(8) And, finally, advises the learner in this kind of religion to submit himself implicitly to a spiritual guide--his Guru. Against the two latter articles we except. The theurgic department of Mysticism--unfortunately but too common--seems to us always to have been (as it certainly was in neo-Platonism) the despairing return to that ceremonialism which it had begun by shaking off, when it was disappointed in reaching its high aim by its proper method. The use of the Guru, or Father Confessor (which Mr. Vaughan confesses to be inconsistent with Mysticism), is to be explained in the same way--he is a last refuge after disappointment. But as for the first six counts. Is the Hindoo mystic a worse or a better man for holding them? Are they on the whole right or wrong? Is not disinterested love nobler than a mercenary religion? Is it not right to protest against ceremonial prescriptions, and to say, with the later prophets and psalmists of the Jews: "Thinkest thou that He will eat bull's flesh, and drink the blood of goats. Sacrifice and burnt-offering Thou wouldst not . . . I come to do thy will, O God!" What is, even, if he will look calmly into it, the "pantheistic identification of subject and object, worshipper and worshipped," but the clumsy yet honest effort of the human mind to say to itself: "Doing God's will is the real end and aim of man?" The Yogi looks round upon his fellow-men, and sees that all their misery and shame come from self-will; he looks within, and finds that all which makes him miserable, angry, lustful, greedy after this and that, comes from the same self-will. And he asks himself: How shall I escape from this torment of self?--how shall I tame my wayward will, till it shall become one with the harmonious, beautiful, and absolute Will which made all things? At least I will try to do it, whatever it shall cost me. I will give up all for which men live-- wife and child, the sights, scents, sounds of this fair earth, all things, whatever they be, which men call enjoyment; I will make this life one long torture, if need be; but this rebel will of mine I will conquer. I ask for no reward. That may come in some future life. But what care I? I am now miserable by reason of the lusts which war in my members; the peace which I shall gain in being freed from them will be its own reward. After all I give up little. All those things round me--the primeval forest, and the sacred stream of Ganga, the mighty Himalaya, mount of God, ay, the illimitable vault of heaven above me, sun and stars--what are they but "such stuff as dreams are made of"? Brahm thought, and they became something and somewhere. He may think again, and they will become nothing and nowhere. Are these eternal, greater than I, worth troubling my mind about? Nothing is eternal, but the Thought which made them, and will unmake them. They are only venerable in my eyes, because each of them is a thought of Brahm's.