
governable enough, and have found at length perfectly subduable.' He was
in truth, both by natural temperament and by the course which his
studies had taken, thoroughly competent to enter into the mind of the
mystics and enthusiasts against whom he wrote. It was perhaps only his
sound intellect