Platonism, then, came as a direct appeal to the religious mind of the sixteenth and seventeenth centuries which was so constituted that the element of philosophic revery was blended most naturally with a strain of pure devotional love. Although the ultimate postulates of that philosophy were intellectual principles, they were such as could be grasped by the soul only in its deep passion of love for spiritual beauty. The condemnation which Baxter passes upon other philosophies could not be brought with truth against Platonism. “In short,” he says, “I am an enemy of their philosophy that vilify sense.... The Scripture that saith of God that He is life and light, saith also that He is love, and love is complacence, and complacence is joy; and to say God is infinite, essential love and joy is a better notion than with Cartesians and Cocceians to say that God and angels and spirits are but a thought or an idea. What is Heaven to us if there be no love and joy?”[8] This desire of life and love, along its upper levels of thought, was satisfied by Platonism; it enabled the poets to forecast the life of the soul in heaven, and of its anticipation on earth as a love of beauty. There was a strong tendency, however, throughout this period of religious poetry, toward a phase of devotional love which may be called erotic mysticism, or that love for Christ which is characterized less by admiration and more by tenderness and mere delight in the pure sensuous experience of love. Contemplation of Christ’s divine nature as essential beauty is totally absent from this passion. Christ as the object of this love is conceived only as the perfection of physical beauty; and the response within the soul of the lover is that of mere sensuous delight either in the sight of his personal beauties or in the realization of the union with him. This strain of religious devotion is heard in Herbert, in Vaughan, and Crashaw. In Herbert, who confessed that he entered the service of the church in order to be like Christ, “by making humility lovely,”—a confession which breathes pure emotion,—there was joined so sensuous a strain that “he seems to rejoice in the thoughts of that word Jesus, and say, that the adding these words, my Master, to it, and often repetition of them, seemed to perfume his mind, and leave an oriental fragrancy in his very breath.”[9] The spectacle of the crucified Saviour of man was especially influential in keeping this strain of mystical devotion alive; and the minds of these poets are continually dwelling upon the beauty of his mangled hands and feet. In a nature so eminently intellectual as John Donne’s, this strain of feeling is still present, and in his explanation of the grounds for such a love is found an excellent account of its varying phases. In one of his sermons he says: