The truth of the Divine immanence, which is the foundation
of all the more positive religious thinking of to-day, and which
is destined, when once its import has been fully grasped, to
revolutionize our religious life, is made familiar to our thought
in Wordsworth's poetry. To him it was simply an experience; in quite
another sense than that in which it was true of Spinoza, it might have
been said of him that he was a "God-intoxicated man"; and although his
clear English sense permitted no pantheistic merging of the human in
the divine, but kept the individual consciousness clear for choice
and duty, the realization of the presence of God made nature in his
thought supernatural, and life sublime. To him, as Dr. Strong has
said, it was plain that "imagination in man enables him to enter into
the thought of God--the creative element in us is the medium through
which we perceive the meaning of the Creator in his creation. The
world without answers to the world within, because God is the soul of
both."
"Such minds are truly from the Deity,
For they are Powers; and hence the highest bliss
That flesh can know is theirs,--the consciousness
Of whom they are, habitually infused
Through every image and through every thought,
And all affections by communion raised
From earth to heaven, from human to divine."
The mystical faith by which man is united to God can have no clearer
confession.
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