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2 in externals alone, he insists, nevertheless, that man was sent into the world to enjoy himself, to stretch out for new acquisitions with all his faculties, and take to himself great possessions. He regards even the base and material form of conquest, expressed in endless covetousness and fierce desire for possession, rather as a lower type of what man should do and be, than of what he should not. Man's faculties were given him so that he might be divinely unsatisfied, ever seeking more, ever assimilating more—regarding this earth not as a vale of misery or a source of temptation, but as a very Paradise and the true gate by which Heaven is to be attained and entered. "It is, indeed," he writes, "the beautiful frontispiece of Eternity, the Temple of God, and the Palace of His Children."

In this respect Traherne's teaching is remarkably like the teaching of William Blake, who regarded the mere outwardness of things as nothing in comparison with their real inwardness, and yet was insistent that here and now the spirit of delight and energy and enjoyment was the true and undefiled way of life.

But this revolt against the monastic asceticism of the middle ages stands far removed from any implication of sensual indulgence.

"My mind to me a kingdom is," wrote one of our poets. "The kingdom of Heaven is within you" gives in more scriptural phrase precisely the same truth; and for its