it, save to him who (as Paul saith) knows an idol to be nothing. The pure, spiritual, comprehensive Christian, is one who grows up with God from administration to administration, and so walks with God in all his removes and spiritual increasings and flowings; and such are weak and in the flesh who tarry behind, worshipping that form or administration out of which God is departed.”[510] [Sidenote: OTHER MYSTICS.--STERRY.] Peter Sterry, one of Cromwell’s chaplains, is described as “a high-flown mystical Divine.” After being first much abused and then long neglected, he has of late been named with honour in high literary quarters. _The Rise, Race, and Royalty of the Kingdom of God in the Soul of Man_, is a publication in which the characteristics of the author’s mind and teaching may be fully seen. It consists of a series of sermons upon the words, “Except ye be converted, and become as little children, ye shall not enter into the kingdom of heaven;” the rise to the kingdom being conversion, the race to the kingdom being a life like that of little children, and the royalty itself being composed of the two states of present grace and future glory. The practice of minutely dividing and subdividing a discourse, until it becomes a thing of shreds and patches, is pushed in this instance to an intolerable extreme; and the breaking up of sentences into distinct paragraphs, with the carrying on of different sets of numbers from page to page, render the perusal of the book a tremendous task. Upon reading it, I find that the mysticism which it exhibits is of another order than that found in the pages of Saltmarsh. The substance of Saltmarsh’s thought is saturated with the spirit of mysticism, the whole nature and scope of his theology is mystical from head to foot; but the mysticism of Sterry strikes one as pertaining more to his imaginative forms of conception and modes of expression than to anything else. His doctrines of conversion and of religious life, of Christian experience, duty, and hope, are of the usual evangelical type, but his ideas are ever dressed in mystical phraseology. He quotes texts of Scripture in abundance, and then commonly runs out into some strain of allegorical interpretation. I will quote one passage, which, whilst a specimen of his style, is more than ordinarily impregnated with mysticism in the substance of the thought:--