arks
upon the value, within guarded limits, of disturbed and excited
religious feelings in rousing the soul from lethargy, and acting as
external aids to dispose the mind for true spiritual influences.

Henry More died the year before King William's accession. But his
opinions were, no doubt, shared by some of the best and most cultivated
men in the English Church during the opening years of the eighteenth
century. After a time his writings lost their earlier popularity.
Wesley, to his credit, recommended them in 1756 to the use of his
brother clergymen.[474] As a rule, they appear at that time to have been
but little read; their spiritual tone is pitched in too high a key for
the prevalent religious taste of the period which had then set in. Some
years had to pass before the rise of a generation more prepared to draw
refreshment from the imaginative and somewhat mystical beauties of his
style and sentiment.[475]

When once the genius of Locke was in the ascendant, more spiritual forms
of philosophy fell into disrepute. Descartes, Malebranche, Leibnitz were
considered almost obsolete; More and Cudworth were out of favour: and
there was but scanty tolerance for any writer who could possibly incur
the charge of transcendentalism or mysticism. It is not that Cartesian
or Platonic, or even mystic opinions, are irreconcileable with Locke's
philosophy. When he spoke of sensation and reflection as the original
sources of all knowledge, there was ample room for innate ideas, and for
intuitive perceptions, under the shelter of terms so indefinite.
Moreover, the ambiguities of expression and apparent inconsistencies of
thought, which stand out in marked contrast to the force and lucidity of
his style, are by no means owing only to his use of popular language,
and his studied avoidance of all that might seem to savour of the
schools. His devout spirit rebelled against the carefully defined limits
which his logical intellect would have imposed upon it. He could not
altogether avoid applying his system to the absorbing subjects of
theology, but he did so with some unwillingness and with much reserve.
Revelation, once acknowledged as such, was always sacred ground to him;
and though he often appears to reduce all evidence to the external
witness of the senses, there is something essentially opposed to
materialistic notions, in his feeling that there is that which we do not
know simply by reason of our want of a new and different sen