many a retort even in the realm of nature, where the passage to a higher
grade of life so often means the stultifying of functions proper to the
lower. As to the pre-eminence of that state in which the spiritual
excellencies of marriage and virginity are combined, Catholic teaching
is quite clear and decided; in this, as in other points, Patmore's
untaught intuitions, and instincts--his _mens naturaliter
catholica_--had led him, whither the esoteric teaching of the Church had
led only the more appreciatively sympathetic of her disciples, from time
to time, as it were, up into that mountain of which St. Ambrose says:
"See, how He goes up with the Apostles and comes down to the crowds. For
how could the crowds see Christ save in a lowly spot? They do not follow
Him to the heights, nor rise to sublimities"--a notion altogether
congenial to Patmore's aristocratic bias in religion as in everything
else. Undoubtedly it was this mystical aspect of Catholic doctrine that
appealed to his whole personality, offering as it did an authoritative
approval, and suggesting an infinite realization, of those dreams that
were so sacred to him. As far as the logic of the affections goes, it
was for the sake of this that he held to all the rest; for indeed the
deeper Catholic truths are so internetted that he who seizes one, drags
all the rest along with it under pain of self-contradiction.

No one knew better than Patmore the infinite insufficiency of the
highest created symbols to equal the eternal realities which it is their
whole purpose to set forth; he fully realized that as the lowliest
beginnings of created love seem to mock, rather than to foreshadow, the
higher forms of which they are but the failure and botched essay, so the
very highest conceivable, taken as more than a metaphor, were an
irreverent parody of the Divine love for the human soul. It is not the
_same_ relationship on an indefinitely extended scale, but only a
somewhat _similar_ relationship, the limits of whose similarity are