If he differed from the Broad Church mainly in his loyalty to Quaker mysticism, it was Platonism which made the bounds of the High Church too narrow for his faith. He did not hesitate at one time to say that Plato possessed a truer spiritual insight than St. Paul, and it was in reality a mere extension of the sphere of Platonism when, in what appears to be the last letter he ever wrote (or dictated rather, for his hands were already clasped in those of beneficent Death), he avowed his creed: "That Image after which we were created--the Divine Intellect--must surely be able to respond to the Divine call. The greatest advance which has ever been made was the teaching, originally by Aristotle, of the receptivity of matter.... I should be very glad to see this idea of _John Inglesant_ worked out by an intelligent critic." Beauty was for him a kind of transfiguration in which the world, in its response to the indwelling Power, was lifted into something no longer worldly, but divine; and he could speak of our existence on this earth as lighted by "the immeasurable glory of the drama of God in which we are actors." It was not that he, like certain poets of the past century, attempted to give to the crude passions of men or the transient pomp of earth a power intrinsically equivalent to the spirit; but he believed that these might be made by faith to become as it were an illusory and transparent veil through which the visionary eye could penetrate to the mystic reality. For the particular act in this drama, which he was to write out in his religious novel, he went back to the seventeenth century, when, as it seemed to him, the same problem as that of the nineteenth arose to trouble the hearts of Englishmen, but in nobler and more romantic forms. There was, in fact, a certain note of reality about the earlier struggle of Puritan, Churchman, and Roman Catholic, which was lacking to the quarrel of his own day. John Inglesant is the younger of twin sons born in a family of Catholic sympathies. A Jesuit, Father Hall, who reminds one not a little of Father Holt in _Henry Esmond_, is put in charge of the boy and trains him up to be an intermediary between the Church of England and the Church of Rome. To this end his Mentor keeps his mind in a state of suspense between the faiths, and the inner and real drama of the book is the contest in Inglesant's own mind, after his immediate debt to Rome has been fulfilled, between the two forms of worship.