To some, of course, this will appear the one flaw in the author's logic--this step from the vague notion of the Platonic ideas dwelling in the world of matter, and shaping it to their own beautiful forms, to the belief in the actual Christian drama as the realisation of the Divine Nature in human life. Yet the step was easy, was almost necessary, for one who held at the same time the doctrines of the Friends and of Plato; their union might be called the wedding of pure religion and pure philosophy, wherein the more bigoted and inhuman character of the former was surrendered, while to the latter was added the power to touch the universal heart of man. As Mr. Shorthouse held them, and as Inglesant came to view them, the sacraments might be called a memorial of that mystic wedding. They brought to it the historic consciousness and the traditional brotherhood of mankind; they were the symbolism through which men sought to introduce the light into their own lives as a religious art. Now an art is a matter to be perceived and to be felt, whereas a science, as Newman and others held religion to be, is a subject for demonstration and argument. How much religion in England suffered from the attempt to prove what could not be caught in the mesh of logic, and from the endeavour to make words take the place of ideas, we have already seen. You may reason about abstract truth, you cannot reason about a symbolism or a form of worship. The strength of _John Inglesant_ lies in its avoidance of rationalism or the appeal to precedent, and in its frank search for the human and the artistic.