The world as it is, is the world as God sees it, not as we see it. Our vision is distorted, not so much by the limitations of finitude, as by sin and ignorance. The more we can raise ourselves in the scale of being, the more will our ideas about God and the world correspond to the reality. "Such as men themselves are, such will God Himself seem to them to be," says John Smith, the English Platonist. Origen, too, says that those whom Judas led to seize Jesus did not know who He was, for the darkness of their own souls was projected on His features.[38] And Dante, in a very beautiful passage, says that he felt that he was rising into a higher circle, because he saw Beatrice's face becoming more beautiful.[39] This view of reality, as a vista which is opened gradually to the eyes of the climber up the holy mount, is very near to the heart of Mysticism. It rests on the faith that the ideal not only ought to be, but _is_ the real. It has been applied by some, notably by that earnest but fantastic thinker, James Hinton, as offering a solution of the problem of evil. We shall encounter attempts to deal with this great difficulty in several of the Christian mystics. The problem among the speculative writers was how to reconcile the Absolute of philosophy, who is above all distinctions,[40] with the God of religion, who is of purer eyes than to behold iniquity. They could not allow that evil has a substantial existence apart from God, for fear of being entangled in an insoluble Dualism. But if evil is derived from God, how can God be good? We shall find that the prevailing view was that "Evil has no substance." "There is nothing," says Gregory of Nyssa, "which falls outside of the Divine nature, except moral evil alone. And this, we may say paradoxically, has its being in not-being. For the genesis of moral evil is simply the privation of being.[41] That which, properly speaking, exists, is the nature of the good." The Divine nature, in other words, is that which excludes nothing, and contradicts nothing, except those attributes which are contrary to the nature of reality; it is that which harmonises everything except discord, which loves everything except hatred, verifies everything except falsehood, and beautifies everything except ugliness. Thus that which falls outside the notion of God, proves on examination to be not merely unreal, but unreality as such. But the relation of evil to the Absolute is not a religious problem. To our experience, evil exists as a positive force not subject to the law of God, though constantly overruled and made an instrument of good. On this subject we must say more later. Here I need only add that a sunny confidence in the ultimate triumph of good shines from the writings of most of the mystics, especially, I think, in our own countrymen. The Cambridge Platonists are all optimistic; and in the beautiful but little known _Revelations_ of Juliana of Norwich, we find in page after page the