THE INNER LIFE AND ITS DANGERS.
[To THE EDITOR OF THE "SPECTATOR.') SIR,—It is quite true that "not to shun and hate this great world, but to raise it to a higher level, and so to make it correspond to the higher visions of the soul—that is the true and larger aim which the more expanded Christianity demands," but the significant Bible text, "He bath set the world in their hearts," is almost certainly a misquotation. The Hebrew word 'olam is taken by Delitzsch, Hengstern- berg, Ginsberg, and many others, as well as the margin of the Revised Version, in its usual sense of eternity, or better still, as the late Dean Plumptre in his admirable commentary on Ecclesiastes explains it, the sense of the infinite. How much stronger the argument would have been if the writer of your article had so quoted the text ! For asceticism, like all other human systems, is simply a limitation, a cage, which the human soul wherein God has placed "the sense of the infinite" finds, as it strives after things higher, to be such. Or at best it sees it, as Browning puts it, only as the help which once used is withdrawn—earth's ladder which "drops, its service done."—I am, Sir, &c., GEO. ELADON. Higher Walton Vicarage, Preston.
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