A good deal that passes for religion is this Neoplatonism masquerading in Christian dress. All such hymns as "The Sweet By and By," "Oh, Paradise, Oh, Paradise," and the like, which set heaven and eternity in sharp antithesis against earth and time, are simply Neoplatonism baptized into Christian phraseology; and the baptism is by sprinkling rather than immersion. Thomas à Kempis's "Imitation of Christ," and indeed all the mystical books of devotion--Tauler, Fénelon, "The Theologia Germanica"--are saturated with this Platonic or Neoplatonic spirit. "Thou shalt lamentably fall away, if thou set a value upon any worldly thing." "Let therefore nothing which thou doest seem to thee great; let nothing be grand, nothing of value or beauty, nothing worthy of honour save what is eternal." "Man approacheth so much the nearer unto God, the farther he departeth from all earthly comfort." These words from the "Imitation of Christ" sound orthodox enough in our ears. But we ought to understand once for all that it is Neoplatonic mysticism, not essential Christianity, that breathes through them. This type of personality reduces the world to two mutually exclusive elements, God and self; and permits no reconciliation or mediation between them. Fénelon puts this dualism in the form of a dilemma. "There is no middle course; we must refer everything either to God or to self; if to self, we have no other God than self; if to God, we are then without selfish interests, and we enter into self-abandonment." Undoubtedly for evangelistic purposes the sharp antithesis has great practical advantages. It is an easy way to reach heaven--this of scorning earth; an easy definition of the infinite to pronounce it the negation of the finite. As Carlyle has represented for us the stronger side of Platonism, his friend Emerson shall serve to illustrate the weakness that lurks half hidden in all this way of thinking. It is so concealed that we shall hardly detect it unless we are sharply on the watch for this tendency to exalt the Infinite at the expense of the finite; the Universal at the expense of the particular; God at the expense of our neighbour. "Higher far into the pure realm, Over sun and star, Over the flickering Dæmon film, Thou must mount for love; Into vision where all form In one only form dissolves; Where unlike things are like; Where good and ill, And joy and moan, Melt into one."