GOWER. And are not these, supplemented by the hierarchy of ecclesiastics, his real objects of worship? No man could make an actual God of that super-essential ultimatum, that blank Next-to-Nothingness which the last Neo-Platonists imagined as their Supreme. Proclus could not; Dionysius could not. What then? A reaction comes, which, after refining polytheism to an impalpable unity, restores men to polytheism once more. Up mounts speculation, rocket-like: men watch it, a single soaring star with its train of fire, and, at the height, it breaks into a scattering shower of many-coloured sparks. From that Abstraction of which nothing can be predicated, nothing can be expected. The figment above being is above benignity. So the objects of invocation are gods, demi-gods, dæmons, heroes; or, when baptized, cherubim, seraphim, thrones, dominions, powers, archangels, angels, saints; in either case, whether at Athens or at Constantinople, the excessive subtilisation of the One contributes toward the worship of the Manifold. ATHERTON. The theology of the Neo-Platonists was always in the first instance a mere matter of logic. It so happened that they confounded Universals with causes. The miserable consequence is clear. The Highest becomes with them, as he is with Dionysius, merely the most comprehensive, the universal idea, which includes the world, as genus includes species.[35] MRS. ATHERTON. The divinity of this old Father must be a bleak affair indeed—Christianity frozen out. GOWER. I picture him to myself as entering with his philosophy into the theological structure of that day, like Winter into the cathedral of the woods (which an autumn of decline has begun to harm already);—what life yet lingers, he takes away,—he untwines the garlands from the pillars of the trees, extinguishes the many twinkling lights the sunshine hung wavering in the foliage, silences all sounds of singing, and fills the darkened aisles and dome with a coldly-descending mist, whose silence is extolled as above the power of utterance,—its blinding, chill obscureness lauded as clearer than the intelligence and warmer than the fervour of a simple and scriptural devotion. ATHERTON. You have described my experience in reading him, though I must say he suggested nothing to me about your cathedral of the woods, &c. His verbose and turgid style, too, is destitute of all genuine feeling.[36] He piles epithet on epithet, throws superlative on superlative, hyperbole on hyperbole, and it is but log upon log,—he puts no fire under, neither does any come from elsewhere. He quotes Scripture—as might be expected—in the worst style, both of the schoolman and the mystic. Fragments are torn from their connexion, and carried away to suffer the most arbitrary interpretation, and strew his pages that they may appear to illustrate or justify his theory.