not less real than those to which the common superficial consciousness of mankind bears witness.  I agree with this statement about the basis of Mysticism, but I prefer to use the word symbol of that which has a real, and not merely a conventional affinity to the thing symbolised.[320] The line is by no means easy to draw.  An aureole is not, properly speaking, a symbol of saintliness,[321] nor a crown of royal authority, because in these instances the connexion of sign with significance is conventional.  A circle is perhaps not a symbol of eternity, because the comparison appeals only to the intellect.  But falling leaves are a symbol of human mortality, a flowing river of the “stream” of life, and a vine and its branches of the unity of Christ and the Church, because they are examples of the same law which operates through all that God has made.  And when the Anglian noble, in a well-known passage of Bede, compares the life of man to the flight of a bird which darts quickly through a lighted hall out of darkness, and into darkness again, he has found a symbol which is none the less valid, because light and darkness are themselves only symbolically connected with life and death.  The writer who denies that Mysticism is symbolic, means that the discovery of arbitrary and fanciful resemblances or types is no part of healthy Mysticism.[322] In this he is quite right; and the importance of the distinction which he wishes to emphasise will, I hope, become clear as we proceed.  It is not possible always to say dogmatically, “This is genuine Symbolism, and that is morbid or fantastic”; but we do assert that there is a true and a false Symbolism, of which the true is not merely a legitimate, but a necessary mode of intuition; while the latter is at best a frivolous amusement, and at worst a degrading superstition.[323]

But we shall handle our subject very inadequately if we consider only the symbolical value which may be attached to external objects.  Our thoughts and beliefs about the spiritual world, so far as they are conceived under forms, or expressed in language, which belong properly only to things of time and space, are of the nature of symbols.  In this sense it has been said that the greater part of dogmatic theology is the dialectical development of mystical symbols.  For instance, the paternal relation of the First Person of the Trinity to the Second is a symbol; and the representation of eternity as an endless period of time stretching into futurity, is a symbol.  We believe that the forms under which it is natural and necessary for us to conceive of transcendental truths have a real and vital relation to the ideas which they attempt to express; but their inadequacy is manifest if we treat them as facts of the same order as natural phenomena, and try to intercalate them, as is too often done, among the materials with which an abstract science has to deal.