In order that we may properly apprehend the next period in FÉnelon’s life it is absolutely essential for us to take a survey of the general subject of Mysticism, for with that he became now very intimately concerned. And, happily, it is a subject of perennial importance, having no less close connection with the present day than with the centuries past. Indeed the present age has in some respects very special need of just this element. It is a commercial, materialistic, money-grabbing age, devoted to the outward and the practical; it is a time when the triumphs of machinery and invention and industrial progress are sounded as never before—an extremely busy, bustling time of immense external activity, when man hastens to get rich and rushes through life at railroad speed, scarcely finding leisure so much as to eat, much less for the quiet contemplation of the things of the spirit. And it is the contemplative, interior, spirit-filled life with which Mysticism has pre-eminently to do.

The term, it is true, has come to be widely regarded with suspicion, and used, more or less vaguely, as a word of reproach. With many, perhaps with most, it carries an unpleasant, offensive suggestion. Its associations in their minds are with that which is misty or recondite, visionary and unintelligible; also with that which is fanatical, extravagant, unreasonable, and somewhat dangerous. That there is some ground for this impression can not be denied, because under the general name of Mysticism much has been included, in the long sweep of the centuries, which can not be admired or defended; much which does not commend itself to that level-headed common sense according to whose dictates we like to think that our religion can be and should be squared. But we are persuaded that this extreme objectionable development, or manifestation, of the Mystic spirit has been much less frequent than is commonly supposed, and has no sufficient claim to be identified with it in the public mind anywhere near as largely as it usually is. There is a true Mysticism, and a false Mysticism. There are Mystics every way worthy of highest honor, and there are those not at all points deserving imitation. It surely is a mistake to lay the chief stress on the latter, as is so frequently done, and thus to stamp a stigma upon all. Christian Mysticism is something of which no one can afford to be ignorant. The Church which neglects it or despises it, whether through misapprehension or some less honorable cause, is certain to be a large loser.

What is Mysticism? As has been pointed out by several, it is something which from its very nature is hardly susceptible of exact definition, does not readily lend itself to the most precise forms of language. It is a phase of thought or feeling which continually appears in connection with the endeavor of the human mind to grasp the Divine essence, and to enjoy the blessedness of actual communion with the Highest. It springs inevitably from intense desire for intimate fellowship with God, from the hottest possible pursuit of the highest ideals. It is a sort of name for the realization of God as transfused throughout the universe, as being immanent in material things and in mankind alike. The Century Dictionary defines Mysticism as “any mode of thought or phase of intellectual or religious life in which reliance is placed upon a spiritual illumination believed to transcend the ordinary powers of understanding.” The Standard Dictionary says that Mysticism is “the doctrine and belief that man may attain to an immediate direct consciousness or knowledge of God as the real and absolute principle of all truth. The term is applied to a system of thought and life of which the chief feature is an extreme development of meditative and intuitive methods as distinguished from the definitive and scholastic.” Similarly Dr. J. P. Lange, in the Schaff-Herzog Cyclopedia, says: “Mysticism has been defined as belief in an immediate and continuous communication between God and the soul which may be established by certain peculiar religious exercises.... There is a mystic element in all true religion.” Cousin says: “Mysticism is the belief that God may be known face to face without anything intermediate. It is a yielding to the sentiment awakened by the Infinite, and a summing up of all knowledge and all duty in the contemplation and love of Him.” Nitzsch, in his “System of Christian Doctrine,” declares “that the religious man, the man of faith, is, as such, a Mystic; for he in whose consciousness God does not appear, certainly does not feel God, nor can he know or honor Him; but he who only thinks Him, without loving Him and becoming pure in heart, can not know Him vitally; much less can he behold Him spiritually who desires to see Him with the outward sense. The inner life of religion is ever Mysticism.”

This is why in all ages of the Church, when the outward has come to usurp and absorb attention, when formalism and ceremonialism have dominated the mind, when scholasticism has gained ascendency, and especially when a corrupt looseness of morals has set in to degrade the very ideals of humanity, there have been those who have arisen to make a stand for a purer, more fervent, more spiritual type of piety. They have met, of course, with bitter opposition; they have troubled those who did not wish to be disturbed in their carnal indulgences or worldly conformities, and they have had various uncomplimentary epithets thrown at them: such as, Pietists, Quietists, Mystics, Puritans, Quakers, and Methodists. They have been misrepresented in manifold ways. They have been persecuted even unto the death. But they have been the salt of the earth, and the succession has been kept up under one name or another from the earliest days to the present. They have not always been endowed with philosophic minds or skilled in the learning of the schools. They have been keenly conscious of the difficulty, the impossibility, of completely expressing, in imperfect human words, the deep things of God revealed to them on the mounts of vision with which they have been favored. They have struggled hard with the inadequacy of the only language at their command, and have been driven to a liberal use of figures of speech, some of them questionable in point of propriety. They have had a cramped vocabulary, have made mistakes, have not found themselves able to translate into intelligible terms all that was in their minds. To mint the secrets of the interior life into the current coin of language suited to the comprehension of common souls requires a skill given to but few. And more especially have their expressions been found unintelligible, or worse, by adversaries not qualified by any experience to comprehend what it was all about. For, as St. Paul says (I Cor. ii): “The natural man receiveth not the things of the Spirit of God; for they are foolishness unto him, and he can not know them, because they are spiritually judged. We speak wisdom among the perfect, God’s wisdom in a mystery, even a wisdom which hath been hidden, which none of the rulers of this world knoweth. Which things also we speak, not in words which man’s wisdom teacheth, but which the Spirit teacheth, interpreting spiritual things to spiritual men.” The adversaries were also eager in many cases to remove out of the way those who, by their purity of life and their opposition to priestly claims and gains, were esteemed dangerous to the peace of the Church. We are confident that in the main this is a fair interpretation of the course which events have taken. Not but what some of the Mystics have really laid themselves open to the complaints of their enemies. They have been unguarded in their language, have been so carried away with ecstasy, as some new precious truth has burst upon them, that they have stated it too strongly; have not supplied the limitations and modifications and exceptions which would have been well, which were necessary for a complete rounding out of the statement; have taken for granted that the other side had been sufficiently emphasized before, and that their special mission to emphasize the neglected point would be recognized; hence they have said things which, by strict construction and taken in bald literalness, were not precisely true. All this can be granted without casting any serious reflection either on their character or their doctrines. Their books must be read with caution and discrimination. To persons not well balanced they might sometimes be a source of peril. But this admission is in no way incompatible with the assertion that they have conferred a very great benefit upon mankind, that their doctrines, on the whole, are sound, and that this generation could ill afford to overlook the good to be obtained by careful studies in this direction.

The first Mystics were really St. John and St. Paul; and their words have full justification in what they derived from their Divine Master. Who more positively than the great Apostle to the Gentiles, “according to the wisdom given unto him,” preached a gospel that was foolishness to some, but which he continually called the wisdom and the mystery of God; a gospel which proclaims the Divine indwelling, we in Him and He in us, our bodies the temples of the Holy Ghost, believers being “in Christ” and “members one of another?” He was a man caught up into Paradise, and hearing unspeakable words which it was not lawful or possible for a man to utter. “I die daily,” he said, “I have been crucified with Christ, and it is no longer I that live, but Christ liveth in me;” “To me to live is Christ;” “I have learned the secret, I can do all things in Him;” “I fill up on my part that which is lacking of the afflictions of Christ;” “Ye died, and your life is hid with Christ in God;” “In Him we live, and move, and have our being;” “The Spirit Himself beareth witness with our spirit,”—and many other such like things there be, left on record from his pen to show clearly that he was a true Mystic. Still more, perhaps, do the Mystics look to St. John for complete authorization of their position. His Gospel is the spiritual Gospel, the charter of Christian Mysticism. It is he who tells us, “God is love,” “God is light,” “God is Spirit.” The Divine union which he sets before us is of the closest kind. “Our fellowship is with the Father, and with His Son Jesus Christ;” “Ye have an anointing from the Holy One, and ye know all things;” “The anointing which ye received of Him abideth in you, and ye need not that any teach you;” “Hereby we know that He abideth in us, by the Spirit which He hath given us;” “He that believeth on the Son of God hath the witness;” “He that dwelleth in love dwelleth in God, and God in him,” etc. It is impossible to quote a tithe of the words in John’s Epistles and Gospel which embody the fundamental ideas of Mysticism. Especially do we find in the marvelous words of Jesus reported by John alone, as by the one peculiarly fitted to formulate them, in the thirteenth to the seventeenth chapters of his Gospel, the seeds and roots of all which have been drawn forth by subsequent writers on these profound themes.

Plato has been called “the Father of European Mysticism.” Dr. Inge says: “Both the great types of Mystics may appeal to him,—those who try to rise through the visible to the invisible, through nature to God; and those who look upon this earth as a place of banishment, upon material things as a veil which hides God’s face from us, and who bid us seek yonder in the realm of ideas the heart’s true home. Plato teaches that the highest good is the greatest likeness to God; that the greatest happiness is the vision of God; that we should seek holiness, not for the sake of reward, but because it is the health of the soul, while vice is its disease; that goodness is unity and harmony, while evil disintegrates; that it is our duty to rise above the visible and transitory to the invisible and permanent.”

The Church has never lacked during its history for those who have followed this line of thought and cultivated this kind of experience. Clement of Alexandria has been called “the Founder of Christian Mysticism,” a Neoplatonist among the Fathers; followed by Dionysius the Areopagite, and a lengthy line of successors, large among whom looms the noble Bernard of Clairvaux, the glory of the twelfth century. Without tracing out the story in detail it will be enough for our purpose to refer briefly to those who, in the few centuries before FÉnelon, stood forth most prominently as leaders in this realm of truth, and so prepared the way for him.

In the fourteenth century we find a most remarkable band of devout believers who called themselves “Friends of God,” to signify that they had reached that stage of Christian life when Christ, according to His promise, would call them “no longer servants but friends.” They were composed of persons from all classes of society, and from all the religious orders. Most prominent among these were Master Eckhart—styled “Doctor Ecstaticus”—vicar-general of the Dominican order, a man of uncommon purity of life and great excellence of character, one of the profound thinkers of the Middle Ages; Henry Suso, who has been called “the Minnesinger of Divine Love,” and who was wont to say, “A man of true self-abandonment must be unbuilt from the creature, inbuilt with Christ, and overbuilt into the Godhead” (he was prior of the Dominican convent at Ulm, where he died in 1365); Nicholas of Basle; and John Tauler. Nicholas was a layman who wielded a powerful pen and was also a great preacher; thoroughly devoted to religion from his earliest days. He traveled much through Germany, propagating his opinions in a quiet, unostentatious manner, and gradually there grew up around him a society of Christians composed of men and women likeminded with himself, who loved to honor him as their spiritual father. It seems to have been largely his personal influence which held them together, for they fell to pieces after he was burned at the stake for heresy, near Poitiers, about 1382.

John Tauler—“Doctor Illuminatus”—born at Strasburg, 1290, and dying there in 1361, was still more distinguished, although indebted to Nicholas for being led out into the light. This took place when he was over fifty years of age. Nicholas, coming to Strasburg to hear the famous preacher, speedily detected his deficiency in spiritual experience, and the lack of true power attending the Word on this account. With rare humility, Tauler, a learned theologian, received this rebuke from the uneducated layman, and so profited by it that he was able, though not without long struggle, to enter into complete freedom. Then he preached in a very different manner, and the first time he opened his mouth in public fourteen persons fell as if dead under the Word, and nearly thirty others were so deeply moved that they remained sitting in the churchyard long after the congregation was dismissed, unwilling to move away. For eighteen years after this second conversion he made great progress in the divine life, rising to a place of highest esteem with his brethren, and being rightly reckoned among the chief of God’s children on earth.

Properly to be counted among these Friends of God can be set down the unknown author of “Deutsche Theologie,” or “Theologia Germanica,” which contained so much truth that it had the distinguished honor of being put upon the Romish Index of prohibited works. Luther ascribed it to Tauler. It is in his style, and contains his sentiments; but it is now considered more probable that it originated a little later than his time, and was written by some other member of the band. It was their usual practice to conceal their names as much as possible when they wrote, lest a desire for fame should mingle in their endeavors to be useful. Luther placed it next to the Bible and St. Augustine as a source of knowledge concerning God and Christ and man. Baron Bunsen ranks it still higher. And many others have expressed their supreme indebtedness to it for help in respect to the perfect life. It has continued up to the present day to be the favorite handbook of devotion in Germany.

Concerning the views and doctrines of these Friends of God, although some of their expressions and opinions may be objected to, considering the corrupt age in which they lived they must be pronounced worthy of high praise. They insisted, first of all, on the uttermost self-renunciation, yet they avoided the system of penances and austerities common in the monasteries. Neither idle contemplation nor passive asceticism found favor with them; they were evangelical and practical, full of good works and the imitation of Christ both in patient suffering and active usefulness. They were animated by an exalted reformatory spirit which threw them out of touch with the ecclesiastics around them. Though they did not in all cases fall under the ban of the Church, they may still be regarded as forerunners of the Reformation. Their Mysticism was a powerful protest against the terrible corruptions of the Romish Church and the cold, barren speculations of scholasticism. They craved and secured direct communion with God, unrestricted by human interposition; an immediate vision of the Almighty, undimmed by any separating veil and unchanged by any distorting medium. The highest form of the Divine life in a man seemed to them to be perfect resignation to the will of God, and they counted prayer to be the best means of bringing about this state of resignation. “To pray for a change in one’s circumstances,” they said, “is to pray that what God sends may be made subject to us, not that we should submit ourselves to it; and so tends to produce self-assertion, not self-renunciation.” Nicholas taught that “when self-renunciation is complete, the soul of man, having become entirely resigned to the Divine will, becomes so entirely assimilated to the Divine nature that it has continually a near fellowship with God; he is always in familiar intercourse with the Spirit of God, who communicates to him all Divine knowledge.” “All things to the beloved are of God; all, therefore, are indifferent.” That religion which sprang from fear of punishment or hope of reward they counted of little worth, and considered love to be by far the highest state, the only one truly worthy of the Christian.[5] Their union with Deity was not that of pantheism but of passionate love, and great prominence was given to the will as the mainspring on which all developments of the higher life depend.

The following quotations from “Theologia Germanica” will convey in a few words what may be called the root ideas of the book and of the men whose spirit it so well embodies:

“A true lover of God loveth Him alike in having and in not having, in sweetness and in bitterness, in good or evil report; for he seeketh only the honor of God, and not his own, either in spiritual or natural things. Therefore he standeth alike unshaken in all things.”

“All disobedience is contrary to God, and nothing else. In truth, no thing is contrary to God; no creature, nor creature’s work, nor anything that we can name or think of, is contrary to God or displeasing to Him, but only disobedience and the disobedient man. In short, all that is, is well-pleasing and good in God’s eyes, saving only the disobedient man.”

“The man who is truly godlike complaineth of nothing but of sin only. And sin is simply to desire or will anything otherwise than the one perfect good and the one eternal will, or to wish to have a will of one’s own.”

“Sin is to will, desire, or love otherwise than God doth. Things do not thus will, desire, or love: therefore things are not evil; all things are good.”

“He who is truly a virtuous man would not cease to be so to gain the whole world; yea, he would rather die a miserable death. To him virtue is its own reward, and he is content therewith, and would take no treasure or riches in exchange for it.”

“Union with God is brought to pass in three ways; to wit, by pureness and singleness of heart, by love, and by the contemplation of God.”

A still greater name among the Mystic writers, coming a bit later than those already mentioned, is that of Thomas À Kempis, born near Cologne, in this same West Germany where the Friends of God flourished, in 1386, and dying about 1470. His “Imitation of Christ” stands easily at the head of its class, first in popularity and usefulness among manuals for devotion. “The epic poem of the inner life,” it has lent the fragrance of its sanctity to every language of the civilized world, and has been a prime favorite for nearly five hundred years with all those who have made largest advancement in holy things. Only a few extracts need be given to show how closely it is in line with what has already been said, and what remains to be said, concerning the topic of our chapter:

“When a man is so far advanced in the Christian life as not to seek consolation from any created thing, then does he first begin perfectly to enjoy God; his heart is wholly fixed and established in God who is his All in All.”

“There is no other occasion of perplexity and disquiet but an unsubdued will and unmortified affections.”

“Self-denial is the test of spiritual perfection, and he that truly denies himself is arrived at a state of great freedom and safety. It is no small advantage to suppress desire, even in inconsiderable gratifications. Restless and inordinate desires are the ground of every temptation.”

“Abandon all, and thou shalt possess all; relinquish desire, and thou shalt find rest.”

“No evil is permitted to befall thee but what may be made productive of a much greater good. Receive all with thankfulness, as from the hand of God, and esteem it great gain.”

“For all that befalleth me I will thank the Love that prompts the gift, and reverence the Hand that confers it.”

“O Lord God, holy Father, be Thou blessed now and forever! For whatever Thou willest is done, and all that Thou willest is good.”

“The righteous should never be moved by whatever befalls him, knowing that it comes from the hands of God, and is to promote the important business of our redemption. Without God, nothing is done upon the face of the earth.”

“Perfection consists in offering up thyself, with thy whole heart, to the will of God; never seeking thine own will either in small or great respects; but with an equal mind weighing all events in the balance of the sanctuary, and receiving both prosperity and adversity with equal thanksgiving.”

“All is vanity but the love of God and a life devoted to His will.”

Passing over St. Theresa and St. John of the Cross[6]—particulars about whom may be found in Vaughan—and denying ourselves, through limitations of space, all quotations from Rodriguez and Scupoli,[7] who flourished in the sixteenth century, and wrote divinely about Divine things, leaving the world heroic examples of holiness,—we come to St. Francis of Sales and Molinos, both of whom had close connection with FÉnelon, although in different ways. Francis—born in 1567 and departing to glory in 1622, who has been called “the noblest, tenderest and most devoted Mystic of the Catholic Church after the Reformation”—more than any other, was FÉnelon’s teacher in matters pertaining to the inner life, even as Scupoli had been the teacher of Francis. FÉnelon never wearies of recommending to the correspondents whom he is instructing in spiritual things the perusal of the works of this delightful and inspiring writer. He says to one: “You can read nothing better than St. Francis of Sales. Everything he writes is full of comfort and love; although his whole tone is that of self-mortification, it is all deep experience, simple precautions, high feeling, and the light of grace. You will have made a great step when you are familiar with such mental food.” Upon another he urges “a half hour spent in meditative reading of the Gospels in the morning, and an evening portion of St. Francis de Sales.” To the Elector of Cologne, when about to receive episcopal consecration, he says, “Read the Life and Works of St. Francis de Sales.” We do not wonder at these counsels. The two men, the two Francises, were entirely congenial, marvelously alike in heart and head, with similar vivacity, urbanity, and grace of manner, polish of style, profundity of insight into the soul, and practical knowledge of the world. Both had high rank in State and Church, strong intellects, intense devotion to God, and ability to express truth in a simple, lucid, attractive way. They were alike in that the profound piety they taught was not, as in the previous age, reserved for the cloister, but was quite compatible with mingling in the world, requiring no great change of habits, but an entire change of motive. Even the life at court might be continued and graced with cheerful obedience to the whole will of God; all the actions of the day could be sanctified by a perpetual prayer offered up in their midst and by a sincere intention to please God; the humble every-day virtues were extolled, and no austerities recommended. Thus religion was made commensurate with the whole of life, and the saint could join in all that others did, except sin. No difference can be found in their doctrines, or even their forms of expression, and it seems like an irony of fate that the Bishop of Geneva should be canonized in 1665 by the same Church which condemned, in 1699, the Archbishop of Cambrai. The fictitious and factitious reasons that led to the latter will be detailed a little later.

Part of the reason is connected with the history and fate of Miguel de Molinos, commonly esteemed to be the founder of the Quietists. He was a Spanish theologian, born of noble parentage near Saragossa, December 21, 1627. He acquired a great reputation at Rome and elsewhere for purity of life and vigor of intellect, but steadily refused all ecclesiastical preferment. In 1675 he published his “Spiritual Guide,” which in a few years passed through twenty editions in different languages, and was warmly hailed by people of marked piety in many lands. But it was soon bitterly attacked, especially by the Jesuits, who quickly perceived that Molinos’ system tacitly accused the Romish Church of a departure from the true religion, and that his whole doctrine would militate against the power of the priesthood and the importance of ceremonialism. Although he had a vast number of friends, some of them eminent for learning and piety, and even high in worldly rank, and though the pontiff himself, Innocent XI, was partial to him, he was, in 1685, cited before the Inquisition and subjected to close examination as well as rigid imprisonment. It is said that as many as twenty thousand letters were found in his house, which, if true, shows the degree to which the movement he headed had spread, and the hunger of great multitudes for spiritual food. His trial lasted two years, and in 1687 sixty-eight propositions, purporting to be extracted from his book, were condemned, and he was declared to have taught false and dangerous dogmas contrary to the doctrine of the Church. He was compelled to pass the remainder of his life in the dungeons of the Inquisition, where he died, after many years of close confinement, in which he exhibited the greatest humility and peace of mind.

The principles of his book have been much misunderstood and misrepresented. The following statement is believed to be substantially correct. He taught that Christian perfection consists in the peace of the soul, springing from a complete self-surrender into the hands of God, in the renouncement of all external, temporal things, and in the pure love of God free from all considerations of interest or hope of reward. A soul which desires the supreme good must renounce all sensual and material things, silence every impulse, and concentrate itself on God. In a state of perfect contemplation the soul desires absolutely nothing, not even its own salvation; it fears nothing, not even hell; the one only feeling of which it is conscious is utter abandonment to God’s good will and pleasure; it is indifferent to all else; and nothing which does not reach the will, where alone virtue resides, can really pollute the soul. The system was termed Quietism, because it laid so much stress upon inward quiet, passive contemplation, and silent prayer; also upon freedom from hope and fear, the great agitators of the human mind.

It is a very vulgar error to suppose that the Mystics taught abstention from good works, or outward inactivity; for none were busier in blessing their fellow-men, as the twenty thousand letters above mentioned might indicate, as well as the ceaseless endeavors in this direction put forth by Madame Guyon, FÉnelon, and the rest. Mystics are not impracticable dreamers; they have been in a very marked degree energetic and influential. Their passivity simply meant a calm yet glad acceptance of all God’s dispensations. They were also abundantly active in the highest sense, since the old faculties were transformed and uplifted and no longer shackled by the cramping chains of sin, but enabled to do far more for the good of mankind and the glory of God in their happy, healthy working than they ever had done before. They laid great stress upon faith, rather than rites or austerities, as a means of justification and sanctification, a peculiarity which seems at the bottom of the remark of the Romish ecclesiastic who wrote, under date of July 10, 1685, “I am informed that a Jesuit named Molinos has been put into the Inquisition at Rome, accused of wishing to become chief of a new sect called Quietists, whose principles are somewhat similar to those of the Puritans in England.” There is sufficient similarity between the Quietism of the seventeenth century and the Pietism and Methodism of Germany and England in the eighteenth century to give us a friendly feeling toward it. That the former was not so well guarded as the latter; was less directed to practical ends; was not in control of such cool, sensible minds; ran very easily into abuses; had stronger pantheistic leanings; was more open to the objection that it taught a strained, impossible perfection utterly out of reach of all but the few, and attainable by those few perhaps only under very favorable conditions,—may be freely granted. But it does not, and need not, prevent our sympathies going out strongly toward those who, in that earlier day and amid much difficulty, struck out the high path on lines not essentially at variance with those who, in easier times of greater enlightenment, came after them. The Mystics, with all their extravagances, possessed more of the truth of God than could be found elsewhere within the wide domains of the Roman Church. The Reformers recognized this, and sympathized far more deeply with them than with the schoolmen.

It should be said, also, that the Quietists vehemently repudiated the constructions put upon their writings by their enemies, and the evil inferences which were drawn from them. They protested against what others professed to find there as being no part of their real belief. It seems to us that they have a perfect right to be heard in explanation of their tenets, and much allowance must be made for those endeavoring to find expressions that would convey such profound and lofty thoughts. Professor George P. Fisher, in his “History of the Christian Church,” says, “The real ground of hostility to Quietism was its tendency to lead to the dispensing with auricular confession and penances and outward rites altogether.”

It will be sufficiently evident from what has been now written that there is Mysticism and Mysticism; and that that which has the best right to the name lies very close to the most essential truth of the best religion, inseparable from it so far as it is to answer the deepest yearnings of the human heart. If religion is not to be made wholly objective, reduced to a round of external performances, accounted synonymous with philanthropy and morality; if its subjective side is to have proper recognition as the controlling one; if being is to take rank above doing, as we firmly believe it should,—then we are all Mystics in the true sense of the word. Since we have to do with “the love of Christ which passeth knowledge,” and which must be known by some higher faculty than the understanding; since the new birth is fitly compared by the Master to the mysterious coming and going of the winds of heaven, and can not be completely comprehended by the human reason; since the method of God with the soul of man passes all metes and bounds of man’s finite mind, and the operations of the Holy Spirit can not be wholly fathomed by cold intellect,—Mysticism has extremely close relations with all parts of supernaturalism. It is grounded in a profounder philosophy than those can offer who assume to scout and scorn it. We as Methodists, especially, believe firmly in feeling, and in a first-hand knowledge of God as the privilege of each genuine believer. We hold fast to experience as having rights which logic and dogma must respect; we have exalted life above theory, and the vision divine above dead orthodoxy; we maintain that there is a God-consciousness, as well as a self-consciousness and a world-consciousness; and that spiritual facts can be, and should be, verified in personal experience. We count the words of Pascal divinely true: “The things of this world must be known in order to be loved; but the things of God must be loved in order to be known.”

“Mysticism,” says Professor J. E. Latimer, “has ever been a reaction from formalism and dogmatism in religion. When Christian men have been relying upon the letter, the Mystic has always exalted the spirit. When the Church has been content with mere dogmatic statement and intellectual orthodoxy, a Mystic revival has come to rehabilitate its spiritual life, and sends new streams of power along its arid channel.” Do we not greatly need this revival now? We do not believe there is any special danger to-day from one-sided subjectivity and morbid introspection. The peril is altogether the other way. Our great want is a profounder apprehension of the basal truths of the spiritual life, and their practical translation into individual experience. The knowledge of God is widespread, but it is superficial. Piety is very bustling, but it is not deep. The utterances of the Savior and His apostles are taken at a large discount, and the mass of believers are easily content with a low condition of spirituality. Hence the Church is feeble, and fails to impress itself strongly upon the world. It would be immensely benefited by a large infusion of the spirit of the true Mystic, who wages the most deadly war with all carnality; who has a terrible moral intensity; who renounces absolutely all that dims the radiance or shadows the image of the Perfect One in the mirror of the soul; who is determined, so far as in him lies, to bridge the gulf that separates him from his Maker and make the closest possible approach to God. Of Rabbi Gamaliel, a genuine Mystic, it is reported that he prayed, “O Lord, grant that I may do Thy will as if it were my will, and that Thou mayest do my will as if it were Thy will.” Charles Wesley, another Mystic, is very bold and says,

Why should it be thought a thing incredible with any that man may become a partaker of the Divine nature? If to a small extent, why not, when all the conditions are favorable, to a very large extent? Why should not the Church in general, and the Methodist Church in particular, get a new grip on this much neglected but every way fruitful truth of the Divine indwelling and the Divine immanence, God in all and all in God, the universe but the will of God expressed in forms of time and space, humanity reaching its highest point of development when it most completely entemples Deity, nature a symbol of God, God revealed in His works? Just so far as this shall be accomplished will the Church swing out into a wealthy place, and march forward to large conquest. Complete surrender will be the prelude to complete possession, and complete possession will straightway be turned into complete victory over every foe.