Admired, sanctified, obey'd,
That is received. For He
Doth place His whole Felicity
In that, who is despised and defied,
Undeified almost if once denied.
Matthew Arnold said of Goethe that he
Neither made man too much a God
Nor God too much a man.
That could hardly be said of Traherne. It is scarcely possible, I think, to deny that in the above-quoted passage he committed the fault of making "God too much a man." That, however, was a fault which he shared with most of the theologians of his time. Perhaps it is a fault which is almost inseparable from a sincere and fervent faith. Without refining away the conception of God to a mere abstraction, it is impossible to think of Him otherwise than as an infinitely magnified and glorified man. Since the human mind is so constituted, it is surely vain to attempt to set limits within which we are to think of Him. Every man will do this according to the law of his own temperament. The man of cool reason and well-controlled passions will form a very different conception of the Deity from the man of enthusiastic disposition and ardent emotions. To think of the Deity as "a power not ourselves which makes for righteousness" is no more possible for a Traherne, than it is for an Arnold to think of God as One
who is despised and defied,