foundation of all the more positive religious thinking of to-day, and which is destined,
when once its import has been fully grasped, to revolutionize our religious life, is made
familiar to our thought in Wordsworth's poetry. To him it was simply an experience; in
quite another sense than that in which it was true of Spinoza, it might have been said of
him that he was a "God-intoxicated man"; and although his clear English sense permitted
no pantheistic merging of the human in the divine, but kept the individual consciousness
clear for choice and duty, the realization of the presence of God made nature in his
thought supernatural, and life sublime. To him, as Dr. Strong has said, it was plain that
"imagination in man enables him to enter into the thought of God—the creative element
in us is the medium through which we perceive the meaning of the Creator in his
creation. The world without answers to the world within, because God is the soul of
both."
"Such minds are truly from the Deity,
For they are Powers; and hence the highest bliss
That flesh can know is theirs,—the consciousness
Of whom they are, habitually infused
Through every image and through every thought,
And all affections by communion raised
From earth to heaven, from human to divine."
The mystical faith by which man is united to God can have no clearer confession. And in
the great poem of "Tintern Abbey" this truth received an expression which has become
classical;—it must be counted one of the greatest words of that continuing revelation by
which the truths of religion are given permanent form:
"For I have learned
To look on nature, not as in the hour
Of thoughtless youth; but hearing oftentimes
The still, sad music of humanity,
Nor harsh nor grating, though of ample power
To chasten and subdue. And I have felt
A presence that disturbs me with the joy
Of elevated thoughts; a sense sublime
Of something far more deeply interfused,
Whose dwelling is the light of setting suns,
And the round ocean, and the living air,
And the blue sky, and in the mind of man:
A motion and a spirit, that impels
All thinking things, all objects of all thought,
And rolls through all things."
We can hardly imagine that the religious experience of mankind will ever suffer these
words to drop into forgetfulness; and it would seem that every passing generation must
deepen their significance.