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YALE UNIVERSITY
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ANN S. FARNAM FUND

MYSTICISM AND
MODERN LIFE

BY
JOHN WRIGHT BUCKHAM
Pbofessob of Christian THBOLoaT in Pacific Theoloqical Seuinaby
Author of Christ and the Eternal Order, Personality and the
Christian Ideal, etc.

THE ABINGDON PRESS
NEW YORK CINCINNATI

Coypright, 1915, by
JOHN WRIGHT BUCKHAM

To H. W. B.
In Grateful Recognition
of Twenty-five Years of
Mystical Comradeship

'On all that my hand does
Thy hand is laid"

CONTENTS

page
Preface ---._. .7,
Introduction : What is Mysticism ? - 13
PART I
NEW FORMS OF MYSTICISM
chapter I The Mystic Way and its Modern
Equivalents - 29
II Health Mysticism - - 56
III Cosmic Mysticism - - 73
PART II
TESTS OF MYSTICISM
IV Defects and Limitations of Mysti
cism .... 97
V Mysticism and Rationality 118
VI Mysticism and Psychology - 133
VII Normal Mysticism - - 149
PART III
VALUES OF MYSTICISM
VIII Lessons from the Mystics 171 '¦
IX The Treasury of Christian Mystical
Literature 194
X Mysticism and the Modern Church 209
XI Mysticism and Modern Society 232
Index -------- 251

PREFACE
Does religious conviction spring from the
rationalizing faculty or the intuitive faculty,
from the "freezing reason's colder part" or
the "warmth within the breast".'' Does it rest
upon logic or faith.''
This is an issue upon which the recent study
of mysticism throws much light. Nor is it
aiding us in this respect alone. It promises
much help in untwisting the tangle of modern
life and in aflFording a clue to its true value and
use. Many readers will take up — or perhaps let
lie — a book entitled Mysticism with a not
wholly unjustified prejudice. The phrase "reli
gious experience" would be far preferable for
a volume like this to the much-misunderstood
and much-abused word "mysticism," were it
not that the latter indicates the faith of a
historic succession of men and women who
have been the exponents and defenders of
religious experience of an intense and significant
type. While I shall endeavor to show that
every one who has an immediate religious
experience of his own is to that extent a mystic
and belongs to the mystic fellowship, still I

8 PREFACE
agree with writers upon mysticism that there is
a chosen company whom we may well call the
mystics" who have attained to such heights of
religious experience as to serve in a peculiar
way as its exponents — ^the great adventurers in
the spirit realm. Their experience, while normal
for them, is not the norm for all.
It is the aim of the writer in the first place
to point out the presence of mysticism in
modern life and thought, and then to assist,
as far as he may, in the much-needed task of
sifting the normal from the abnormal in mys
ticism, of clarifying the distinction which
_^rofessor Rauschenbusch has succinctly put
in a letter to the writer, "between the open-
eyed kind and the shut-eyed kind, the kind
that makes a man realize his fellows and nature
more keenly, and the kind that makes him lose
consciousness of them and interest in them; the
kind that makes human nature more complete
and normal, and the kind that introduces ab-
^normal and wild-eyed qualities."
Whatever tends to make religion esoteric,
incomprehensible, over-refined, an affair of the
elect and not of humanity as a whole, is mis
leading and fatal. It defeats religion in the
name of religion. It is a common impression
that mysticism is such. On the contrary — as I
trust this volume will help to show — mysticism

PREFACE 9
in its normal form is not an inscrutable, exclu
sive religious cultus, but the gift, in some
form, of everyone who will cultivate his capac
ity for it.
The task, for the author, relates itself very
closely to one in which he has been for some
time engaged and to which his previous volumes
have been devoted — the study of the nature of
Personality. In pursuing such a study it is
impossible to pass by the mystics with their
rich contribution to the meaning of this most
fundamental of realities.
The gentle reader who does not care for the
critical discussion of mysticism may omit
Part II. The author deems this, however, to
be a very essential part of the volume. "One
does not like to be a fool, even a blessed fool,"
as a neighbor of mine remarks. Without a
philosophy to justify him the mystic can
hardly escape this suspicion.
In briefly acknowledging obligations I cannot
do less than begin with the great mystics
themselves, to whom I owe more than I can
express for the generosity and confidence with
which they have shared with me — as with all
who will hsten — the secret of their inner experi
ence. To the writers upon mysticism also I
am greatly indebted, as the following pages
will show. Professor Rauschenbusch and Dr.

10 PREFACE
George A. Gordon have clarified and furthered
my, task with suggestion and cheer. To my
colleagues. President C. S. Nash and Professor
W. F. Bade, hearty thanks are extended for
encouragement and aid; also to my wife and
to Mrs. George DeWitt Castor, Miss Olive
Brownsill, who in the last months of a fatal
illness gave freely of her fine insight and
sympathy to these chapters, and Miss Bertha
M. Buckham. The editors of The Honuletic
Review, Dr. Robert Scott and Professor George
W. Gilmore, have extended greatly appreciated
assistance. The latter has read the manuscript
and has made many valued suggestions.
Acknowledgments are made with thanks to
The Homiletic Review for the use of the chap
ter dealing with "Christian Mystical Litera
ture"; to the Christian Intelligencer for the use
of parts of the chapters "Lessons from the
Mystics" and "The Mystic Way"; and to the
New York Christian Advocate for the use of a
part of the chapter "Mysticism and the
Church." The needless repetition of quotation marks
in the case of longer extracts has been avoided.
All indented paragraphs in smaller type should
be understood as quotations.
Finally, in accord with the word of Plato in
the Timseus, "All men, Socrates, who have

PREFACE 11
any degree of right feeling, at the beginning of
every enterprise, whether small or great, always
call upon God," the author would commit to
the guidance of the Spirit of Truth this essay
to honor and extend his gracious power in
human hearts. John Wright Buckham.
Pacific Theological Seminary,
Berkeley, California.

INTRODUCTION
WHAT IS MYSTICISM?
Whoever reflects upon himself, his fellows
and the world confronts Mystery, primal and
perpetual. In ihe beginning was Mystery — at
once a challenge and a promise. We know but
in part. Yet ignorance and mystery are not
the same. "The former means 'I know not,'
the latter means 'I know not but it is known.' '"
As knowledge widens. Mystery deepens. The
old mysteries disappear, but new ones take their
places. Instead of vanishing, mystery becomes
vaster, more inclusive, more pervasive. Yet it
loses its chill and gloom and lightens, like the
mist upon the mountain top, as the sun rises
higher. The winds rend it, the sunlight pierces
it. It grows prescient and purposeful. The
certainty of a vast encompassing Reality makes
itself felt. I
Mystery is the matrix of revelation: In the
beginning was the Word. Without mystery,
revelation would lack motive, occasion, setting.
Without revelation, mystery would be mean-

1 W. E. Hocking: The Meamng of God in Human Experience, p. 236.
13

14 INTRODUCTION
ingless, insoluble, .blighting. The two involve
one another.
As mystery is not synonymous with igno
rance, so mysticism is not synonymous with
mystery. Mysticism is the certainty that grows
up in the presence of mystery. It is religion
resting upon inner experience — the obverse
side of mystery.
Mystery — the Word. From this antithesis
emerges mysticism, — the most characteristic,
persistent, and universal form of religion.
II
It may be well at the outset, in order to
forestall misunderstanding and clear away, as
far as possible, some of the prejudices which
attach to the term, to present some representa
tive definitions of mysticism and offer a brief
preliminary account of it, as understood in this
volume. Mysticism means spiritual enlightenment.
The mystic is one who closes {fWEiv) the
avenues of sense, not in order to be in darkness,
but that the divine light "that never was on
land or sea" may flow in upon his inner sight
and enlighten him. Edward Caird wrote:
"Mysticism is religion in its most concentrated
and exclusive form; it is the attitude of mind in
which all other relations are swallowed up in

INTRODUCTION 15
the relation of the soul to God." Canon Inge,
who has earned the right to a careful hearing
upon the nature of mysticism, defines it as
follows: "Mysticism is the attempt to realize
in thought and feeling the immanence of the
temporal in the eternal and of the eternal in
the temporal."^ Later in his volume he adds:
"The shortest definition of mysticism which
has ever been suggested is also one of the best:
'Mysticism is the love of God.' " To this
might well be added, "the love of man." Few
more truly mystical utterances can be found in
Hterature than this of Augustine: "Blessed is
he who loves Thee, and his friend in Thee, and
his enemy for Thy sake."^ Rufus M. Jones in
his Studies in Mystical Religion defines mys
ticism as follows: "The type of religion which
puts the emphasis on immediate awareness of
relation with God, on direct and intimate
consciousness of the Divine Presence. It is
religion in its most acute, intense and living
stage."^ For "awareness" as the key word one
might well substitute the more familiar term
experience, or recognition.
As an experience, mysticism is spiritually
sentient. "Mysticism," says Goethe, "is the
scholastic of the heart, the dialectic of the
2 Christian Mysticism, p. 5.
3 Confessions, iv, 9.
* Preface, p. xv.

16 INTRODUCTION
feelings."^ The mystics are men and women of
deep, though often quiet, emotional life. " '0
taste and see,' they cry, in accents of astound
ing certainty and joy. 'Ours is an experi
mental science.""* And yet, "to say that mys
tics lay stress on feeling as the element in man
through which he can best approach divinity
is no full account,"' ajiy more than it would be
to say that their main emphasis is upon thiak
ing. The fact is that neither thought alone, nor
feeling alone, nor both together, constitute
mysticism. It fuses and yet transcends them.
Nor is the will inactive. As the will that is
"ours to be made Thine," it plays a most
important part.
Mysticism is the immediate sense of Supreme
Reahty. * More definitely, and in its purest
form, it is, in Pascal's phrase, "God known of
the heart." It is the religion of the Holy
Spirit." It is the realization and interpretation
of religious experience, for it includes not only
the experience itself, but the attempt to give
^ Quoted by Inge: Christian Mysticism, p. 338.
" Evelyn Underbill: Mysticism, p. 28.
' G. M. Stratton: The Psychology of the Religious Life, p. 175.
8 By "an immediate sense," or "immediacy," I do not mean that which is
independent of ideas, but that which transcends them. See Part 11,
Chapter II. Miss Underbill, in her volume Practical Mysticism, which
has appeared since this writing, defines mysticism as "the art of union
with Reality."
® "Christian mysticism is, in fact, the doctrine, or, rather, the Experi
ence of the Holy Ghost" (R. C. Moberly: Atonement and Personality,
p. 312).

INTRODUCTION 17
it expression. That may seem a question-
begging definition, and yet it is difficult to
stop short of it. Philosophically, mysticism
rests upon intuitional idealism.
Even more intimate than the relation of
mysticism to reality is its relation to personal
ity. Indeed, mysticism might be described as
the awakening and development of the true self
in conjunction with the Perfect Self. Or, as Mr.
George Wharton Pepper put it in his Lyman
Beecher lectures at Yale University, "Mystic
ism is the realization of one's self with God."
Mysticism comes very near being that which
goes by the name of "personal religion." Any
one who has, or believes he has, a direct experi
ence of God is to that extent a mystic. For he
can neither possess nor express this conviction
except as he transcends ordinary experience.
Mysticism might be characterized as "the
practice of the Presence of God." Professor
James Bissett Pratt has put the case plainly
thus: "Whoever prays, not merely with the
belief, but with the immediate sense that God
is with him and hears, is to that extent a
mystic and a mystic of the highest type."^"
Much besides this is included in mysticism, as
will appear in the pages that follow, but we
are here trying to find the kernel.
10 Psychology of Religious Belief, p. 163.

18 INTRODUCTION
This by no means makes mysticism equivalent
to religion. One may be religious, earnestly
religious, whose faith in God is — or is conceived
to be — a rational inference or an accepted belief,
not an immediate experience, and who regards
and fulfills his duties — as Kant counseled — ^in
the light of divine commands. Religion, indeed,
is righteousness as well as faith. It is a matter
of intellectual belief, of cult and conscience and
creed — an ethical, social, institutional fact, as
well as an inner experience. Mysticism is thus
but a part of it. But to many it seems the
salient part — that by which religion is made
one's own. Alison Parr, in Winston Churchill's
The Inside of the Cup, expresses a demand of
mysticism when she says, "1 cannot take a
consensus of opinion about Him — ^he must be
my God." Ill
By confounding mysticism as a whole with
exaggerated forms of it certaia popular mis
conceptions have become widespread which are
not easily uprooted. One of these is that
"mysticism" is equivalent to "mistiness" —
that the mystic is one who holds some very
hazy, ill-defined, dreamy notions about life and
truth and God and himself which he neither
understands himself nor can make clear to

INTRODUCTION 19
others, "in sleep a king; but waking, no such
matter." This mistaken idea of mysticism on
the part of its detractors has grown largely
out of the superficial assumption, "That which
I cannot understand is ipso facto not under
standable." On the contrary, the mystic,
taking him "by and large," is one of the most
convinced and convincing of thinkers. It is
true that he cannot fully express himself.
That which he regards as the truth has taken
such possession of him and seems to him so
rich and splendid that he cannot express it
worthily. But there is nothing vague or indefi
nite in it. The muteness and stammering
with which he is overcome is due only to super
abundance of conviction. Nor is the mystic a
mere visionary. Don Quixote is too far from
genuine mysticism to be even a parody of it.
An equally groundless misconception of mys
ticism is that it is a dismal and dreary other-
worldliness; the mystic a joyless, lack-luster
ascetic. On the contrary, the mystic believes
himself possessed of the only true secret of
happiness. While the man of the world has
been pitying him for the joylessness and color-
lessness of his life, he has been pitying the
devotee of pleasure for the very same reason.
He is convinced that the life that is centered
in things is shallow, meaningless, and exhausting,

20 INTRODUCTION
and is thankful that he has discovered a life
far richer and sweeter. In finding Him who is
the source of life and joy, he is confident that
he has all things and abounds. The Fountain
of Perpetual Youth has been unsealed to him.
He has gotten into touch with the Source of
Life. As Chesterton, with true mystic mind,
has said, "We have sinned and grown old, and
our Father is younger than we." In coming into
fellowship with Him we recover our true youth.
A still more serious misconception of mys
ticism is that which confounds it with occult
ism" Close as this realm Hes to the mystical,
it is, as the historians of mysticism are more
and more clearly showing, a distinct and aUen
territory, — a Moab lying over against the
Holy Land of Mysticism. "Magical" and
"mystical" are radically opposed conceptions.
Other misconceptions of mysticism there are,
such as that it is a life of inactivity and empti
ness, which we may hope the following pages
will help to dispel. IV
The study, as well as the cultivation, of
mysticism has had its periods of decadence
11 "FetishiBm, Magic, Gnosis. Theurgy, Asceticism, Alchemy, Ritualism,
etc., and still more recently, Spiritualism and Palladism — a long list of the
terrible degradations of mysticism, which weighs heavily on ua now, just
when we seem almost ready to come into touch with the broad and integral
life of spirit." E. E^c^jac: The Bases of the Mystical Knowledge, p. 82.

INTRODUCTION 21
and florescence. After a long period of com
parative neglect it has now entered upon an
era of renewal. When, in 1902, William James
published his now famous volume. Varieties of
Religious Experience, no one realized to what
an extent the uncovering and examination of
so many and varied religious experiences would
stimulate the study of mysticism, or how many
and potent influences were at work in the same
direction. Since that time, from many causes,
the interest in mysticism has grown widely and
rapidly. Books of rare interest have appeared,
like Baron Von Hiigel's The Mystical Element
in Religion, Evelyn Underbill's Mysticism and
The Mystic Way, Professor W. E. Hocking's
The Meaning of God in Human Experience,
and Professor R. M. Jones' Studies in Mystical
Religion. Older books on the subject, like
Vaughan's Hours with the Mystics and Dean
Inge's Christian Mysticism, have taken on fresh
values. Many volumes upon religious psychol
ogy have given chief attention to mystical
types of rehgion. Reviews and periodicals the
world around have taken up the theme, until
now it is hardly too much to say that the
revival of interest in the study of mysticism
has become one of the leading movements in
present-day rehgious thought.
"There has been no similar movement of

22 INTRODUCTION
mystical thought so widespread and original
in impulse since before the Reformation" in
the judgment of an English theologian." "It
is a good sign in this gray hour of crisis and of
doubt," writes an Italian psychologist, "that
so many are turning with renewed love to the
study of the great mystics.""
The return of interest in mysticism is due
partly to a reaction from the dominance of
science, partly to a revolt from absolutism in
philosophy, from dogmatism in theology, and
from formality and frigidity in religion, but
chiefly to the attraction of the subject itself."
Our age is weary of a science that resolves the
universe into the mere play and product of

12 a. S. Martin: Review of Theology and Philosophy, vol5.viii, 2, p. 69,
note. 13 Guido Ferrando: La Fsicologia du misticisme, Psiche, vol. i, 4, p. 265.
The same writer offers the following suggestion as to the manner in wbich
the study of mysticism should be pursued: "It belongs to psychology to
prepare the way and to prevail upon science, philosophy, and theology to
reexamine and correct their valuations of mystical experience; so that
scientists may lay aside their obstinate determination to consider mystics
physically and mentally unsound; that philosophers may recognize that
the doctrine of mysticism is not reducible merely to a negative affirmation
, of an ineffable and empty reality; and that theologians may abandon their
distrust and hostility due to fear of certain pantheistic propositions which
are found, it is true, in the writings of the mystics, but which have a
significance very different from that which is attributed to them" (Trans
lation by Professor W. F. Badd).
" In the year 1892, at the very beginning of the interest in the psychical
study of religion, Thomson Jay Hudson, in that popular book. The Law of
Psychic Phenomena, wrote: "What used to be known as 'vital religion'
is gradually becoming a thing of the past, and is giving place to a cold,
self-contained, unemotional sentiment, which is as unlike true reUgious
worship as the other (emotional religion), and as abnormal" (p. 404).

INTRODUCTION 23
unintelligent forces, of a materialism that seeks
only utilitarian or hedonistic ends, of a philos
ophy that sinks spiritual values in intellectual
formulas, and of a theology that goes on assert
ing ancient dogmas without revitalizing them
or relating them to new truth. Mind and
heart are calling for something deeper. The
question is not whether religious truth is ra
tional, but whether it has not a deeper ration
ality than we have been finding in it. Is there
not a truth, as well as a peace, that "passeth
understanding" .?
Besides these negative reasons there are still
stronger positive ones for the revival of con
fidence in the mystical sources of truth. It
presents to philosophy new worlds for old. It
is with a sense of rekindled youth that the
modern student of philosophy, wearied with
static absolutisms, hopeless mechanisms, and
stand-pat idealisms, has received the mystic
^message of fresh creative energies and of new
revelations of truth, lying hard by pathways
long trodden by "due feet" that have never
ventured to turn aside from them. How
eagerly to-day is the note of mysticism in
philosophy welcomed and listened to — that of
a Eucken, a Bergson," a William James ! For,
'5 A clear account of the mystical aspects of Bergson's philosophy will
be found in the InternationalJournal of Ethics for April, 1013, by Professor
Arthur O. Lovejoy.

24 INTRODUCTION
as time goes by, it is the mysticism of Professor
James, rather than his pragmatism, that is
making the more lasting impression."
For theology, even more than for philosophy,
mysticism holds promise of unlimited rein-
vigoration. It uncovers to literature fresh and
inexhaustible sources of inspiration. It offers
to the church the way to the recovery of con
viction and passion. It presents to the man
and woman in the field, the shop, the factory,
the home, a deeper insight into the sacredness
of life. These may seem extravagant claims.
They are, if mysticism is reduced to the limited
meaning ordinarily given it; but taking mysti
cism in the larger, freer sense, its horizons are
as wide as its insights are profound.
At the close of a penetrating and compre
hensive address given at the International
Psychological Institute in 1902, Professor Bou-
troux, after discussing mysticism, viewed from
within and without, its reality and its value,
said: If these reflections have sufficient founda
tion, it seems clear that a broad and complete
study of mysticism offers not only an intrinsic
interest which is at the same time scientific, but

10 See, for instance, The Religious Philosophy of William James, by
James Bissett Pratt, in the Hibbert Journal, vol. x, 1. See also Professor
Troeltsch's discussion of James's religious philosophy in the Harvard
Theological Review, vol. v, 4.

INTRODUCTION 25
also still more, an interest affecting very directly
the life and destiny of individuals and of hu
manity itself.
No farther word is needed to urge us to wider
exploration and reflection in a realm so fair and
full of promise, though it lies so high among
the uplands of the spirit.

Part I
NEW FORMS OF MYSTICISM
"Quench not the Spirit."

What if the o'erturned altar
Lays bare the ancient lie?
What if the dreams and legends
Of the world's childhood die?
The world will have its idols.
And flesh and sense their sign;
But the blinded eyes shall open
And the gross ear be fine.
What if the vision tarry?
God's time is always best;
The true Light shall be witnessed.
The Christ within confessed.
-John G. Whittier: "The Vision of Echard.'

CHAPTER I
THE MYSTIC WAY AND ITS MODERN
EQUIVALENTS
In order to understand the relation of mys
ticism to modern life we should first seek to
gain its attitude toward Ufe itself. This can
hardly be better done than through one of its
most characteristic conceptions, the Mystic
Way. The mystical life, according to the
established conception, has definite stages or
periods of development. They cannot always
be detached from each other, nor do they
•always come in the same order; yet they are,
on the whole, readily distinguished. I
There are four more or less distinct stages of
progress in the Mystic Way: Awakening, Puri
fication (Purgation), Illumination, Unification.
The first and second of these stages are some"
times treated as one. Thus the author of the
Theologia Germanica writes: "Now be as
sured that no one can be enUghtened unless he
29

.30 MYSTICISM AND MODERN LIFE
be first cleansed or purified, and stripped. So
also no one can be united with God unless he
be first enlightened. Thus there are three
stages: First, the purification; secondly, the
enlightening; thirdly, the union."
The mystic awakening of the soul is, as the
term indicaites, a sometimes sudden, some
times gradual opening of the inner eye of the
soul to a transcendent reality. The manner of
this awakening, the exact form in which this
new experience presents itself, is as varied as
are the individuals who experience it. To Paul
it was a blinding revelation of Jesus. To
Augustine it was a complete break with a
pagan and sensual life, and a self-dedication to
the new life in Christ. To Dante it was a
revelation of heavenly beauty, the dawn of
love. To Saint Francis it was a call of Christ
and dn espousal of Lady Poverty for his sake.
To Catherine of Siena and to Madame Guyon
it was a "wound of love." To Henry Suso it
was a call of the Eternal Wisdom.
The new life brings with it a certain summons
to action, to seff-discipline, a process of bring
ing the self into harmony with this newly
learned Reality. This is what is known as
Purgation, or the Purgative Way. It is the
principle of Detachment found in the Bhagavad
Gita. The self must be purged of its selfish-

THE MYSTIC WAY 31
ness; its devotion to sense and the material
world must be broken. Hence we find, in the
case of many of the greatest mystics, the most
severe and often torturing self-discipline. The
devoted Henry Suso, who at the age of eighteen
experienced his "commencement" and "turned
wholly from things," went through harrowing
self-tortures. A garment filled with pointed
brass nails caused him intense agony, especially
in summer, and when he tried to sleep he would
cry out, "O gentle God, what a dying is this!"
This, with a cross of protruding nails which he
wore on his back day and night, and his other
instruments of torture made a terrible arma
ment of purification. Yet the time came when
he cast them all aside. "On a certain Whitsun
day a heavenly messenger appeared to him and
ordered him in God's name to continue it no
more. He at once ceased and threw all the
instruments of his suffering (irons, nails, hair-
shirt, etc.) into a river.'" Catherine of Genoa
refused herself all food that she liked. Madame
Guyon wore girdles of hair and held wormwood
in her mouth.
How far these self-denials and asceticisms
really furthered the life of the spirit it is dif
ficult to say. The motive certainly was a
high one whatever may be true of the method.
' See Underbill, Mysticism, p. 263.

32 MYSTICISM AND MODERN LIFE
Jacob Boehme's experience is suggestive. "I
began," he says, "to fight a hard battle against
my corrupted nature. Now, while I was
wrestling and battling, being aided by God, a
wonderful Ught arose within my soul. It was
a light entirely foreign to my unruly nature,
but in it I recognized the true nature of God
and man, and the relation existing between
them, a thing which heretofore I had never
understood, and for which I would never have
sought."' Whatever the place of this discipline and the
method of self -conquest, it is certain that every
one who would Uve the higher life must fight
his battles with himself and learn to master
his appetites and inclinations. When once this
mastery over the lower self is won, then the
relation of the senses to the spirit takes a new
aspect. "You must tame the Green Lion before
you give him wings," as Miss UnderhiU finely
says. Those who have at length conquered
themselves may, often do, find a new value in
the sense world, discovering in it a medium for
the spirit life unrecognized before. Having
mastered the sense world, they find its spiritual
meanings. But this the older mystics largely
failed to realize.
To the soul that has thus entered the Mystic
' Underbill, Mysticism, p. 273.

THE MYSTIC WAY 3:^
Way and is striving to be true to the heavenly
vision come glimpses, revealings, "openings."
This is the stage of Illumination. Many and
diverse are these visitations. Sometimes they
take the form of mental insight and clarity
which make truth most vivid and real. Texts
of Scripture stand out in peculiar light and
beauty. Sometimes they make themselves felt
as a great surging of love in the heart. Some
times they take the form of visions. Often
these come with great suddenness: "Straight
way," exclaims the Seer of Revelation, "I was
in the spirit: and behold  ." Suso, who went
through great sufferings in seH-purgation, ex
perienced equally intense illuminations. One of
these he describes (he always refers to himself
in the third person) as follows :
He was alone after his midday meal, under
going a severe suffering. Of a sudden he saw
and heard what no tongue can express. What
he saw was without form or shape, and yet
had in itself the beauty of all forms and all
shapes. He felt the sweetness of eternal life
in calm and silence. This experience lasted
an hour or less, and when he came to himself
again he felt that he had come back from
another world and he was still full of divine
joy, and felt himself as light as if he were
soaring in the air.^
> R. M. Jones, Op. cit, p. 283.

34 MYSTICISM AND MODERN LIFE
Often these jjluminations are closely related
to nature. Such was the case with Saint
Francis. Miss Underbill gives a charming
description of Rose of Lima, the Peruvian saint,
-and her duet of praise with the little bird. These
joyous niuminations and visitations of the
mystics are neither lawless nor meaningless.
They come usuahy as the result of long and
earnest contemplation. They follow psycho
logical laws. Nor are they useless. They
mean much for life. In the light of them the
mystic goes on his way rejoicing. They impart
to him new power for life and service.
""^Beautiful and ennobling as are the revela
tions which characterize enlightenment,^ it is
not the final stage of mysticism. Those who
never get further than this do not reach the
goal. Blessed as are the illuminated, they are
not yet stable, ripe, fruitful. Only as they
reach the Unitive Life are they one with God.
They then become centers of life in themselves.
They abide, as the branch in the vine. There
fore they bring forth fruit. To reach this stage
involves much of persevering progress, often
deep agony and suffering. To attain it one
may have to pass through the "Dark Night
of the Soul." But when once attained it is the
abundant life. Peace and power, strength and
joy, attend it.

THE MYSTIC WAY 35
One of the chief characteristics of the unitive
life is its serenity. To one who has reached this
state of inner calm and peace, the circumstances
and conditions of the outward life are of little
concern. Dwelling in the secret place of the
Most High, he abides under the shadow of the
Almighty. The unitive Ufe may seem to be only a mono
tone. It is open to the charge of "automatism."
"The worshiper who persists in the contempla
tion of the whole, thinking to establish himself
permanently in the immediate presence of God,
becomes an automaton, precisely as the deter
mined worker becomes a machine," says Hock
ing;* and he instances Madame Guyon. This
criticism applies, however, to the quietistic
form of mysticism only. The Spirit-filled life
of the unitive mystic is neither automatic nor
apathetic. It is characterized by a freedom
that has gotten beyond friction, a calm that
has transcended storm.
A word should be added conceming that
indescribable mystical experience so often re
ferred to ia mystical literature — ^in which the
pilgrim passes over the highest summits, so to
speak, of the Mystic Way — Ecstasy, or Rapture.
Ecstasy is defined by Inge as follows:

' The Meaning of God, p. 425.

3r. MYSTICISM AND MODERN LIFE
Ecstasy, or vision, begins when thought
ceases, to our consciousness, to proceed from
ourselves. It differs from dreaming, because
the subject is awake. It differs from halluci
nation, because there is no organic disturbance:
it is, or claims to be, a temporary enhancement,
not a partial disintegration, of t|je mental
faculties. Lastly, it differs from poetical inspi
ration, because the imagination is passive.^
This description applies to the simpler or
lower forms of ecstasy rather than to the more
extreme form in which it passes into trance,
accompanied by unconsciousness, partial or
complete. The cause of ecstasy seems to have been, not
so much contemplation as love. "By love He
may be gotten and holden, but by thought
never," said Plotinus." Catherine of Genoa's
ecstasies are described as follows:
She would remain as though dead for six
hours; but on being called to the doing of any
duty, however trifling it might be, she would
instantly arise and respond, and go about the
doing of this her obligation. . . . And coming
thus forth from her hiding place she would have
her face flushed so as to look like a cherub, and
to seem to have upon her lips the "Who then

^ Inge: Op. cit., p. 14.
* See Underbill: Mysticism, p. 445.

THE MYSTIC WAY 37
shall separate me from the love of Christ?" of
the glorious apostle.' II
Whatever may be said of the exaggerated
forms and colors which mediseval mysticism
gave to these mystical stages, they seem to be
based upon laws of spiritual experience. They
constitute "a sequence of psychological states."^
It will not be difficult, by probing a little the'
religious life of our own day, to see how at its
best it conforms to the same stages, or, rather,
how the stages represent roughly the normal
development of the spiritual life even under
modern conditions. °
Awakening is as real an experience now as
ever. Two independent factors have laid new
emphasis upon reUgious awakening, or the new
birth, within recent years. One is the study of
religious psychology and the other is the grow
ing interest in Oriental and in cosmic mysticism.
Everything that draws away interest from the
material realm to the spiritual is, of course,
bound to emphasize the need of passing from

" Von Hilgel: The Mystical Element of Religion, vol. i, p. 140.
^ A phrase used by .Miss Underbill in the preface to her volume. The
Mystic Way, q.v.
® I find myself differing somewhat from Professor R. M. Jones's criticism
of the Mystic Way in bis article in Tbe Harvard Theological Review
(April, 1915). The conception seems to me of permanent value, if regarded
as I have indicated.

38 MYSTICISM AND MODERN LIFE
the one into the other. In whatever Ught the
new life is conceived, there must be a turning
away in penitence and contrition from the
domination of sense and selfishness and a
rebirth into the world of spirit. The eye of
the spirit must open upon those realities which
the eye of the body cannot see. The experience
we call conversion has often been sadly distorted,
but in its genuine form it emphasizes the part
which the will plays in the change. Yet the act
of the will is less prominent in mysticism than
the spiritual enlightenment. Recall, for ex
ample, those memorable words in which Fox
described his entrance into the light:
I heard a voice which said, "There is one,
even Jesus Christ, that can speak to thy con
dition." And when I heard it my heart did leap
for joy.
An interesting modern instance of awaken
ing of a very normal and quiet kind, is that of
the late John Bigelow, of New York, long an
eminent citizen, who, during an enforced deten
tion in the island of Saint Thomas, became ac
quainted with the writings of Swedenborg and
through them had his eyes opened to the
spiritual meaning of the Bible, of nature, and
of life itself. In closing his account of this
experience as related in his interesting volume,

THE MYSTIC WAV .39
The Bible that Was Lost and Is Found, Mr.
Bigelow writes:
Why, I ask, all these incidents, none of which
would have occurred to me if I could have had
my own way, unless it was necessary to make
me lie down to sleep like Jacob upon a pillow
of stone, that when I should awake I might
be ready to exclaim: "Surely the Lord is in
this place and I did not know it."
A very different and far more dramatic
modern instance of awakening is that of Helen
R. Albee, related in her book. The Gleam. One
of the incidents connected with her entrance
into a larger life was associated with automatic
writing, a practice which she admits to be
questionable: After a good deal of preliminary writing one
evening my pencil remained stationary for a
period and then suddenly questioned if I felt
myself prepared to enter upon the future life.
I replied: "No, indeed. I am just getting
ready to live. I have^- given years to study
and preparation for future work in design, and
all that would be sheer waste if I pass out now."
Then it wrote "Your work that you value so
highly is of no real consequence. ... It has
no value whatever," it repeated, "for the reason
that you are only serving self in it all. You

40 MYSTICISM AND MODERN LIFE
fancy you are working for others, but in your
secret heart you are desiring to do some great
thing, something unusual, and in your concen
trated effort to serve that end you are ignoring
very obvious duties; you neglect the little
things, the small kindness and thought of
others; these are what make up the whole of
fife.". . . Mortifying as it was, I could not
protest, for it was quite true, though I had
never guessed it; and for hours that night I
stood before the bar of judgment and faced my
mean little soul with its petty self-seeking, its
evasion of everything that was unpleasant. . . .
It was a terrible hour of revelation, and well
deserved. . . . That was the birth night of a
new and higher existence.*"
To-day the theosophist and the poet are
insisting, though in very different ways, upon
that need of the new birth of which the church
has been saying so much less. Even in such
books as Bucke's Cosmic Consciousness great
stress is laid upon the mystic experience by
which one enters into the larger consciousness.
Indeed, Dr. Bucke takes as the motto, or text,
of his volume the familiar words, "Verily I say
unto you, except a man be born anew, he can
not see the kingdom of God."
The second stage, Purgation or Purification

1° The Gleam, pp. 78, 79.

THE MYSTIC WAY 41
(for which the Greek term catharsis is sometimes
used), is also essential to spiritual living in any
age. It is the discipline by which the spiritual
nature gains control of the physical, and thus
develops a true personality. Of this necessity.
Christian mysticism from the very beginning
took a firm hold. Only, unfortunately, it put
too much emphasis upon an arbitrary and
repressive method of purification — asceticism.
In spite of its unnatural character, asceticism
undoubtedly produced some admirable, ter
ribly admirable, effects. But it quite missed
a fact which the modern mind is coming thor
oughly to understand, namely, that life itself,
rightly lived, offers the best and most normal
means of purification.^^ Here, right at hand,
in daily Uving, without fleeing to the desert
or retreating to the monastery, without the use
of fasting or hair shirt, mortification or flagel
lation, in everyday duties and disciplines, Jies
the divinely ordained corrective of the flesh.
Here is ample training for the spirit.
Protestantism, speaking broadly, overthrew
the ascetic ideal and substituted for it the con
ception of life as furnishing its own discipUne
in holiness. Of this release and advance.

11 This is not to say that the mystics as a whole neglected the common
duties of life, including civil and social duties, or failed to see disciplinary
values in them. The mystics of the Rhine, especially Eckbart and Tauler,
had much to say in their sermons of the common duties of everyday life.

42 MYSTICISM AND MODERN LIFE
Luther, more than any other, was the prophet
and leader. It was his wholesome and manly
piety that enabled him to see that the devout
and seK-denying facing of common life with
its toil and trial, its searching tests and tempta
tions, is the best and truest possible purgation.
But Luther only half succeeded' ^in inculcating
this truth. The lesson has been slow in learning.
It is strange that with the example and teachiag
of Jesus, reproduced in Paul, so sun-clear in
this respect, the ascetic ideal could ever have
gained so firm a hold on Christianity. Even in
Protestantism, in a modified form the ascetic
ideal has been incorrigibly persistent.
Only in our own generation have Christians
come to see that asceticism has no place in
.Christian life, and that the necessary element
'm spiritual life which it strove to secure Hes
in the very circumstances and conditions of
human existence, when rightly understood and
used. Living itself is an ascetic discipline, a
school of personaUty. If one may venture to
alter a classic line in the direction of its writer's
own teaching, "Life's a school, and all the men
and women simply scholars." There are truants
in this, as in every school — those who refuse
to get its lessons, those who hate it, those who
fail to see what it is for and what it can do for
them. Yet the great school of life goes steadily

THE MYSTIC WAY 43
on. It keeps every day. Its stern, relentless,
yet rewarding lessons are daily shirked, despised,
misunderstood by some, conned and loved by
others. On the whole, as Dr. MacLure observed
of life in Drumtochty, "it's doing its wark
weel" — although it takes a mystic to see it.
Work, for instance, is a masterly purgation.
Humanity has been laboring and sweating and
protesting for countless generations and has
not yet fully learned that toil, instead of a
curse, is a purifying and saving grace, a purga
tion, a masked blessing. Yet work is also very
much more than a purgation. On its finer side
it is a species of devotion, a form of active con
templation. It has been made a curse, it is
true, by excess and wrong conditions and bit
terness of spirit, but in itself it is an angel of
purifying in rough guise. Consider the effect
upon character of having to rise for work at a
given hour (if only it be not every morning in
the week) and of having a family to care for.
Watch the influence of idleness on the average
man and then the purifying effect of a return
to work. Study the effect of responsibility.
Take a careless, worthless young fellow and'
make him a motorman or a conductor and
observe the change in him. Put a light-headed
young woman in charge of a school, or a class,
and note the effect. Could any asceticism

44 MYSTICISM AND MODERN LIFE
accomplish transformations so purifying as do
these and similar responsibilities?
Consider the effect upon character of scien
tific investigation, with its chivalrous, devoted,
almost ascetic intensity of application. Science
is but one of the new forms of purgation, —
easy because chosen. The exquisite tortures
attending present-day "improved" methods of
living, in their demands upon patience and con
sideration and composure, are surely rich
enough in disciplinary values. Is not the
telephone as stinging as the hair shirt, the book-
agent as flagellation? Does one need to_fast
if he can accept graciously the "discovery that
the cook has burned the soup, or leffr-th« season
ing out of the dessert? Need "one sleep on a
bare board if he can endure without inner
cursing the after-midnight dance in his neigh
bor's house? We do not need to seek occasions
of discipline of the flesh; life brings enough of
them in its train. The trouble, one might
almost say the tragedy, is that we fail to take
these things religiously, mysticaUy, spiritually,
so that the product, instead of a disciplined and
seasoned character, is too often, in slang phrase,
only "jasm.""
It was a most seriousmistake of naediaevalism

^ A distinguished theologian describes "jasm" as the effect produced
when a saw comes in contact with a nail.

THE MYSTK^ WAY 4.5
to elevate the monastic life above the family
life, as a school of godliness, for of all exaHing,
probing, protean, yet infinitely enriching dis
ciplines, the bringing up of children — that
modem heroism from which so many shrink —
is the most perfect. Then there is the never-
ending discipline of learning to get on with
people, adapting oneself in love to all the faults,
idiosyncrasies, and notions that differ from
your own, in the people about you. "The Art
of Living Together" produces many a human
masterpiece and many a consummate artist.
Turn from these lesser, but by no means
negligible substitutes for asceticism, to the
more overwhelming disciplines — the disasters
and ills which sweep over us. What does
anything that we can do to ourselves, to wean
our sluggish wills from too close attachment
to the world, amount to beside these "acts of
God"? They are acts of nature rather than of
God, or his only as belonging to a world that
is his. And yet he comes near to us in them,
as a mother to an injured child. Henry Suso
discovered that his self-inflictions were as
nothing beside those appointed to him by
Providence. The "slings and arrows of out
rageous fortune" strike down one's self-con
fidence most effectually. If a man thinketh
himself to be something when he is nothing.

46 MYSTICISM AND MODERN LIFE
these experiences will undeceive him. As a
tree in the storm, so we are bowed down to the
ground and all the pride and self-assurance
taken from us. Failure, loss, illness, bereave
ment — are they good for us or not? The
mystic is assured that they are, and searches
diligently for that realization of Infinite Love
which can come only in the "dark night of the
soul." For him light never fails to arise in
darkness. The dark comes down about us, but a star
Beckons beyond, beyond the thing we are.*'
Not that the mystic necessarily holds that
the dark and the storm are sent by God and
that the lightning javelins of fate are hurled
by his hand. Evangelicalism went too far in
that direction. It bore down upon the victim,
often when his heart was sorest and his mind
most full of questioning, and insisted that he
take the disaster as the direct act of God, with
the implication also of its punitive intent. The
mystic has not urged this interpretation. He
has turned, rather, to the possibilities of puri
fication and perfection enwrapped in trouble,
and found them — not always at once, but in
the end — incomparably rich and wonderful.

13 John Galen Howard: Grasmere, p. 23.

THE MYSTIC WAY 47
III
Awakening and Purgation are thus seen to
be permanent factors in religious experien e,
as valid and essential to-day as ever. So also
is Illumination.Our knowledge of the breadth and meaning
of illummation is extending constantly. The
records of religious experfence are fult^of in
stances of it in various forms and degrees. I
have on my table the unpublished journal of
one of the pioneer missionaries of California —
a man who fulfilled a long and splendid service
of institution-building on the Pacific coast —
in which is the following entry, under date of
December 26, 1856:
Light! Light! . . . That the sense of "no
condemnation" belongs to anyone as soon as
he is in Christ Jesus — ^then he is born into
liberty, translated out of legality into Christian
Hberty. This seems now to be light to me., It
seems at this moment to reconcile the struggles
of hfe, struggles under much darkness and
bondage. ... I record this view now this day
as I perceive it, that I may survey the truth on
all sides, and if this is a true standpoint, it is
practically (though not theoretically altogether)
new to me.
There is no reason for regarding illumination

48 MYSTICISM AND MODERN LIFE
as confined to a specifically churchly experience.
If we as personal spirits belong to a spiritual
world which impinges upon the physical world,
why should not the consciousness of that larger
world be not only an underlying element of
our general consciousness, but also at times
assume an especial intensity? Why should
not the spiritual order at times come to con
trol and illuminate our total consciousness
with such vividness that we realize, as we
tio not on ordinary levels, its reality and su-
pj^emacy? The capacity for such illumination is by no
means confined to saints, or mystics of the
^rst degree, although in their case, naturally,
it is more intense and dramatic. On the con
trary, there is ample evidence for believing
that susceptibility to illumination is a human
capacity, varying almost infinitely in degree and
manner of expression, the treasure of the
humble, as well as the shekinah of the saint,
slumbering in us all, awaiting only the effect
of a releasing touch to assert itself and raise
us into the fellowship of the illuminati.
Yet how little is the capacity realized!
When we look about for the reason why illumi
nation of a normal sort is not more general, the
explanation is not far to seek. With customary
penetration, William James pointed out one

THE MYSTIC WAY 49
reason for it in the force of the inhibition which
many persons place upon the exercise of the
mystic capacity.
Their religious faculties may be checked in
their natural tendency to expand, by beliefs
about the world that are inhibitive, the pes
simistic and materialistic beliefs, for example,
within which so many good souls, who in former
times would have freely indulged their religious
propensities, find themselves, as it were, frozen;
or the agnostic vetoes upon faith as something
weak and shameful, under which so many of
us to-day lie cowering, afraid to use our in
stincts." When the religious capacity is thus "inhi
bited," "frozen," "vetoed," as if it were some-/
thing to be ashamed of — a weak and childish
credulity to be repressed and smothered —
what wonder that not only the man of the
world but sometimes the man of the cloth also
thinks it the part of rationality and robustness
to take the sceptical or patronizing attitude
toward a reUgion of the heart, not only shutting
himself out of the mysteries of the Kingdom
but keeping others out also? Yet still the gates
of the mystic city are open day and night, the'
^* Varieties of Religious Experience, p. 204.

50 MYSTICISM AND MODERN LIFE
visitations of truth and beauty come to the
pure in heart, and the meek inherit not only
heaven but earth.
Often these illuminations come in the form
of guidance and direction ia the more deUcate
and critical affairs of life. A friend of mine, a
teacher, in perplexity over what to say to a
pupil whom she saw to be going wrong, con
centrated her mind in prayer for guidance and
heard a voice, distinct though not audible, say
the one word, "Wait." She waited and won.
Another friend has just solved a vital issue in
Ufe in the full sense of spiritual guidance. Such
experiences are doubtless especially strong
assertions of the moral sense and judgment,
but that does not prevent their being some
thing more. IV
Finally, the unitive life, unto mystica, so far
from being an extreme and impossible flight
of the religious imagination, may be, inits
fundamental principle, a normal and reaUzable
experience. If we are children of God anything
less than spiritual union with him would be
less than the true goal. And, if so, the way to
that goal cannot be a smooth and easy path.
One may come into the consciousness of the
Divine Love early, naturally, swiftly, but to

THE MYSTIC WAY 51
reach anything like full realization of it, to
attain those heights of serenity and calm where
one can take life and all its experiences with
perfect equanimity, abiding in the Divine as'
the branch abides in the Vine, that cannot be
an easy matter. The great mystics seem almosV
out of sight as we look up at them moving
toward these summits. But perhaps they
made the way too steep, the ladder too high.
At aU events there may be a consciousness of
harmony with God — better, perhaps, called
unison — which is most normal and which many
a saintly character in the knowledge of all of
us has attained.
We may even ask whether that exceptional
mystical experience, the so-called Ecstasy, or
Rapture, is, after all, quite so remote and
unallied as both the mystics themselves and
their biographers have sometimes assumed it
to be.'^ I am thinking now, not of the psy
chological phenomena of self-hypnotism, coma,
etc., but of forms of experience of a far less
abnormal character. Is there not something
closely approaching ecstasy, for instance — as

IB Writing of ecstasy, Inge says: "I regard these experiences as neither
more or less 'supernatural' than other mental phenomena. Many of them
are certainly pathological; about others we may feel doubts; but some
have every right to be considered as real irradiations of the soul from 'the
light that forever shines,* real notes of the 'harmony that is in immortal
souls' " (Christian Mysticism, p. 18).

52 MYSTICISM AND MODERN LIFE
Fleming suggests — in canto xcv of the "In
Memoriam," or — as Inge poiats out — ^in Words
worth's description of the
Serene and blessed mood
In which the breath of this corporeal frame,
And even the motion of our human blood,
Almost suspended, we are laid asleep
In body and become a living soul
And see into the life of things.
Coleridge's "Hymn before Sunrise ia the Vale
of Chamounix" suggests something approach
ing rapture in such lines as :
Till the dilating soul, enrapt, transfused.
Into the mighty vision passing — there
As in her natural form, swelled vast to Heaven.
Certainly, Charles G. Finney's experience
was hardly less than an ecstasy when he sat
alone in his office and felt the love of God roll
over him in waves. James Russell Lowell
recounts in one of his letters, reproduced by
William James, an experience that seems to
fall not very far short of ecstasy:
As I was speaking [on spiritual matters] the
whole system rose up before me like a vague
destiny looming from the abyss. I never before
so clearly felt the Spirit of God in me and
around me. The whole room seemed to me

THE MYSTIC WAY 53
full of God. The air seemed to waver to and
fro with the presence of Something, I know
not what. I spoke with the calmness and clear
ness of a prophet.'"
In many of these experiences there is lacking
the sense of an intensely intimate realization of
the Divine Personality such as appears in Paul's
conversion, or in Dante's beatific vision, or in
the trances of Saint Teresa and Saint Catherine.
There is more in them of the cosmic sense that
has come into our modern thought; and yet
that does not mean that this consciousness is
out of keeping with Reality as Personal.
One would not wish in any wise to belittle
the thrilling and solemn raptures of the medi
seval saints; and yet it is quite possible that
they have been too far segregated and canon
ized. May there not be minor, as well as major,
ecstasies, in which the soul receives, not all the
raptures of seraphic saintliness, but enough of
the breath of the Spirit to waft it for a brief
moment out upon the ocean of the infinite,
where it is caught away from itself into com
munion with the Eternal? It is well to remem
ber that the trance, which so often attended
ecstasy, bore a supernatural aspect to the medi-^
seval mind which it has lost to us.

1° Varieties of Religious Experience, p.

54 MYSTICISM AND MODERN LIFE
V
Have we essayed a vain undertaking in
attempting to bridge the gap between these
far-away saints, mounting their high and stony
way toward the Perfect, and the saints of our
own days treading their humbler, more prosaic
pathway? Must we put down "the saints of
old" as neurotics and extremists and our present-
day saints as no saints at aU? It is useless to
attempt to ignore the wide chasm between
their intrepid, other-worldly, sense-scorning,
world-repressing piety and that of our own
time. And yet, may it not be that the partakers
of the mystic life to-day are so far one with
them that "they without us should not be made
perfect."" These skyey saints were doubtless
far more human than a distant view of them
reveals. Had they not "eyes, hands, organs,
dimensions, senses, affections, passions"? And
have not we men of to-day, even in our "brassy
bosoms and rough hearts of flint," something
of the incipient qualities of sainthood? If you
prick us with the reproach of an unrealized
17 Since writing the above 1 find that A. B. Sharpe, Roman Catholic
though he is, after setting apart the mystics as having a supernatural
experience peculiar to themselves, nevertheless finds himself compeUed to
ask whether, after all, the ordinary Christian does not share something of
their experience. He concludes: "It can hardly be denied that an aspect
which it is difficult to distinguish from that of genuine mysticism seems at
times to belong to- some of tbe inward experiences of ordinary persons who
have no thought or knowledge of tbe contemplative life" (Mysticism,
p. 191).

THE MYSTIC WAY ' 55
ideal, do we not bleed? If a sunset smites us
with the glory that never was on land or sea,
do we not yearn? If a noble, sacrificial, love-lit
character crosses our pathway, do we not long
to be like him? Are men so earthly, after all,
as we have thought,
"Finished and finite clods, untroubled by
a spark"?
Such is not the conviction of our better mo
ments. Our soul, in its rose-mesh
Pulled ever to the earth, still yearns for rest.
And not for rest only. Life will not let us rest
content upon the lower levels. Something, or
Someone, is ever calling us to higher aims and
nobler ideals.

CHAPTER II
HEALTH MYSTICISM
The mystic has always felt the close intimacy
of the soul and the body as a challenge. It has
appealed to him, not so much in the light of a
problem to be solved as an issue to be met.
He knows that body and spirit are not one and
the same, but distinct. Nothing is more cer
tain to him than that. Yet at every moment
he feels how closely they are united. How to
bring the two into right relations and keep them
so has ever been to him a task of supreme
moment. Mysticism has frequently attempted
to accomplish this by means of a process of
discipline (askesis). This was the idea of the
hermits. Anthony and his successors looked
upon asceticism as an exercise, a kind of spir
itual athletics. The founders of monasticism
adopted the same view. The physical life,
they felt, was too assertive. It stood in the
way of spiritual life; cramped it, blocked it,
would not let it come to its own. "When the
stomach is full of meat," said Paul the Hermit,
"forthwith the great vices bubble out."^ The
' Charles Kingsley: The Hermits, p. 102 (Sunday Library Edition).
56

HEALTH MYSTICISM 57
body, though a creation of God, was regarded
as more or less given over into the sway of
Satan. Therefore, in order to live the spirit
Ufe, the body must.be denied, its appetites and
desires suppressed. I
The asceticism of the past can hardly be
understood unless we take into account the
contrast between the physical, and especially
the nervous, robustness of those generations
and our own.
\ In respect to nervous sensitiveness, the Euro
pean and American have passed through a
development, or a degeneration — as one chooses
to look at it — within, say five generations, whose
extent and consequences we fail to realize.
Disease has been reduced, hygienic Uving
promoted and life greatly prolonged, espe
cially within the last century. At the same
time, the nervous system has become more
deUcate and easily disturbed, neurasthenia
and all forms of nervous disorder have in
creased, and we find ourselves almost of
another stuff from our remote ancestors in our
physical constitution. We forget this in read
ing history and in objectifying the Ufe of the
past and shudder, more perhaps than we need,
at conditions of cruelty and suffering, terrible

58 MYSTICISM AND MODERN LIFE
enough, to be sure, but producing far less acute
anguish than would be the case if they existed
to-day. From the point of view of ability to
cope with our physical environment, this high
nervous development is doubtless a loss; but
from the point of view of mental and spiritual
susceptibility and acuteness, except where it has
become abnormal, it is an inestimable gain.
Stolidity, with all its dull and heavy encum
brance to the higher life, is disappearing. The
effect upon the religious life is apparent. A
religion to appeal to the type of mind associated
with a highly refined and sensitive physical
organism must be of a kind capable of adjust
ment to its needs. If it prescribes severities
and asceticisms to a constitution too refined to
bear them, it will alienate and stunt, rather
than call out and strengthen, the inner life.
This is the case with respect to asceticism in
our day as contrasted with the past.
Probably no one has so graphically painted
this contrast as Francis Thompson, the mys
tical poet, in his suggestive little book Health
and Holiness, from which we take the following:
To our generation uncompromising facts and
severities of conduct are found to be piteously
alien; not because, as rash censors say, we are
too luxurious, but because we are too nervous,
intricate, devitalized. We find our austerities

HEALTH MYSTICISM 59
ready-made. The east wind has replaced the
disciphne, dyspepsia, the hair shirt. Either
may inflict a more sensitive agony than a lusty
anchorite suffered from lashing himself to blood.
It grows a vain thing for us to mortify the
appetite — would we had the appetite to mor
tify ! — macerate an evanescing flesh, bring down
a body all too untimely spent and fore wearied,
a body which our liberal-lived sires have trans
mitted to us quite effectually brought down.
The pride of life is no more; to live is itself an
ascetic exercise; we require spurs to being, not a
snaffle to rein back the ardor of being. ... It
was not so with our fortunate (or at least earth-
happier) ancestors. For them doubtless the old
idea worked roughly well. They lashed them
selves with chains; they went about in the most
frightful forms of hair shirt, which grew stiffened
with their blood, and yet were unrestingly
energetic. . . . This implies a constitution we
can but dimly conjecture, to which austerity,
so to speak, was a wholesome antidote.*
There is, of course, much of poetic license
as well as of overgeneralization in such a
statement; and yet, there is so much too that
is pertinent in it that even the Roman Church
has put upon it its imprimatur.

: Health and Holiness; A Study of the Relations between Brother Ass,
the Body, and bis Rider, the Soul, pp. 21-23.

60 MYSTICISM AND MODERN LIFE
II
The mystics of the past felt the necessity of
suppressing the body. To-day another need
has appeared. The body needs reenforcement,
in order to meet the demands of the spirit.
[Accordingly, there has arisen a new type of
mysticism, whose emphasis is upon health, the
toning up of the body, just as the emphasis of
mediseval mysticism was upon asceticism, the
toning down of the body. The rise and rapid
development of this new health mysticism is
one of the most extraordinary phenomena in
the reUgious life of our time. And yet it might
have been foreseen. At least the rise of some
new form of mysticism might have been
anticipated as a reaction from the prevailing
externalism, orthodoxism-versus-liberalism, and
denominationalism of the American churches.
For generations the church has been inviting
the paralysis which has now seized her by
devoting herself all too largely to mere church
propagandism, losing her life message in shib
boleths, showing more concern for herself than
for humanity. From this selfishness there are
signs that she is now waking. Meanwhile she has
very largely lost not only the laboring people,
but many educated people who are longing for
a spiritual life they are failing to find in the
church. Hence the rise of the new mystic cults.

HEALTH MYSTICISM (il
The new Health Mysticism, made up of
ChristianSognce, the New Thought^ Theos-
ophy, and kindred cults, is a singular com
posite. A writer in the Hibbert Journal, Mrs.
Stuart Moore, gives its constituents as follows :
"To mingle Buddhism, Christianity, magic,
physical culture, and feeble metaphysics and
make with these ingredients a faith whose
chief rewards shaU be health and wealth —
heaven here and now indeed — seems a consider
able task; but the Higher Thought has managed
it."^ William James analyzed its contents as
follows: the four Gospels, Emersonianism,
Berkeleyan idealism, spiritism, popular science,
evolutionism, and Hinduism.* To these should
be added the new psychology. James reached
the well-known conclusion that "the spread of
the movement has been due to practical fruits,
and the extremely practical turn of the American
people has never been better shown than by the
fact that this, their only decidedly original con
tribution to the systematic philosophy of life,
should be so intimately knit up with concrete
therapeutics."^ Next to its "concrete therapeutics," the most
marked feature of the movement is its diluted
metaphysics. This appears especially in Mrs,
3 Magic and Mysticism of To-day, vol. vi, 2, p. 381
* Varieties of Religious Experience, p. 94.
» Ibid., p. 96.

62 MYSTICISM AND MODERN LIFE
Eddy's Science and Health. If it were mere
metaphysics, it would, of course, have no
standing, but it is metaphysics devoted to a
practical end. As such it has power, because
it has seized a great truth, however crudely,
and turned it to religious uses. It is much the
same truth that Dionysius and Erigena and
Eckhart laid hold of from Neoplatonism and
that through them prevailed among the mystics
of earlier ages — the doctrine of the Absolute as
the Fundamental Reality. To come into rela
tion with this Reality, to realize its presence
and its power, and thus to escape the poverty
and loneliness and weakness of our separate
lives — this (next to concrete therapeutics) is
the main object of the new cults, as it has been
of mysticism in aU the ages. "That great cen
tral fact in human life," says Ralph Waldo
Trine in his In Tune with the Infinite, "in
your life and in mine is the coming into a con
scious, vital realization of our oneness with this
Infinite Life, and the opening of ourselves to this
Divine overflow." Nor is it an unreasonable
assumption that such unison with the Infinite
normalizes the physical self and brings it into
accord with the spirit Iffe. Thus Brother Ass
turns to a Pegasus and bears the soul onward
with winged ease. Psychology has given its
unqualified testimony to the beneficial effects

HEALTH MYSTICISM 63
of a religiously composed temper upon both
brain and body. Thus far, at least, the new
health mysticism has a true raison d'etre.
Ill
Everyone who cares for the furtherance of
the spiritual Ufe has reason to hail this recent
mushroom mysticism, as a fresh indication of
the unquenchable longing of the human heart
for the Infinite. Through it thousands have
found their way into fellowship with the Love
that wiU not let us go. By its fruits we may
know it. The very last to condemn Christian
Science or New Thought should be the church.
If it has done what the church has failed to
do for myriads of persons, she should be glad
and ask why. If, ia so many Uves, trust and
gentleness and kindness have taken the place
of fear and selfishness and discontent, a cause
should be looked for adequate to the results.
Men do not gather grapes of thorns or figs of
thistles. It is difiBcult to overestimate the
blessing which this movement has brought to
many Uves in driving away fear and false
sorrow. Yet this is nothing peculiar or new.
For instance, from the diary of Father John,
a priest of the Eastern Church, "known and
served in every nook of Russia," comes this
testimony to the power of the Divine Presence:

64 MYSTICISM AND MODERN LIFE
"Sorrow is the death of the heart and is a falliag
away from God. The expansion, the peace of
head and heart through Uvely faith in him
proves more clearly than the day that God is
constantly present near me and that he dweUs
within me."° Some grasp must have been made
by these cults of divine laws and forces. Let
us inquire a little further into their secret.
We have already found that the power of
these mystic cults lies in the realization of the
Absolute as a power in human life, though it
is associated by them with so crude and imper
fect a metaphysic. But superficial and sono
rous as is their metaphysic, they have learned
the lesson for which pragmatism has risen up
to rebuke philosophic idealism and have put
their metaphysical creed ai work. They have
said in effect to "high-browed" philosophical
idealism: You have long been famiUar with the
idea of the Absolute, but you have treated it
too much as your own possession; you have
diocussed it and played with it and never
found any life values in it or given it to your
fellow men to help them in their Uves. We, on
the other hand, have at least tested its values.
We have said to suffering, hard-pressed men and
women: The Infinite is real; avail yourselves of
it, realize it, rest in it.
' My Life in Christ, p. 10.

HEALTH MYSTICISM <!.->
Surely, this is rational, logical, and thor
oughly worth while. This is the way to use
truth and to prove it to be truth, though not
the way to make it truth. For this we may
thank the new mysticism and challenge philos
ophy, as did William James, to come down
from* the heights and make itself felt in every
day life. Naturalistic and mechanistic theories
will find it hard to overthrow the adherents of
Christian Science and New Thought. They
have found a satisfying reality and have
afforded a new demonstration of the security
and power of the spirit life.
IV
Why not, then, welcome this rest-in-the-
Absolute, health-happiness, Hindu-Emersonian
mysticism as the spiritual enlightenment and
reenforcement that we so greatly need to-day?
If it has laid hold of vital truth and demon
strated its salutary effects, why not turn to it
as a finality?
In the first place, because of its intellectual
weakness and heterogeneity. It has neither the <
depth and earnestness of Hinduism, nor the
breadth and poise of Emersonianism, nor the
keenness and insight of Berkeleyanism. There
have been no creative minds connected ^tUT
it. Science and Health is" too crude a piece of

66 MYSTICISM AND MODERN LIFE
metaphysical mechanics to impress any but
the neophyte. The system of Dionysius, or
Erigena, or Jacob Boehme towers above the
writings of this school as a Gothic cathedral
above a doll-house. Not that there are not
thoughtful writers who have contributed to it,
and thoughtful people who have been drawn
to it. Indeed, it takes a certain above-the-
average grade of intelligence to get anythiag
from this new mysticism. But it has_. neither
thg strength of true simpUcity nor the wealth
of true profundity. A faith to satisfy the heart
must not offend the head. Mysticism is first
of all an experience; but unless the experience
produces an interpretation that commands the
intellect, it argues a limitation in the experience.
Either let the new faith be silent, so far as
interpretation is concerned, or else let it speak
worthily and win our intellectual respect. If
it will be metaphysical, let it rise to the level
of genuine metaphysics. No one can enter
heartily and permanently into a faith with his
mind's eye winking at it.
Moreover, the Christian Science-New
Thought Mysticism is deficient because of its
moral incompetence and one-sidedness. It
deUberately chooses to see but one side of life.
"To see life steadily and see it whole" is no
part of its desire. It closes its eyes to the dark

HEALTH MYSTICISM 67
side of life. This is far better than to make
too much of the dark side. But Christianity is
braver and broader than this, and dares to
look fearlessly and deeply into life as it is,
through the eyes of the Christ. Its deceptive
rose-coloring of life gives to this entire move
ment an atmosphere of unreality and dilet-
tanteism which removes it from the stern arena
of Iffe as it is, and makes of it a parlor philos
ophy. Not so did the greater mystics look
upon Iffe. The optimism of Augustine and
Saint Francis, Luther and Wesley, George Fox
and John Tauler was of another sort than this.
Human evil and sin cannot be driven from Iffe
by thinking them away. They must be lived
and suffered out of existence. That is a truth
that lies close to the heart of Christianity, and
its symbol is the cross. V
Finally, the mysticism we are discussing
reveals its inherent inconsistency and shallow
ness by its inordinate emphasis upon physical
health. A mysticism which so confuses and
misinterprets values cannot be a consistent
mysticism. It is not, as has already been
said, that this school is wrong in holding that
a mind in harmony with the Infinite may act
with almost ruiraculous effect upon the body.

(iS MYSTICISM AND MODERN LIFE
That was a leading truth in early Christianity,
and the church has been guilty of unfaith, as
of folly, in losing it.'' But to make health an
e7id, instead of a means, in the life of the spirit
is treason to personality.
* Mrs. Stuart Moore, though unduly severe in
her criticism of this movement, is not without
grounds for saying: "A religion such as this,
which frankly declares that the first and only
concern of the believer is with himself, with
the prevention of his own ills, the increase of
his own income, the recognition of his own
Divine Principle waiting within his own solar
plexus ... is sure at the present time to be
popular. It is, of course, the antithesis of mys
ticism, as the mystics understood that science of
love.'" The fact is, as the early mystic ascetics saw,
that mere animal health is as foreign to the
spirit life as are infirmity and illness. The
best medium for the life of the spirit is neither
rampant, irrepressible physical health nor physi
cal pain and weakness, but a steady, controlled,
well-expended vitality, a state in which body
and spirit are in full accord.
To secure and maintain the physical con-

^ For a competent, well-balanced discussion of tbe relation of healing
to the work of tbe church consult Weaver's Mind and Health, especially
the last three chapters.
^ATiide cit., p. 385.

HEALTH MYSTICISM (>!J
dition in which mind and spirit can reach their
highest development and do their best and
largest service, should certainly be one of the
aims of a true life philosophy. But if the
spirit cannot rise above physical conditions and
make spiritual harvest of ill-health and infirm
ity, it has nothing to attest its supremacy. As
Robert Louis Stevenson so conclusively put it:
"The truest health is to be able to get on with
out it."
A history of the spiritual development of
humanity would show that sickness has played
an inestimable part in forwarding religious
experience. Loyola, Saint Francis, Luther,
Chalmers, John Woolman, Frederick Robert
son, R. L. Stevenson, are only random instances
of men to whom sickness has been the gateway
to a larger life. Brother Lawrence was doubt
less an extremist in holding our pains to be
tokens of the divine love, but they can be
made channels for the reception of the divine
love, as well as means of self-development.
In Woolman's Journal is an interesting
entry in which he states that having been taken
ill, a cry arose in him that he "might know the
cause of his affliction and improve under it."
Having discerned, as he thought, the cause in
"conformity to some customs which I believed
were not right," he adds: "Feeling the desire

70 MYSTICISM AND MODERN LIFE
of further purifying, there was now no desire
in me for health until the design of my cor
rection was answered. Thus I lay in abase
ment and brokenness of spirit, and as I felt a
sinking down into a calm resignation, so I felt
as in an instant, an inward healing in my
nature, and from that time forward I grew
better." Among the purest, bravest, ripest characters
in every community are those victorious invalids
who are making the largest draughts daily upon
the divine grace and power, but who do not
get well, and probably never will. For Chris
tian Science practitioners to hold out the
promise of health to such saints on the ground
of conformity to certain spiritual prescriptions
of their own is crass presumption. They
should themselves go to such demonstrators of
the spirit life to learn what courage and patience,
victory over self and invincible trust in the
Eternal, mean. Spiritual health, primary, indis
pensable, and always attainable; physical health,
secondary and desirable, but not always attain
able, is the only principle that conserves spir
itual values. VI
What we need is not so much a new health
mysticism as a new heart mysticism, a new
influx of love, a freshened sense df the greatness

HEALTH MYSTICISM 71
and joy of Iffe in a world in which infinite
resources of power and progress are at work,
a new realization of the inestimable worth of
personality and the possibilities of personal and
social achievement.
It is too late in the day of human progress
for humanity to be fooled "RHlth superstition or
dazzled with an irrational siiper-naturalism.
That which men are hungry for is a sane and
heartfelt mysticism.^ They want contact with
spiritual realities. When the doctrinal and
ecclesiastical debris is more thoroughly swept
away from Christianity it will be found that
here, and not in any other religion or cult,
new or old, is the satisfaction of the craving of
the soul. The mysticism that emanated from
Jesus and centers in him as the incarnation of
the Divine Spirit has power to rejuvenate our
age as it did that Graeco-Roman age which
ours so much resembles.
Ever since its wane in the second century the
mystical element of Christianity has been more
or less obscured. It has emerged now and again
in restorative movements and in responsive
individuals and groups, but only to be again
too largely smothered under dogmatism and
ecclesiasticism. There are not wanting signs —

s It cannot but be evident, even to the outsider, that tbe hold, for
example, of Free Masonry lies largely in the appeal to the mystical.

72 MYSTICISM AND MODERN LIFE
such as this very uprising of the new health
mysticism — that we are on the eve of a fresh
realization of mystical truth and power. If
so, it will mean the influx of a mighty tide of
spiritual life, and with it power for that indi
vidual and social advance which awaits some
commanding impulse greater than we now are
using.

CHAPTER III
COSMIC MYSTICISM
Mysticism has been too long regarded as a
seven days' wonder, or else ignored as identi
fied with certain bizarre or esoteric doctrines,
phenomena, and practices. The time has come
to go beneath the surface and try to under
stand more fully its deeper motives and under
lying principles. I
Not long ago an English army officer of active
life. Sir Francis Younghusband, was injured by
a motor-car-^one of those yet unsubdued foes
of mysticism — and suddenly found himself
faced with the necessity of adjustment to a
new order of experience, a new world. Out of
long suffering and reflection came a book from
him entitled Within, in which he commented
as follows upon the meaning of Iffe :
Of the existence of a Holy Spirit radiating
upward through all animate beings, and finding
its fullest expression in man in love, and in the
flowers in beauty, we can be as certain as of
anything in the world. This fiery spiritual
73

74 MYSTICISM AND MODERN LIFE
impulsion at the center and the source of things,
ever burning in us, is the supremely important
factor in our existence.^
However far Colonel Younghusband's theology
may differ from that of the mystics in general,
his attitude and conclusions are thoroughly
mystical, especially his revised sense of values.
After all, this readjustment of values is the
.main thing — the turning away from the out
ward or self-centered life to the inner, and
finding there supreme reaUty and satisfaction.
This is the ever-recurrent note in the mysticism
of the ages — quiet, deep, wondering joy in the
unseen and eternal.
Whether we of to-day have ever had religious
experiences at all approaching in intensity those
of the great mystics or not, there is a strange
sense — strange? — a home feeling, rather — of
spiritual reality that comes to most of us at
times, accompanying an insight into a world
ordinarily closed. "Openings" the mystics some
times called these experiences. "Fallings from
us, vanishings," Wordsworth named them. They
are times when, as Plato said, "on a sudden one
beholds a beauty wonderful in its nature."
These experiences, swift, subtle, inexpressible,
vary greatly with different individuals.
> Hibbert Journal, vol. xi, 3, p. 690.

COSMIC MYSTICISM 75
Sometimes they are closely associated with
nature.  I recall, as I write, two descriptions
of mystical experience which I have heard
from friends, one a vision of Infinite Beauty in
the early morning on the shores of a mountain
lake, the other occurring on the summit of a
peak in the Sierra where there came, in that
mountain wilderness such a sense of expan
sion, of the greatness and glory of, Being, that
the memory of it has been a vivid and sustain
ing influence ever since. A similar experience
on the seashore is cited by William James, in
which the experient expressed herself as follows :
"To return from the solitude of individuation
into the consciousness of unity with all that is,
to kneel down as one that passes away and to
rise up as one imperishable. Earth, heaven
and sea resounded as in one vast world-en
circling harmony."^ Goethe's experience in the
Harz mountains, when, thrilled by the ascent
of the Brocken, he cried, "I bring my sacrifice
to the Being of all Beings," is a striking instance
of nature illumination. "From that time on,"
says one of his biographers, "he felt himself to
be one loved by God and led by God."' But
it does not require an unusual and impressive

2 Varieties of Religious Experience, p. 395.
' For a further account of this incident, see Oscar Kuhns's The Sense of
the Infinite, p. 60.

76 MYSTICISM AND MODERN LIFE
scene to awaken these mystical states. They
may be connected with some very humble and
\pmmon thing — a flower by the wayside, a
raV of sunshine, a glimpse of blue sky, a bit of
symmetry or brightness anywhere.
That sensitive nature mystic Richard Jef
fries, in The Story of My Heart, describes an
experience of his as follows :
I was utterly alone with the sun and the
earth. Lying down on the grass, I spoke in
my soul to the earth, the sun, the air, and the
distant sea far beyond sight. I thought of the
earth's firmness; I felt it bear me up; through
the grassy couch there came an influence as if
I could feel the great earth speaking to me. I
thought of the wandering air, its pureness which
is its beauty; the air touched me and gave me
something of itself. By all these I prayed; I
felt an emotion of the soul beyond all defini
tion. ... I hid my face in the grass, I was
wholly prostrated, I lost myself in the wrestle,
I was rapt and carried away. . . . Having
drunk deeply of the heaven above and felt the
most glorious beauty of the day, and remem
bering the old, old sea, which (as it seemed to
me) was but yonder at the edge, I now became
lost, and absorbed into the being or existence
of the universe. [Yet this absorption did not
involve the loss of selfhood.] Recognizing my
own inner consciousness, the psyche [he con-

(^OSMIC MYSTICISM 77
tinues], so clearly, death did not seem to me
to affect the personality''
But these inrushes of feeling and insight are
by no means invariably associated with nature.
More often still they come through the touch of
another personality. It was thus that the dis
ciples of Gautama and those of Jesus and of
other great vitalizing personalities received their
mystical transformations. Even characters who
are far from ideal have been the means of
imparting a kind of mystic inspiration by no
means momentary in its effects. A person who
once made a brief call on Walt Whitman stated
that, as a result, he became "plainly different
from his ordinary self," and that this brief con
tact with the poet became a permanent ele
ment in his life, "a strong and living force,
making for purity and happiness."^
The author of Cosmic Consciousness, Dr.
Richard Maurice Bucke, who relates the inci
dent concerning Whitman, describes his own
illumination as follows :
It was in the early spring, at the beginning
of his thirty-sixth year. [Dr. Bucke speaks of
himself in the third person.] He and two friends
had spent the evening reading Wordsworth,
Shelley, Keats, Browning, and especially Whit-

* See Cosmic Consciousness, pp. 264, 265.
5 lUd., p. 80.

78 MYSTICISM AND MODERN LIFE
man. They parted at midnight, and he had a
long drive in a hansom [it was in an English
city]. His mind, deeply under the influence of
the ideas, images, and emotions called up by
the reading and talk of the evening, was calm
and peaceful. He was in a state of quiet, almost
passive enjoyment. All at once, without warn
ing of any kind, he found himself wrapped
around, as it were, by a flame-colored cloud.
For an instant he thought of fire, some sudden
conflagration in the great city; the next he knew
that the light was within himself. Directly
after came upon him a sense of exultation, of
immense joyousness accompanied by, or im
mediately followed by, an intellectual illumi
nation quite impossible to describe. Into his
brain streamed one momentary lightning flash
of the Brahmic splendor which has ever since
lightened his life; upon his heart fell one drop
of Brahmic bliss, leaving thenceforward for
always an after taste of heaven. Among other
things he did not come to believe, he saw and
knew that the Cosmos is not dead matter but
a living Presence, that the soul of man is
immortal, that the universe is so built and
ordered that without any peradventure all
things work together for the good of each and all,
that the foundation principle of the world is
that we call love, and that the happiness of
everyone is in the long run absolutely certain.'

" See Cosmic Consciousness, pp. 7, 8.

COSMIC MYSTICISM 7!)
II
y The accumulating number of experiences of
this kind raises a problem which cannot be
avoided, namely, how are such transformations
as these related to the distinctively Christian
mystical experience? Dr. Bucke throws all
such experiences together, without distinction
or evaluation. Gautama, Jesus, Paul, Plotinus,
Dante, Shakespeare (Bacon), Jacob Boehme,
Balzac, Walt Whitman, Edward Carpenter
share, in his view, the "cosmic consciousness" —
which he explains in terms of nature and of
dual seHhood. The confusion increases when,
among the partial experierits of cosmic con
sciousness, he brings together such contrasted
children of the Spirit as Gideon and Isaiah,
Thoreau and Charles G. Finney, Pascal and
Richard Jeffries, Roger Bacon and Spinoza.
There certainly would seem to be a common
factor in the experience of all these mystics,
however varied; and the list might be indef
initely enlarged. There is the same shift of
values from the outer to the inner, from the
lower self to the higher, from things to Some
thing back of them. As a result a new light,
supernal, spiritual, falls upon everything. Ther^
is in all cases a sense of expansion; hope aivfl
love assert themselves; optimism rules. The
recipient feels that he has passed from death

80 MYSTICISM AND MODERN LIFE
unto life because he loves — whether it be the
brethren, or the race, or the cosmos, or God,
or the All.
The lover's tale, at its best, is not far dif
ferent. In his case there is an elect person
who represents all beauty, truth, and good
ness, at the center of his experience. Yet this
other is more than a single individual. The
beloved epitomizes all of Being. There is a
going forth of soul, not alone to this one, but
to nature, to humanity, to God. It is an
experience that makes all things new and that
does not pass with "love's short hours and
weeks." If there is any word that expresses
the ineffable character, the universality, the
other- worldliness of love, it is the word "mys
tical." From this whole sphere of experience, how
ever varied in form, the term "religious" can
hardly be withheld. It carries us back to the
rudimentary forms of primitive religion. In
spite of the close relationship to the physical,
it belongs to the supernatural; it nourishes the
soul; it pertains to the second Adam, the Lord
from heaven.' This is not saying that every
7 Roman Catholic theology, of course, excludes all these forms of
experience from tbe rank of true mysticism. Thus, A. B. Sharpe writes:
"For a confused consciousness of tbe divine or the supernatural, as sym
bolized or suggested by certain fragmentary aspects of nature, or art, or
social experience, is at bottom a perfectly different thing from the direct
vision of and intercourse with a divine Person. '1 talk not with thy

COSMIC MYSTICISM 81
passing response to the glory of nature, every
momentary admiration for a great personality,
every skin-deep adoration for a beautiful face
is religious. So much deeper than these flit
ting approximations to it is a real mystical
experience, that they seem hardly more than
its counterfeits. Ill
"Cosmic consciousness" is both mystical and
religious. Yet it is hardly the highest mys
ticism or the noblest religion. Certainly it i^
not completely Christian. The reason is, I
should say, that it stops short of the fully
personal, both in character and in conception.
It is ennobling and releasing to enter into a
deep and joyous fellowship with n&ture, or
with human nature, to feel the currents of
divine life flowing through the cosmos. Such
an experience is not only mentally but (as Dr.
Bucke points out) morally ennobling. Both
nature love and human love run all through
Christian mysticism, as we have seen, as a rich
and tender part of it. Who had more of the
cosmic consciousness than Saint Francis? The
nature communion of that austere Christian

dreams,' supernatural mysticism replies to the imaginative outpourings
of the nature mystic, the philanthropist, or the lover" (Mysticism, pp.
19, 20).

82 MYSTICISM AND MODERN LIFE
mystic Jonathan Edwards matches Words
worth's. Both strike deeper notes than are
to be found in pantheism. Such nature wor
ship is not less than pantheism, but more, and
corrects it by transcending it. It is bathed in
delight of personal faith.
So too with that communion with one's own
deeper self, of which extra-Christian forms of
mysticism make so much. Such self-communion
is found in wonderful wealth of introspection
in Paul. It fills the literature of the Friends of
God. It illumines the pages of the Imitation.
It appears richly in Jacob Boehme. And yet,
in all these and other committed Christian
mystics, there is a recognition of the union of
that inner self with a Transcendent Self, a con
sciousness of God, or of an Indwelling Christ,
or a Divine Spirit, which is largely lacking in the
cnsmip mvstiVs — whose new bii-th, Dr. Bucke
insists, must take place in the early months of
the year and at the period of the maturity of
the natural powers. Such a view looks down
ward into nature for the genesis of the true
self, rather than upward into the realm of pure
Personality, where alone its adequate Source
can Ue. Cosmic consciousness sufficeg^r the
sunny day, the periods of health and content;
but before some cosmic catastropTie it' may
suddenly be shivered tO atoinsT leaving the

C@SMIC MYSTICISM 83
soul grpping for something more tangible and
firm. This hasHBeen the experience of more
than one possessor of the cosmic consciousness.
Cosmic emotion vanishes, and^the heart and
flesh cry out for the living God. Then it is
only the help of his countenance that restores
the disquieted soul.
Thus we flnd in Christian mysticism not so
much a repudiation of cosmic mysticism as a
fulfillment, an interpretation of it, which takes
up its crude, undeveloped, half-pagan insights
and impulses and carries them on into the larger
Ught of personality. In this light nature is
seen, not as God himseff, but as a revelation
of God; its beauty the symbolic expression of a
Personal Spirit. Love for other persons is seen
to involve love of the Supreme Person. T^ie
self within us is recognized not as a second ego,
but as the Divine within each of us, the Funke-
lein of a Great Fire above, "Christ in you the
hope of glory." IV
Mystical experiences, more or less com
pletely Christian, are, I am convinced, much
more general and frequent than is ordinarily
supposed. A considerable number of the men
and women in our churches are of the mystical
mind, as is revealed in the replies to the ques-

84 MYSTICISM AND MODERN LIFE
tionnaires in the studies in the psychology of
religion. Professor Pratt, in an analysis of
one of his questionnaires, found fifty-six out
of seventy-seven respondents to be mystics.
Trine's policeman, by a vision splendid upon
his beat attended, is not found on every street
corner, yet our streets might be safer, as well
as happier, if he were.* We are constantly
coming upon the mystically minded, as Words
worth came upon the leech-gatherer on the
lonely moor. A laundry agent once said to
me that he had many times on his rounds had
such an experience of the presence of God
that it had seemed to him as if God were right
on the wagon seat with him! The crudeness
of the conception and expression of some of
these experiences does not affect their validity.
If the hearts of many reserved and unexpres-
sive people could be uncovered, who can doubt
that many a hidden mystic experience would
be revealed, of astonishing tenderness and
depth? The hardest and most impervious persons
are susceptible at rare moments to these incur
sions of a spiritual world. In times of illness,
or when the departure of one of those pure
spirits who are not far from every one of us
brings a softening sense of the pervading pres-
^ See James: Varieties of Religious Experience, p. 393.

COSMIC MYSTICISM 85
ence of an unseen reality, many a man who
seemed to others, and perhaps to himself, but
a hard-headed, common-sense practicalist, finds
himself in the atmosphere of another world.
The striking fact about these experiences is
their intense, supersensuous realtetTT They
make the everyday world of material interests
seem unreal and illusive when divorced from
this deeper reality. They enthrone the mystic'
sensibility as the arbiter of reality, making it,
as Professor James said, "the function of the
mystic sense to distinguish between the real
and the seeming, the true and the false, in the
realm of the spiritual and physically intan
gible."" The inclusiveness with which we have swept
into the ranks of the mystics so many of the
"good, great men" of the race and are now
doing the same with the unexceptional and
lowly, "lost in love's great unity," makes the
query a pertinent one: Who, then, are the
non-mystics? The only answer we can make,
consistent with our entire treatment of the
subject, is that the mystical sense, being normaF
and human, is potentially present in us all.
There are no absolutely nonmvstical persons
except the~abnormal and subhuman and those
who have made" LheiliyylVtiB' Slich^^men of the
* Principles of Psychology, quoted by Weaver: Mind and Health, p. 202.

86 MYSTICISM AND MODERN LIFE
ilk of Bluebeard, Sancho Panza, Shylock,
Richard III, Peter Bell, Uriah Heep, and —
shall we add? — "the self-made man." Many
a man appears to be harder than a flint until — -
Remember Scrooge!
A rheumatic son of France who lives on the
hilltop above me, betrays no token of mys
ticism either in his appearance or his con
versation. Yet each Sunday and holiday, as
I glance toward his house, I see his adopted
flag flying bravely in the breeze and say to
myself, "He too is a son of Abraham." Wher
ever you find idealism, outreach toward the
higher life, there is something of the mystical.
"From of old," says Schleiermacher, "all truly
religious characters have had a mystical trait.''^"
Professor James identifies mysticism with
faith :
The operation of the mystic sense is summed
up in the simple word "faith.". . . Faith covers
the whole working of the mystic sense, provided
it is not restricted to a severely religious mean
ing. In its distinctively religious meaning faith
is the operation of the mystic sense in its highest
employment. It works amid ideas and ideals.
It is at once a supersense and a subsense. The
normal use of this sense does not make a man
a mystic. The healthily developed man is

'¦" Addresses, translated by Oman, p. 132.

COSMIC MYSTICISM 87
mystical, though not a mystic. His dominating
sense is that of the spirit, not that of the flesh."
Just what degree of the mystic sense it takes
to make a mystic, James does not say; but the
distinction seems to be a just one, though not
easily applied. Often one feels a mystical vein
in reticent, incommunicative persons and is
at a loss to account for it until he chances to
see them at work; then the fineness, the skill,
the devotion, with which they do their work
betrays the secret.
The trouble is that while the mystic sense
is so general, so deep-seated, so human, in most
persons it is hardly more than germinal. ^^
Other qualities are disproportionately devel
oped. Shrewd"~Sgtfishness~ love ' oT~easer the,
animal nature, is too often uppermost. Ther/
is far from enough of the mystical in our
hterature, our philosophy, our theology, our
everyday life. This is not a fault of our day
alone; it has always been so. As we look back
over the history of human life and thought we
can see how the suppression of mysticism in
many influential minds has fostered and per-
" Principles of Psychology, vol. ii, pp. 289ff ;.' quoted by Weaver, Mind
and Health, p. 202.
^2 "Man, unless be abdicates his manhood, a task so difficult as to verge
on the impossible, must live by his mystic sense; be must keep in touch
with the unseen or cease to be a man" (Bishop Brent, The Sixth Sense,
p. 87).

88 MYSTICISM AND MODERN LIFE
petuated hard and repressive types of thought
and life. Such relative non-mystics as Pyrrho,
Democritus, Hume, Locke, Voltaire, Spencer,
in philosophy; Arius, Pelagius, Abelard, Domi
nic, Socinus, Calvin, the Westminster Divines,
Priestley, in theology, although they have
served to liberate, clarify, and fortify thought,
reveal to us how chill and barren our thought-
world would be if such minds alone ruled it,
lacking the ardor and insight of mysticism with
its Desires and Adorations,
Winged Persuasions and veiled Destinies,
Splendors and Glooms and glimmering Incar
nations.^'
If we owe much to the sharp, clear Ught of the
winter of intellectualism, cutting off so many
needless and overluxuriant growths, we owe
inestimably more to the warm, tender, summer
light of mysticism, in which all that is best
blooms and fruits.

Personal testimony is perhaps not out of
place here. The writer feels bound to break
through the reserve with which most of us
prefer to guard personal experiences, to state
" Shelley, Adonais, canto xiii.

COSMIC MYSTICISM 89
that, though by nature and training an intel-
lectualist, as far back as he can remember he
has had what perhaps might be called, if not
illuminations, inward exhilarations, bringing
with them the deepest sense of reality and
inner joy, which, whatever their cause or
explanation, have greatly enhanced the mean
ing and zest of life. Perhaps the best description
that could be given of these experiences would
be to compare them to the sudden lightening of
the sky on a gray day, the falling of the sun
shine at your -feet, as ff it were meant, not for
you apart and exclusively, but nevertheless for
you as a particular self, with your own power
to receive and appropriate its message.
These experiences are accompanied both by
clearness of vision and warmth of feeUng, as
if there were a sudden uncovering of the world
of the spirit, letting one see into "the soul of
things." In these hours nature becomes not
a mere assemblage of outer objects, mute,
meaningless, prosaic, but symbolic, lambent
with spiritual flame; and men, women, and
children not the mere puppets that they often
seem, engaged with nonentities, absorbed in a
ceaseless round of mediocre, sordid trifles, but
clothed in the dignity and grace of immortal
spirits, caught and held for a little with things,
thrown down by obstacles, drawn aside by

90 MYSTICISM AND MODERN LIFE
allurements, some of them bound hand and
foot by evil, but, on the whole, moving with
an almost inevitable attraction to a great and
high and beautiful destiny."
I have asked myself if these can be mere
dreams, fancies, auto-suggestions, exhalations
of physical happiness and fortunate environ
ment. But they fail to conform to these expla
nations. Closely connected though they are
with physical conditions and surroundings,
they steal in sometimes with redoubled splendor
after long absence, in darkened days and periods
of physical unto war dness. In the dreariness
following failure and disappointment and loss,
swiftly, subtly — perhaps in the night — a surge
of courage and hope flows in upon one; as if
the elixir of an immortal strength were being
poured into the soul. I have tried to put
myself, in imagination, in outward conditions
entirely alien and inhospitable to these experi
ences — life in a factory, for instance, and a
tenement house, where I would be sunshine-
starved, beauty-bereft, cut off from books, art,
society, everything. Would these deprivations,
even if I had been brought up under them,
have shut me away from all mystical experi
ence? Would not Beauty have some way
14 It is hardly necessary to add that I am attempting to give here only
a fragment of personal experience and that I am not touching the more
definitely Christian side of it.

COSMIC MYSTICISM 91
taught me its mystic secret? Would not the
vision of the Perfect have arisen through all
the dust and dreariness? Would not the
Presence that besets us behind and before have
found me? I cannot tell, but it seems to me
so. Is it only one's "disposition" that opens to
him these influences? Have not millions of
one's fellows, with dispositions unlike his own,
similar experiences? And might not others,
who are without them, have them?
Often these renewals of spirit come through
nature, when it seems as if every grass-blade
and shrub and leaf were sensitized with spiritual
healing and vitality. Sometimes a human hand
serves to convey the chrism; sometimes it
comes in solitude, with no apparent medium.
All this is common enough. Ten thousand
poets have felt and expressed it, or tried; mil
lions have felt something of it and have never
tried to express it. The very commonness of
the experience makes it not less mystical, or
real, or precious, but more so.
While not always directly religious, these
experiences have always been, to me, at least,
associated with a pervading sense of Supreme
Love because of which and by means of which
they came. Whether they would disappear and
fade into the light of common day, if I should
come to believe them merely subjective, I do

92 MYSTICISM AND MODERN LIFE
not know; certainly, they would lose the heart
of their meaning. I am not saying that these
individual experiences are the basis and found
ation of my faith. That roots in the soil of a
common Christian faith; but this is one of the
forms in which it becomes living and expressive.
One must have his own "drop o' dew," even
though the largess covers the whole great
meadow. So far from beclouding the intellect,
or unfitting one for careful thinking and earnest
work, these experiences clarffy the mind and
enhearten one for toil. Without the freshness
and zest which they give to Iffe, existence
might grow ashen and dreary — a meaningless
leer or a "tragic shadow-play."
It should be added that while these experi
ences in their indescribable individuality of
meaning and significance often come unex
pectedly, like perfume wafted7~though not by
chance, ffom an invisible garden, still the
mystical mood, the sense of the Presence, the
calm of spirit which puts one in touch with
the larger life, canbe induced bv pra
though not always attEe moment. Prayer
comes to mean, more and more, this mystical
opening of the heart to the Divine, including
an outreach to the sacred souls in the circle of
one's affection, as all embraced within the
Eternal Love.

COSMIC MYSTICISM 93
VI
' But is not this intrusting too much to what
appears to be a mere feeling? Do not such
experiences vary greatly in intensity and reach
their maximum of convincing power only at
certain rare and fleeting moments? Yes, the
mystical experience is intermittent and incon
stant."^" But must it not be so, under the conh
ditions of our dual nature and environment?
We are physical as well as spiritual beings.
Our feet are in the dust, even while our heads
are among the stars. We are of the earth
earthy, as well as of the heavens heavenly.
Therefore the vision fades. But the memory
of it, the sense of its reality, does not fade.
"Sometimes," as H. W. Dresser writes, "a
person's whole life will be changed by the com
ing of a quickening presence or through the
persuasions of an inner vision.'"" To the same
effect are those arresting words of Professor
Diihm: "He who has once been seized by the
conviction, 'I stand before the Living God,'
has experienced in himseff the secret of religion,
and his whole life is henceforth consecrated
(geweiht)."" WilUam James says of mystical experiences,
^ Hocking, in his The Meaning of God in Human Experience, discusses
this necessity with penetration and conclusiveness.
i» The Future Life, p. 29.
17 Das Geheimniss in der Rehgion, p. 32.

94 MYSTICISM AND MODERN LIFE
"as a rule, they carry with them a curious
sense of authority for after-time."" As one
strives to translate the vision into terms of life
and conduct, the conviction of its soundness
deepens rather than vanishes. One knows it
to be real in the sober and dogged struggle to
be true to it, as well as in the high and flaming
moments of visitation. He is well aware that
he is not deceived, but that in these swift incur
sions of the invisible he has "come on that
which is." For these "vanishings," be they
what they may.
Are yet the fountain light of all our day.
Are yet a master light of all our seeing.

18 Varieties of Religious Experience, p. 381.

Part II
TESTS OF MYSTICISM
"Prove aU things"

CHAPTER IV
DEFECTS AND LIMITATIONS OF
MYSTICISM^
"A DRAGON waits on everything that is very
good," wrote Hawthorne. Many dragons wait
on mysticism, and not always in vain. Nor are
the dangers to which mysticism is exposed
merely external. They spring from inherent
defects and limitations. For, with all its sin
cerity and purity of spirit, it cannot be claimed
that mysticism is flawless. In fact, it has ex
hibited, in both its historic and contemporary
forms, several grave errors which cannot be
overlooked; and it is only as these are freely
recognized that its best values can be realized.
I
In the first place, mysticism is chargeable
with the errors and faults of individualism.^
By individualism I mean emphasis upon the ^
1 The discussion is mainly confined to Christian mysticism.
2 The individuaUsm of mysticism is never a selfish grasping of material
advantages. It is of quite another sort — tbe magnifying of one's own
experience as superior to, or at least apart from, that of others.
97

98 MYSTICISM AND MODERN LIFE
self as isolated from others, as contrasted with
personalism, which emphasizes the self as related
to others.^ Every great spiritual movement,
it is true, has exalted the individual. It is a
large part of the power of mysticism that it
has done the same; only in doing so it has too
far forgotten the inherently social nature of
seffhood, of truth, of virtue, of spiritual life.
None has seen the danger of reljdng upon the
vagaries of purely individual revelations of
truth more clearly than have some of the
mystics themselves. Thus Juan of the Cross,
though so great an extremist in many ways,
writes :
I am terrified by what passes among us these
days. Anyone who has barely begun to medi
tate, if he becomes conscious of these words
during his self-recollection, pronounces them
forthwith to be the work of God and consideriag
them to be so, says, "God has spoken to me,"
or, "I have had an answer from God." But it
is not true; such a one has only been speaking
to himself. Besides, the affection and desire for
these words which men encourage, cause them
to reply to themselves, and then to imagine
that God has spoken.*
The deep-visioned and incisive Coleridge,

3 For a discussion of the relation of tbe individual to the person, see my
Personality and tbe Christian Ideal, chapter iii.
* See The Expository Times, September, 1912, p. 531.

DEFECTS AND LIMITATIONS 99
"the rapt one with the godlike forehead," who
may with good reason be included among the
mystics, has this to say of this type of mys
ticism :
Antinuous: What do you call mysticism?
And do you use the word in a good or bad sense?
Nous: In the latter only, as far as we are now
concerned with it. When a man refers to inward
feelings and experiences of which mankind at
large are not conscious, as evidences of the truth
of any opinion, such a man I call a mystic; and
the grounding of any theory or belief on acci
dents or anomalies of individual sensations or
fancies, and the use of pecuhar terms invented
or perverted from their ordinary significations,
for the purpose of expressing these idiosyn
crasies, and pretended facts of interior con
sciousness, I name mysticism.'
It is quite evident that what both the Spanish
mystic and the English thinker are condemning
is not the intuitive method itself but the abuse
of it. There is certainly a most serious danger
into which mystics have often fallen, even some
of the greatest of them, of confusing the Inner
Light with their own vagrant imaginations and
superficial judgments. They have failed to
recognize the value of the common testimony,

' Aids to Reflection, p. 337, Burlington Edition.

100 MYSTICISM AND MODERN LIFE
"Christian consciousness," as a source of appeal
and evaluation. They have failed still more to
realize that it is only through the medium of
a.,,soiciety of spiritual persons that these dis
closures of truth have been made possible to
the individual. As Bishop Brent has well said:
"Mystic observation and experience must have
the support and purification of universal mystic
experience that will distinguish between the
false and the true, phantasm and reality, and
deliver the individual from eccentricity, and
extravagance."" Yet when the social nature of truth and the
danger of trusting too implicitly to individual
impressions have been conceded to the full,
the basis of certainty remains, after all, in the
conviction of a direct disclosure to one's own
soul to be tested, sifted, interpreted with the
utmost care by comparison with the common
experience, yet, in the end, indubitable because
one's own. "I count as nothing," cries the
broken and defeated Savonarola, "darkness
encompasses me; yet the light I saw was the
light from heaven."
The individualism of mysticism has fre
quently led to its underestimation of, some
times its contempt for, institutions. As con
trasted with the egregious institutionalism all
« The Sixth Sense, p. 103.

DEFECTS AND LIMITATIONS 101
about them, this has been an advanced and
releasing attitude of the mystics. Institutions
are for men and not men for institutions; yet
institutions are essential to. the well-being of
humanity in a sense that the mystics did not
always realize. Dante saw this, as his pageant
of the church testifies. Luther saw it, as some
of his less balanced contemporaries did not,
and erripg upon the opposite side, let fling his
denunciations of Carlstadt and the Zwickau
prophets, without stint.
When one considers the enslaving tyranny
which institutions have exercised over the
human spirit, it is difficult to exaggerate the
debt which is owing to the mystics for uphold-*
ing the freedom of faith and of individual access
to God. It is they who haye_kept alive the
inner spirit of religion through all the insti
tution-darkened centuries. And yet without
the Christian institutions there might have
been~nb laith preaeiased— foF— the-~mgsiiE5r-to
puxifs^ Professor Royce, in discussing the tendency
of mysticism to ignore the church, points out
the freedom from it so noticeable in Paul.
"Paul was a mystic," he writes, "but he was
a mystic with a community to furnish the
garden where the mystical flowers grew, and
where the fruits of the Spirit were ripened, and

102 MYSTICISM AND MODERN LIFE
where all the gffts of the Spirit found their
only worthy expression."^
It would not be true to say that mysticism
separates one from his fellows. On the con
trary, the mystical experience draws those who
possegsit together. It acts as a magnet to
create social~fellowships, as all the mystical
brotherhoods attest — Essenes, Franciscans, Wal-
denses, Beghards, Brethren of the Common
Lffe, Quakers, Moravians, Wesleyans, and the
rest. Yet it does tend, in some degree, to draw
men away from the natural social unities — the
home, the state, the church as an outward
institution — unless accompanied, as it usuaUy
is, by strong social and ethical motives.
A similar underestimate, not to say dises-
teem, of the Bible may doubtless be justly
charged to some of the mystics. Yet, on the
whole, mystics deeply love their Bibles. The
spiritual interpretation of the Bible character
istic of mysticism, in spite of the frequent
extravagance of its allegorism,' is in happy
contrast with the deadening effect of literalism
and has contributed richly to its highest under
standing and use.°

' The Problem of Christianity, vol. i, p. 400.
8 For a brilliant discussion of the allegorical method of interpretation as
used by the mystics, see The Garden of Nuts, by Robertson Nicoll, chap
ter iv.
* See Von Dobschiitz : The Infiuence of the Bible upon Civilization, p. 1 13.

DEFECTS AND LIMITATIONS 103
II
A further defect of mysticism lies in its
tendency to extra vagance_ta-e^<('Hs.^. sunrpttmes
even to fanaticism. It often carries its truths,
its practices, its pursuits, to the very verge of
unreason, sometimes beyond. The mediseval
mystics not seldom fail to keep "within hailing
distance of common sense." Thus Eckhart,
filled with a great truth, but carrying it to an
extreme, asserts:
The heavenly Father begetteth his Only-
Begotten Son in himself and in me. Where
fore in himseff and in me? I am one with him,
and he has no power to shut me out. In the
seff-same work, the Holy Ghost receives its being
and proceeds from me, as from God. Where
fore? I am in God, and if the Holy Ghost takes
not its being from me, neither does it take it
from God. In no wise am I shut out.'"
Such statements have a deeper meaning than
appears on the surface; nevertheless, they pass
the bounds both of sanity and reverence and
contrast strongly with the sobriety in intensity
of the New Testament. Mystics often give too
much play to what Luther called Schwdrmerei.
So too with extravagance in self-discipline.
In their supreme devotion to the" lile of Lhe
I'^See Steiner: Mystics of the Renaissance, p. 57.

104 MYSTICISM AND MODERN LIFE
spirit the mystics of the past failed, as a rule,
to rightly honor the body as an instrument and
medium of the spirit. They did not see, as do
we of to-day the intimacy of the relationship
between soul and body. Only a modern mystic
could write: Let us not always say,
"Spite of this flesh to-day,
I strove, made head, gained ground
on the whole."
As the bird wings and sings.
Let us cry : "All good things
Are ours, nor soul helps flesh.
More now than flesh helps soul."
We cannot help regretting — even while we
revere them — that such extremists as Saint
Teresa and Henry Siiso so despised and muti
lated the body in the self-tortures which they
inflicted upon themselves. Saint John of the
Cross, valiant bearer and lover of crosses, fails
to enlist our sympathy in his prayer that no
day of his lffe might pass in which he should
not suffer something. Even A Kempis in cer
tain passages of the Imitation falls into an
abnormal asceticism and self -abnegajion- which
contrasts unfavorably^ with the stronger and
sweeter portions of his priceless classic. Doubt
less it is unbecoming to criticize a piety so far
beyond our own; but the real strength of these

DEFECTS AND LIMITATIONS 105
noble souls does not consist in their self-
afflictions, trances, spiritual excesses, but in
the sanerspirit of devotipn and love which was
their customary frame of mind.
The note of excess is found, too, even in that
which is the chief glory of mysticism — as of
religion itself — love. Not that it is possible
to love too mucKrt5ut the form and expression
of love may Ibe too lavish, too intimate, too
familiar. And this has undoubtedly too often
been the case in the histoi;y of mysticism."
The mystic seems often to regard God as his
own exclusive and peculiar possession. It isJ?
this doubtless which led Professor Francis G. ;
Peabody to say, "The defect of mysticism is
not its emotional exaltation but its emotion^
isolation."^'' Pure as the mediseval mystics
were in heart and motive, and above reproach
in the intensity of their religious affection, some
of their writings are very much weakened by
religious eroticism. Even the Moravians, whose
piety, as a rule, was so sane and simple, were
at one period at least affected by mawkishness
and sentimentalism. It has been claimed that
mysticism is only a sublimated form of the
sexual instinct." In certain of its aspects the
" See chap, xix of Taylor's, The Mediseval Mind.
" Jesus Christ and the Christian Character, p. 279.
" For a refutation of this theory see Hocking: The Meaning of God in
Human Experience, Appendix.

106 MYSTICISM AND MODERN LIFE
relationship cannot be ignored. Nor need it
be. Yet the two are leagues apart. As a sub
stitute for sexual affection and a cure for sex-
ualism, mysticism has produced remarkable
results. Indeed, human experience has proven
that no power is so great to restrain sexual
appetite as that of religion. Witness, for
I example, Augustine's Confessions.
The line of demarcation between full and
free expression and over-expression, between
the adequate and the excessive, is so intan
gible that it is not to be wondered at that the
mystics sometimes crossed it, viewed by a
cooler and more critical judgment. Yet, after
all, as one surveys the main body of mystical
literature, the notable fact is the surprising
manner in which they succeeded in voicing
the inner life of the soul without passing the
bounds of sincerity and good taste.
Contemplation is a mystical exercise which
has often been carried to an extreme that
involves selfishness. To know when and how
to turn from vision to action, from the con
templation of the Ideal to the needs of a world
of men, requires a wisdom and a self-discipline
which the mystic has not always shown.
Ill
The mgst_serious theoretical error of mys-

DEFECTS AND LIMITATIONS 107
ticism is its inclination to minimize evil in order
to^magnifv God.
"Evil," says Dionysius, "is neither in demons
nor in us, as an existent [positive] evil, but
[only] as a failure and dearth of the perfection
of our own proper goods."" Eckhart, follow
ing Aquinas, states that "evil is nothing but
privation or falling away from being; not an
effect but a defect.'"^ This tendency has too
often attached itself to the mystical theology,
although there is no essential connection.
The strong impulse on the part of Christian
mysticism to refuse to concede to evil any
fundamental place or part in the original con
stitution of either nature or man is true to the
deepest conviction of religion, as well as to
philosophy and science. Ontological dualism
is as unchristian as it is unphilosophical."
Mysticism has done a great service in denying
to evil any such eternal reality as belongs to
goodness. But mysticism has often failed to
take due account of the overwhelming reality
of evil as an actual force in the existent order.
It is true — as mysticism has deeply seen and
reverently made known — that evil has been the
instrument of testing, the thing to be overcome,
1* Quoted by Von Htigel: The Mystical Element in Religion, v,ol. ii, p. 294.
I'Btd.!¦ A further discussion of this subject will be found in an article of mine
entitled "Dualism or Duality," Harvard Theological Review, April, 1913.

•\

108 MYSTICISM AND MODERN LIFE
and thus the means of good, to many a soul.
Yet this fact is offset by one equally undeniable
— that to many more it has meant only defeat
and thralldom. Because an experience has
been turned into a means of good does not
involve that it is itself good. Mystics do not
always see clearly that evil can be explained
only in the Ught of freedom. Upon these two
fundamental facts, freedom and sin, pure Chris
tianity has ever laid stress.
Mysticism, with its failure to see evil in its
full heinousness, often fails to estimate human
freedom at its full value. It is overshadowed
by the all-inclusive Divine Activity. God is
aU and does all; man has but to be still and to
receive. Yet this is true, as a rule, only of the
monistic mystics. Many place great emphasis
upon freedom, conceiving it in the largest way.
Thus Angelus Silesius, in the Cherubinic Wan
derer, declares: Naught stronger is than God,
Yet can he not forfend.
That I whate'er I wiU
Should not will or intend."
Here, then we find the root of the absence of
the militant spirit in mysticism, which Baron
Von Hiigel has pointed out: "This antipathy
1' Translation by Paul Carus. See The Monist, vol. xviii, 1, p. 108,

DEFECTS AND LIMITATIONS 109
to even a relative, God-willed independence
and power of self-excitation, gives mysticism,
as such, its constant bent toward Quietism.'"*
Not that there have not been militant mystics,
nor that there is any inherent irreconcilability
between true mysticism and true Christian
freedom. Yet its overbalanced emphasis upon
the divine, as over against the human, has too
far robbed mysticism of the sense of initiative,
and so of power.
If the speculative mystics had been far-
sighted, they might have foreseen that their
mitigation of the raucousness of evil in the
interest of the all-pervasive goodness of God
would be sure to issue in antinomianism, with
all its attendant ills. Perhaps even if they had
foreseen it, they might not have withheld what
seemed to them truth for the sake of conse
quences that might be unjustly drawn from it.
And yet, false and disastrous issues suggest
failure in the clear apprehension of the truth.
At any rate, it is impossible to blind our eyes
to the fact that moral laxity has, to a limited
extent, accompanied the mystical attitude
toward life. The great mystics themselves
were free from it. In hardly a single instance
is there any lapse on the part of any of the
heroes of mysticism from the highest and most
" The Mystical Element of Religion, vol. ii, p. 286.

110 MYSTICISM AND MODERN LIFE
strict moral standards. They have trodden
upon the serpent and the adder, the young
lion and the dragon have they trampled under
foot. Yet their weaker followers and successors
have not always borne themselves so firmly,
especially in group mysticism. In his chapter,
"Brotherhood Groups," R. M. Jones writes as
follows :
The somewhat abstract doctrines of Diony
sius, Erigena, and Amaury had now filtered
down into the common mind, and were being
changed from academic truths to practical
truths. They began to be translated from their
safe place in books to the dangerous stuff of
human life. So long as the teaching of the
AUness of God and the possibility of every
person being an expression of his nature was
wrapped away in the difficult verbiage of a
philosophical treatise, matters went on as though
the book had never been written, but the
situation was mightily altered when those views
spread through the world and became a popular
doctrine as they now did.'^'
^ It is not necessary to trace the extent of this
moral indifference, leading to gross license and
immorality. It is sufficient to take note of it
as an occasional by-product of mysticism,

15 Studies in Mystical Religion, p. 202.

DEFECTS AND LIMITATIONS 111
growing out of the indefinite pantheistic theory
of evil so often attached to mystical speculation.
IV
To these more positive defects of mysticism
must be added certain marked limitations.
First of these is its limited vision of the
breadth and scope of the life of humanity, and so
of the kingdom of God. In no sense could the
mystics be called narrow. They have been
among the peerless thinkers and doers of the
race, men and women with eye single and clear
who did this one thing and thus did it in a man
ner approaching perfection. They were of the
world — that is, the world that is most real and
worthful — but not of this world. In spite of the
mystics' neglect of science, many of them have
done noble and lasting service in making the
present world a better world to live in. They
have not, as a rule, despised or neglected the
duties and obligations of the outer lffe. "The
best preparation of a religious man" — such is
the "golden sentence" of Bonaventura — "is to
do common things in a perfect manner." They
have often been strikingly successful executives
and adminstrators. Paul possessedgreat exepu-
tive power. The mystics of^tEeorders were
great organizers and leaders. Catherine of
Genoa's accounts as matron of the hospital

112 MYSTICISM AND MODERN LIFE
"were never found wrong by a single farthing."^"
"The soul enamored of my truth," said the voice
of God to Catherine of Siena, "never ceases to
serve the whole world in general. "^^ With all
the dark sayings of his sermons, Eckhart
preached clearly the value of service. "What
a man takes in by contemplation he must pour
out in love," he declared. "It is better to feed
the hungry than to see even such visions as
Paul saw."^^ Tauler went so far as to say,
"One can spin, and another can make shoes,
and all these are gifts of the Holy Ghost, I
tell you." Brother Lawrence made cooking
sacramental. George Herbert wrote:
Who sweeps a room as to thy laws
Makes that and the action fine.
Furthermore, mystics have been among the
great political and social idealists and con
structionists. The prophets were both mystics
and social reformers. King Alfred, Saint Fran
cis, Savonarola, Luther, William Penn — myis-
tical all — were builders of the-new sodal order.
Thomas More's Utopia is full of mystical spirit.
With the vision of God often came the vision
of a redeemed social order which should embody
2« Von HUgel: Op. dt., vol. i, p. 143.
21 Underbill: Mysticism, p. 210.
a R. M. Jones: Op. cit., p. 238.

DEFECTS AND LIMITATIONS 113
his will; and the dreamers were not content
with the dream; they sought to make it real.
Nevertheless, when all has been said, it still
remains true that the mystic's cnncpption of
the kingdom of God has been somewhat one
sided and incomplete. In dwelling upon its
eternal uaLurti he has too far overlooked its
temporal nature. The mystic of the past did
not see what a scholar-mystic of our own time
stated thus :
AU is for Him who gave Himself for all —
nature, science, art, business and pleasure, play
and work, the body and the spirit, society and
the state, as weU as the church.^
Tauler, in his sermon on the Kingdom, said of
it, "For the kingdom of God, what is it but
God himseff with all his riches?" That is most
noble and true, and yet it is not the whole
truth. Unless the City of God comes down
out of heaven and transforms life here, it will
not fulfill human hopes and needs. As a Chi
cago preacher said, "Heaven may be our home,
but Chicago is our present place of residence."
In political and social affairs the mystic of
the past has been, as a rule, too content ¦ to
leave things as they are. It is to rationalism,
" Egbert C. Smyth: The True Use of the World, Andover Review, vol.
XX, p. 525.

114 MYSTICISM AND MODERN LIFE
quite as much as to mysticism, that we owe
the rise of democracy. The assertion of human
rights, the claim of the individual to his share
of material wealth and privilege, the uprisings
which brought about the American and French
revolutions — with these mysticism had com
paratively little to do.
It is not without significance that the rise
of democracy accompanied the domination of
deism, sometimes even of atheism. Men felt,
whether rightly or wrongly, that in order to
reach a true sense of their own powers and pre
rogatives they must put God far enough away
to give them a sufficient sense of themselves.
The sam^ tendency naarks , the progress of
industrial democracy. Here is something which
neither the institutionalism nor the mysticism
of the past could quite grasp, for both have
lacked vision of the breadth and scope of
human society. There was needed a larger
conception of the worth of the physical, of the
present world, of man, of society as an organic
developing order.
And yet, as the new political order has
established itself, as the wealth and splendor
of life in the world of here and now have
unfolded, and as men, under its spell and
power, have grown farther and farther from
mysticism and come under the sway of a glit-

DEFECTS AND LIMITATIONS 115
tering materialism, they have come to realize
that without spiritual life — that kinship with
the eternal which mysticism alone can give —
the whole splendid achievement we call civil
ization is an empty show. A deep, indefinable
Heimweh has made itself felt. Many to-day
are earnestly asking whether, without abandon
ing democracy and the sense of the worth and
possibilities of the present life, it is not possible
to have also that which alone can give meaning
and value to it all — the sense of eternal and
invisible realities which mysticism alone fully
possesses. V
Another serious limitation of mysticism in
its interpretation of Christianity is its lack of
the sense of history, especially of the historic
Chnst.'' This weakness lies, manffestly, alongside its
greatest strength. Without the mystical inter
pretation of Christ as the eternal, indwelling
Word of God in the soul, Christianity could
hardly have survived, much less have con
quered. In interpreting him spiritually and
inwardly mysticism universalized ChrisL' A
historical character cannot become potent
^ Professor Hermann goes so far as to characterize mysticism as a
"piety which feels that which is historical in the positive religion to be
burdensome and so injects it." Inge: Christian Mysticism, p. 346.

116 MYSTICISM AND MODERN LIFE
except as he is identified with an inherent
spiritual experience. This identification mys
ticism effected. It saw in Jesus the Christ.
And yet, in doing this, mysticism almost
lost the historic Jesus.^^ The intellectual and
scholarly instinct came in to supplement both
the mystical and the institutional interests.
Since mysticism was concerned with Jesus only
spiritually, and the church was concerned with
him, in the main, neither historically nor mys
tically, but practically and sacramentally, it
is clear that, except for the instinct and service
of pure scholarship, we should have had no
clear and reliable understanding of the Jesus of
history. Not that there is any fundamental dis
harmony between mysticism and learning. On
the contrary, mysticism has been most closely
allied with the development of theology and
philosophy. It has, as we have seen, a strong
speculative and literary bent. But in the
study of history, as of science as a matter of
patient investigation, mysticism as such has
had little interest.
As a result mysticism has missed, to a large
degree, the historic factor in Christianity. It
has not sufficiently grasped the ideal which
2fi "Die Mystik wird ilberall in ebcn dem Masse ungesund, in dem sie
alles Geschichtliche abzustreifen und binter sich zu lassen sucht."
Wobbermin: Gescbichte und Historic in die Religions Wissensebaft, p. 3.

DEFECTS AND LIMITATIONS 117
is coming more and more to command the
thought of our time — that is, Christianity as the
historic consummation of a revelation that per
vades the entire religious life of humanity. The
study both of history and of comparative
religion is necessary to enable us to -see in Jesus
Christ the highest possible revelation of God,
significant for the whole human race as its
only adequate Ideal.
A Christo-centric theology, in the true sense,
is possible only as the mystical theology and
the historical unite in giving us a Christ in
whom are blended the Lord of Faith and Jesus
of Nazareth.

CHAPTER V
MYSTICISM AND RATIONALITY
The strength of mysticism as a philosophy
of lffe lies chiefly in two facts. The first is
that it persistently contends that ultimate
truth is a matter of immediate personal experi
ence, and the second is that it persistently
endeavors to express and interpret the experi
ence in rational and moral terms. Hence its
close association, on the one hand with simple,
unreflective faith, and, on the other, with phi
losophy, theology, and literature. Though pro
nouncing his experience ineffable, the mystic
has proven abundantly able both to state and
to defend it. I
The interplay of these two impulses, the one
toward immediate and intuitive truth, the
other toward interpretative and analytical
truth, appears throughout the history of human
thought in movements, in schools, and in indi
vidual thinkers. Harmonious in Plato, intui
tion and ratiocination became divergent in his
118

MYSTICISM AND RATIONALITY 119
successors. Reunited in Christianity, they
again diverge, again seek each other in early
scholasticism, again part, and in the period of
dominant rationalism almost lose touch with
one another; but again draw toward one another
in the philosophy of the nineteenth centurj^,
and thus, through action and reaction, strife
and adjustment, temper and supplement one
another. , In individual thinkers the same
claimancy of the two principles — the rational
izing and the mystical — is often witnessed, the
one that is slighted ultimately demanding its
rights. Thus Hegel and Schleiermacher, begin
ning with the mystical tendency, move in the
direction of rationalism, the one to the almost
complete absorption of the mystical in the
rational, the other toward a truer harmony;
while Schelling and Fichte, starting with the
predominance of the intellectual element, gravi-
^te toward the mystical.^
This twofold character of mysticism as
experience and as interpretation has exposed
it to a twofold attack, the first from without,
against reliance upon experience (immediacy)
as the criterion of truth, and the second from
1 Professor George P. Adams writes of Hegel: "Perhaps the most interest
ing and significant problem in the interpretation of Hegelian philosophy,
and, indeed, of all absolute idealism, is precisely this relation between tbe
two motives in tuition and discursive thought, experience and its intellectual
eiaboratitsir, mysticism and rationalism" (The Mystical Element in Hegel's
Early Theological Writings. University of California Publications).

120 MYSTICISM AND MODERN LIFE
within, against the attempt to justffy and
interpret experience by and for the intellect.
Let us take up, first, the common objections
to the mystical reliance upon intuition.
II
Two singularly contradictory arguments have
been made against intuition, first to prove it
to be mere untrustworthy subjectivism, and,
second, to show that- it is only a swift process
of sound ratiocination, unconscious of its move
ment and aware only of its result. If either
of these can be proven, it re'nders the other
void. In answer to the first of these objections the
mystic virtually replies: "I know the truth
of the spiritual world with a conclusive sense
of conviction, as I know myseff. This is not
mere emotion, it takes hold of my whole being
and convinces me of its reality. 'The heart
has reasons which the mind knows not of.
Moreover, the conviction is not mine alone;
my fellow believer has the same sense of cer
tainty and assures me of it." And in answer
to the secoiyd objection he replies: "A process
of reasoning of which I am unconscious is a
pure assumption. Unconscious, or semicon
scious, reasoning is not reasoning at all. It is
of the very nature of reasoning that it be

MYSTICISM AND RATIONALITY 121
conscious.^ Moreover, the assurance I feel in
the presence of spiritual truth is far stronger
than that which I reach as the result of a
process of inferential reasoning. It is of a
superior order and quality; I cannot go back
of the testimony of consciousness, which is
that this truth is directly and not inferentially
known." In some such way as this mysticism
may furnish a reason for its faith. As Dr.
George A. Gordon has stated it: "The ulti
mate .premise of thought is not proof. It is
insight or assumption in accordance with sane
reason."' "But," continues the objector, "what
about ideas? Can you, as a mystic, pretend
to converse with truth apart from ideas? And
what are ideas but intellectual concepts?"
Ill
Ideas are the clothing, the embodiment, of
reality. It is indeed impossible to approach
reality without ideas or to interpret it after
ward except in terms of ideas.^ Nevertheless,
the ideas are not the reality itself, nor are they
adequate to express it. Always reality is

2 That wbich has seemed to be unconscious reasoning may, as in the
cases of the Elberfeldt horses, as Maeterlinck, holds, be telepathic.
» The New Epoch for Faith, p. 1.
* The term "ideas" is used as including both concepts and images, but
with the emphasis upon the conceptual element.

122 MYSTICISM AND MODERN LIFE
greater, richer, higher than they.^ If one were
to liken reality to a home, ideas constitute the
house. Through them entrance is afforded to
the inner truth; they inclose and enshrine it.
They even constitute the furniture and the
pictures on the walls; but they are not the
home itself. That is something invisible, intan
gible, indefinable, but intensely real. Without
it the house has no real meaning, at least no
complete meaning. Without a reality tran
scending them, ideas are as empty and mean
ingless as an empty house. "We wrongly
believe," as Maeterlinck has said, "that because
the harvest of life passes along the road of intel
ligence it has been gathered upon this road."
It is unquestionably true that the mystic
has overlooked his indebtedness to ideas in his
insistence that he comes directly to the naked
unmediated reality. There is ample ground
for the criticism offered by Professor Coe :
What discredits the mystical theory is that it
accepts as immediate intuition what is palpably
an interpretation. His spiritual monism may
be true or not; that question does not here
concern us; the present contention is simply
that the mystic acquires his religious convic-

6 "Immediacy and mediateness, in short, are necessary complements in
all conscious life" (H. A. Overstreet, "Tbe Ground of tbe Time-Illusion,"
Philosophical Review, vol. xviii, 1, p. 23).

MYSTICISM AND RATIONALITY 123
tions precisely as his nonmystical neighbor does,
namely, through tradition and instruction,
auto-suggestion grown habitual, and reflective
analysis. The mystic brings his theological
beliefs to the mystical experience; he does not
derive them from it.°
x\nd yet the mystic's religious experience
does differ, immeasurably, from that of his non-
mystical neighbor, because he has passed into
the substance of his ideas — so at least he believes
— to that secret Divine Reality hidden within
them which they may eithei reveal or conceal.
In this sense his experience is immediate,
intuitive, indefinable. He goes straight to it,
even ff it be by the pathway of ideas. More
over, it is only half of the truth to say that
his theological beliefs determine the mystic's
eixperience; he comes away from his experience
with ideas modified, enlarged, infiUed with vital
meaning. IV
What, then, is involved in the doctrine of
immediacy, of which mysticism makes so much?
We have already found that it does not exclude
the mediation of ideas, although it transcends
them. We are now prepared to say that true

• "Sources of Mystical Revelation," Hibbert Journal, vi, 2, p. 367.

124 MYSTICISM AND MODERN LIFE
immediacy, or intuition, .not_^nly does not
abrogate^_ reason__but is itself reason. "The
reason which the mystic recognizes is, however,
vthe Higher Reason, the Inner Light, the Logos,
the Eye of the Soul; that is, it is a reason which,
whatever aid it may receive from ideas in
approaching its object, in the end beholds it
directly and immediately.' It has parted the
veil and entered into the presence of its Object.
Unlike the swallow on the lake, in Tennyson's
figure, "that sees and stirs the surface shadow
there," it has "dipt into the abysm.'"
It hardly needs to be pointed out that this
recognition of a Higher Reason runs through
the whole course of human thought. The his
tory of philosophy is replete with it, from Plato's
distinction between Intuition and Dialectic to
Coleridge's between Reason and the Under
standing and the later ones between the Intellect
and the Reason and between the Discursive and
the Intuitive Reason. Whatever may be their
differences in describing the Higher Reason and
its operation, the mystics are one in ascribing
to it a divine and transcendent character and
in denying to the intellect or reasoning faculty.

7 Here mysticism parts company with philosophic monism. Royce, for
example, describes tbe function of reason as "the synthetic view of many
facts in their unity — in the grasping of a complex of relations in their total
significance" (Sources of ReUgious Insight, p. 90).
8 The Ancient Seer.

MYSTICISM AND RATIONALITY 125
which proceeds by syllogism and inference,
the power to reach Ultimate Reality. That
must be seen with open face, as one looks into
the eyes of a friend. Thus reason, in the highest
sense, according to the mystics, is experiential
rather than analytic or synthetic, in its oper
ation. It is concerned with the supreme real
ities, the truths of the spirit, and concentrates
upon them as embracing the ultimate values
of existence.^
I Not that mysticism has need to deny the
place and validity of the intellect. Within its
sphere the intellect has both validity and value,
but its truths are not those" of The^ higher Ufe
of the soul. It has no vision of its~own, no
first-hand contact with spiritual realities. The
syllogism may be of service in determining
that all men are mortal, but not that they are
immortal. If it is given sole sway in the alien
realm of spirit, all the intellect can do is to
substitute the ideas in which ultimate truths
are enwrapped for the truths themselves and
then proceed to relate and organize these ideas
or doctrines in such a way as to produce a
system, in which ideas emerge from other ideas
logically and schematically, and all is lifeless
and mechanical. This is rationalism — a sys
tem in which ideas generate ideas and there is
no direct contact with their original sources.

126 MYSTICISM AND MODERN LIFE
The truths of the spirit cannot be reached in
that way. Take such fundamental yet final
truths as Right, Love, God. How can they be
discovered save by spiritual experience? Out
of what could these realities be constructed, or
deduced, if they were not already existent, as
real and incontrovertible as are we ourselves?
They are realities of a personal nature, real
because personality is real, boundless as are
personal possibilities, deep as are the depths
of personal being. Unless we experience these
truths, how can we know them? If we simply
open the eyes of our selfhood, are they not
there to greet us? We may apply to them the
words of Pascal concerning God and say: "We
could not find them unless we aheady had
them." Are any truths equally rational with
these truths of personality? Can mysticism,
which dwells in this light, be other than rational?
It is when we are truest to ourselves that we
realize these truths most intensely.
In clearest vision, amplitude of mind.
And Reason in her most exalted mood.
This is not saying that we divest ourselves of
either our sensuous or our intellectual powers
and processes to reach this higher realm of
truth. That would be impossible. What we
do is to enter a new truth dimension, ' so to

MYSTICISM AND RATIONALITY 127
speak, with our total powers and faculties in
action, yet exercised in connection with a higher
perceprive power which is personal and spir
itual. V
But what of dialectic? Have we not in its
patient, hard-won ascent the genuine method
and the final assurance of truth, rather than
in the crass assumption of an inner experience,
a direct vision? Certainly, there is something
in the process of dialectic, as contrasted with
that of formal logic, that gives it a very close
affinity with mysticism. No less a thinker than
Plato himseff recognized the tie, for in Plato
dialectic is not a substitute for but an aid to
intuition. Is it not, then, the dialectic method only,
said I, that proceeds thus onward — ^removing
aU hypotheses back to the starting point, that it
may become firmly established, and so gradually
lead and draw upward the eye of the soul, which
was truly buried in a certain barbaric mire?'
To clarffy the eye of the soul, to draw it
upward that it may see for itseff, is the true
function of dialectic. It is a pirocess of clearing
away obstructions, or of climbing to a point
• The Republic, book vii, chap, xiii, Henry Davis's translation.

128 MYSTICISM AND MODERN LIFE
where the vision of truth is unobstructed, as
it is pictured in Walter Pater's description of
the Platonic dialectic :
It is only upon the final step, with free view
at last on every side, uniting together and justi
fying all those various, successive, partial
apprehensions of the difficult way — only on
the summit comes the intuitive comprehension
of what the true form of the mountain really
is; with a mental, or, rather, an imagina
tive hold upon which, for the future, we can
find our way securely about it; observing per
haps, that next to that final intuition, the first
view, the first impression, had been truest
about it.^"
Bergson, in the clarifying description of the
nature of intuition in his Introduction to Meta
physics, fails to recognize the function of dia
lectic. He makes room only for analysis, suc-
^ ceeding intuition. The fault of philosophy has
been, as he points out, that it has surveyed
truth from without, conceptually, instead of
getting within it. And yet, such an outside
survey may be made a preparation and aid to
a sally within instead of a substitute for it.
Dialectic, that is, is ancillary to intuition, an
aid to the recognition of truth, not a construc-

'" Plato and Platonism, p. 180, Library Edition.

MYSTICISM AND RATIONALITY 12f)
tive process. As such it is not absolutely
necessary to every individual experience of
truth, either as a conscious or an unccnscious
prerequisite, though it holds an essential place
in the total process of spiritual experience.
VI
Mysticism is not content, as we have seen,
with an appeal to experience. It has always
stood, alsoTfor^in^rpretatiom It has not been
satisfied with the gift of tongues, but would
have also interpretation of tongues. Thus it
has to meet, as we noted at the beginning of the
chapter, not only the attack of those without
who question its right to appeal to experience
as a medium of truth, but of those within who
protest against any attempt at explication and
would have only babblings and enthusiasms, or
at best only such limited forms of intelligible
expression as would serve to bind together its
own initiates.
It cannot be denied that this nonrational
type of mysticism has played a large part in
its history. Christian mysticism itself has had
its Montanists, its Enthusiasts, its Family of
Love, its Ranters, its "Holy Ghost and Us"
societies. But these erraticisms and extra
vagances only lend the greater significance to
the fact that, on the whole, mysticism has

130 MYSTICISM AND MODERN LIFE
-stood jinfalteringly ^or a rational interpre-
tationL_of_ rdigiflus^esEerience. Conclusive of
this is the fact that not infrequently mysticism
is wrongly identified with its interpretation of
experience, rather than with its insistence upon
the experience itself.
Those who to-day are joining in the popular
outcry against theology hardly realize that, ff
consistently applied, it would eradicate not
only such treatises as the Summa of Aquinas
and the Institutes of Calvin, but much of the
Confessions of Augustine, the Theologica Ger
manica, the Imitatio Christi, and of all the
noble literature in which the mystics have tried
to interpret and relate their experience.
^ The most rational thing in mysticism, that
which makes it supremely rational, is that it
fastens with unrelaxing grasp upon the central
issue, the truth that is at once highest, deepest,
and most essential to true living. It too often
ignores everything else — science, aii, literature,
pleasure, culture, all — that it may reach the heart
of truth and rest there. It fails to realize that
when one has found the Kingdom these things
wait to be added unto it. Such a sense of
values, or, rather, of value, is the rationality
of the seeker of the pearl of great price, of the
treasure, hid in the field. It is the wisdom of
knowing the best and gaining it at all costs, of

MYSTICISM AND RATIONALITY 131
seizing the center of the field and holding it, of
concentrating upon the truth that shapes and
determines life because it is itself life.
This is an attitude toward truth which we
have now too much lost. We lack the mystic's
daring. We are appalled and shaken with the
mystery of existence, with the limitations of
knowledge. We are held back by the restraints
of the scientific method, by the need of wide
induction, and of painstaking care in reaching
conclusions, not seeing that in the realm of the
spirit the scientific method is the seizure of
moral and spiritual ultimates. We are obsessed,
now by the extent of our knowledge, now by
the extent of our ignorance. With reference
to ultimate truths we are hesitant and afraid.
We survey them from the outside, but do not
dare to enter and take possession.
Nothing could be more essentially irrational
than this indecision, this waiting to be con
vinced, this hesitating inaction, for in respect
to the central issues the main thing is attitude,
and indecision is itself an attitude. Augustine,
describing his years of vacillation concerning
Christianity, wrote:
For I would not allow my heart to climb,
avoiding the precipice to die by the halter. ,
For I wanted to be as certain of things unseen
as I was that seven and three make ten. ... I

132 MYSTICISM AND MODERN LIFE
might have been healed by belief, directing my
purified sight in some way toward Thy truth,
which ever abides and never fails in any part.'^
A world of highly unprejudiced and open-
minded people who were all holding the ques
tion of the existence of God or of the basis for
ethics open, until the complete evidence, cover
ing all possible contingencies, is in, would be
as irrational as it would be irresolute. These
are issues in which neutrality is as fallacious as
it is immoral.
The mystic is unshakenly, convincedly, whole-
heartedly positive in his spiritual attitude. It
is not based upon the balance of probability,
as is that of the rationalist. Nor is it merely
the result of a will to believe — the apotheosis of
a preference — ^like that of the pragmatist. It
is perceptive belief, or, rather, it is not belief
at all, he tells us, except in its weaker and
untried forms, but the truest kind of knowledge
— faith-knowledge.

11 Book iv, chap, iv; Bigg's translation (italics mine).

CHAPTER VI
MYSTICISM AND PSYCHOLOGY
To-day no adequate study can be made of
mysticism which does not pay large heed to
psychology. And, indeed, it is but returning a
compliment, for recent psychology has paid
marked attention to mysticism.^
The mystic could not be blamed ff he looked
askance and with considerable suspicion upon
the psychologist. The man who comes round
to analyze and measure one's convictions and
inspirations is not especially welcome. And
yet he certainly can do no injury to an experi
ence that is genuine and well grounded, and
he may help to its better understanding and
evaluation. At any rate, his inspection will be
made, whether it is welcomed or not. If
psychology attempts to go beyond its province
in dealing with mysticism, becomes supercilious,
or dogmatic, it is a duty to challenge its asser
tions; but any fear of psychology on the part
1 Recent books upon Religious Psychology (for example, Stratton's
The Psychology of the Religious Life and Leuba's P.sychological Study of
Religion) have turned aside from the psychological an.ilyais of religious
experience and are chiefiy historical-psychological studies of religion.
133

134 MYSTICISM AND MODERN LIFE
of mysticism would be a weakness, for truth
can never be an enemy to truth.
We have endeavored to carry on the entire
discussion in the light of its psychological bear
ings, but it now seems best to give direct atten
tion to some of the more specific questions
involved. There are three problems which we
will briefly consider: (1) Does psychology
resolve mysticism into a mere congeries of
mental states? (2) Does it show that mystical
experience is located in the Subconsciousness?
(3) What is the relation of Suggestion to mys
ticism?

May not these experiences, "deep seated in
our mystic frame," after all — such is a query
suggested by psychology — ^be but a method of
behavior of our psychical organism, freaks of
the frame itself, and nothing more? Psychology
has made it clear that mystical states, such as
conversion" and ecstasy, are very closely con
nected with physical conditions. May not
that be the sum and substance of them, and
all this spiritual side, of which so much has
been made, be merely a ghastly sport of nature,
epiphenomenal froth, lying upon her vast
unconsciousness like bubbles upon the bosom
of a lake?

MYSTICISM AND PSYCHOLOGY 135
Such a possibility must be faced, and faced
with the understanding that though raised by
psychology it cannot be laid by psychology.
Concerning mystical states and experiences
psychology has much to say; upon the question
of their objective character, their validity, it
says, or should say, nothing. This is not within
its province. The psychologist as a thinker, a
super-psychologist, has a perfect right to
express his judgment as to the objectivity of
mystical experience, and he has often done this
with great advantage to the problem involved;
but when he does so he should make it quite
clear that it is he who is speaking and not
psychology. It is reassuring to find that, in the main, the
leading psychologists recognize this limitation
of the province of psychology. When they
have expressed themselves as to the objective
nature of religious experience it has been, as
a rule, without dogmatic denial of its validity.
Thus we find Professor James saying :
It must always remain an open question
whether mystical states may not possibly be
such superior points of view, windows through
which the mind looks out upon a more extensive
and inclusive world. The difference of the views
seen from the different mystical windows need
not prevent us from entertaining this sup-

13G MYSTICISM AND MODERN LIFE
position. The wider world would in that case
prove to have a mixed constitution like that of
this world, that is all.^
Boutroux, while refusing to pass upon the
question of the nature of mystical experience,
attaches great importance to its convictions.
Professors Ladd, G. Stanley Hall, Stratton,
ptarBilpkr' Pratt^Coe, and others, without, in
mo^ cases, attempting to pronounce upon the
final nature of religious experience, place a
high value upon it.'
On the other hand, it is quite plausible to
resolve religious experience into mere psychic
activity, as, for example, David Syme, in
writing of Jacob Boehme:
He imagines his soul to be in communion with
God, whereas it is only in communion with
itself, and the communications which he re
ceives are only the result of the interaction of
his central consciousness and the lower sphere.^
Perhaps the best reply to a representation like
2 Varieties of Religious Experience, p. 428.
3 Milnsterberg says of the truth of religion and philosophy: "Such
over-experience can certainly never become a part of the experienceable
world of physical existence. It remains, therefore, unreal, in the narrower
sense of the word. But it is a content of our convictions, and as our con
viction gives us the very firmest bold of our actions, the final realization,
in tbe wider sense of the word, is here fulfilled in the highest degree" (The
Eternal Values, p. 355).
< The Soul, p. 68.

MYSTICISM AND PSYCHOLOGY 137
that is to let the inner voice, of which Professor
James speaks, whisper, "Bosh!" Not that
there are not oth'ter things that might be said
of it, as, that this is hardly the language in
which the central consciousness may be sup
posed to converse with the lower; but if one
chooses to restrict his view of reality to physi
cal activities, it is useless to throw either stones
or Iffe-savers at him. Enough, that for the
average intelligent person such interpretations
of his deeper inner life produce their own refu
tation, "Like a man in wrath," the heart rises
up to answer, "I have felt."^ Not that com
munion with God does not involve "the inter
action of the central consciousness and the
lower sphere," but to confine it to that would
be like confining conversation with your dearest
friend to the alternate action of two juxtaposed
larynxes. II
A field of study undertaken by the new
psychology, which seems to be especially fruit
ful for mysticism, is that of the subcQuscious-
nesS;  In view of all the diversifications of
consciousness with which recent psychology has
favored us, including subconsciousness, fringe-
^ P'or a further discussion of this subject, the reader may consult my
volume, Personality and the Christian ideal, chaps, v-viii.

138 MYSTICISM AND MODERN LIFE
consciousness, and coconsciousness, it is not
easy to get a clear idea of what is meant by
the subconscious.
The present tendency among psychologists
seems to be to attach the subconscious activ
ity more closely than at first to the physical
nature, at any rate to limit those wide-reaching
powers (including religion itself) attributed to
subconsciousness when it first lifted itself above
the abyss into the field of the psychological
consciousness." (Just how the subconsciousness
could ever have become a matter of conscious
ness is a problem which psychology has not yet
solved, but we may pardon it, for its hands are
full.) A large part of our physical functioning goes
on withmit, reporting itself at all in conscious
ness, or so slightly that^attentiorf is not drawn
to"Tf. Of how many more of our total existence
processes, including the moral and spiritual,
this may be true, it is impossible to determine.
It seems wholly reasonable, however, to affirm,
with Professor Pratt, at least this :
The fringe region is in no way "higher" or
"purer" than the center of consciousness. It

8 A very clear and careful resume of the history of the idea of subcon
sciousness and of the present attitude of psychologists toward it will be
found in an article in tbe Harvard Theological Review, vol. vi. No. 2,
entitled, '!Tbe Subconscious and Religion," by Professor James Bissett
Pratt.

MYSTICISM AND PSYCHOLOGY 139
contains evil as well as good, or, rather, it con
tains neither the one nor the other, but the
materials for both. Only conscious personality
tis moral — nothing is good except a good will.
The background is only a background; it is there
not for its own sake but for the sake of the total
personality. The best and purest aspect of the
mind, the aspect of it most highly developed
and most nobly human, is to be found not in
the obscure shadows of the background, but in
the clear sunlight of full consciousness.'
As I observe my own states while working
in my study, for instance, I recognize in myself
a certain stream of consciousness which moves
along parallel with and below, so to speak, the
main activity in which I am engaged. This
subordinate consciousness is associated with the
various organs of my body, concentrating more
fully now on one, now on another. At one
instant, for example, my eye catches the gilt
of a book-title, at the next the glint of the sun
shine on the floor. Next, perhaps, the chilliness
of the room affects my skin, and, if sufficiently
pronounced, makes me uneasy, so that I cannot
carry on my main line of thought readily until
it is corrected. Now the voice of a child, sooth
ing in play or rasping in anger, reaches me, or
the blurt of an automobile ofl'ends my ear. Or
^ The Subconscious and Religion, p. 215.

140 MYSTICISM AND MODERN LIFE
perhaps the nerves of my stomach begin to
remind me that the dinner hour is approaching, '
or should be. I have every reason to believe
that sensations such as these are only the more
clamant and imperious insurrections of a total
physical activity that includes many separate
activities — such as breathing and the action of
the heart — not present to my normal con
sciousness at all.
This is what I should call subconsciousness.
It is sub at least with respect to one's main
consciousness, to the willed and purposive
activity to which he bends his best powers;
and part of it is so far sub that he is not aware
of it at all, except through something abnormal
in its working. Through disturbance, however,
it may rise into his main consciousness.
Now, this physical consciousness, while it
is mine and relates very closely to my well-
being — is, in fact, essential to my very con
tinuance as a physical being — nevertheless I
feel to be, not myself, not of the substance and
fiber of my truest self, but attached to me, like
a servant, or monitor, constantly reporting to
me certain things to which it asks me to give
my attention. And I ought consequently to
treat it precisely as I would a servant who is,
on the whole, well-meaning and useful, and yet
whom I need to subject to due and constant

MYSTICISM AND PSYCHOLOGY 141
watchfulness. Sometimes, for example, I should
say to this lackey, "Yes, this is an important
matter that you call to my attention, and I
must attend to it, or my whole physical organ
ism will suffer serious injury, and I myself be
thus crippled in my activity." At another time
when my man Friday calls to my notice some
very pleasing sensation resulting from my envi
ronment, I may well respond, "Thanks; this
is indeed worthy of my most lively attention;
for it is capable of opening to me that world of
pure Beauty and Truth to which I, as a True
Seff, belong." But again, and very often, I
conceive that it is my duty to say to my sub
consciousness, "This call of yours is an annoy
ance to me, a distraction; ff I yield to it, and
give it first place in my mind, I shall be untrue
to myself and to the larger ends that I am seek
ing to serve. Keep still, subside, let me alone!"
So far, then, from being the seat and center
of the religious faculty, the subconsciousness
seems to be at the farthest remove from it.
True, since the senses are the purveyors and
allies of the mystical life, rightly used, this
physical consciousness may contribute to and
enhance religious experience; but, on the other
hand, it is quite as often a hindrance and
obstacle, so that one feels that he must endeavor
to suppress it. For it is from the subconscious.

142 MYSTICISM AND MODERN LIFE
for instance, that those subtle sensual sug
gestions emanate, which, gaining control of
the imagination, sometimes subvert the mys
tical mind. Pandulph's words in King John
are applicable to this kind of subconscious
activity :
And better conquest never canst thou make
Than arm thy constant and thy nobler parts
Against these giddy loose suggestions.*
Ill
Over against this physical subconsciousness,
occupying quite another stratum of the inner
life, so to speak, is what has been called the
superconsciousness, — a consciousness of per
sonal realities and relationships which may be
more or less dormant, but which at times
press down into consciousness from above just
as physical activities press in from below. This
is the realm of personal relationships, includ
ing "God-consciousness."
The purpose of the esoteric mystic, in what
he conceives to be his highest and most ineffable
experience, is to have the God-consciousness
completely rule and absorb every other form
of consciousness. He smites the chord of self
that it may pass in music out of sight and leave
God alone. His whole desire is that God may
^ King John, Act iii. Scene 1.

MYSTICISM AND PSYCHOLOGY 143
be all in all. He desires to sink himself com
pletely. And yet he wants to be conscious
that God is all in all. He is no weary sigher
for self-annihilation. To have everything cease
to be, including God, would be to him the
worst of calamities. No; in his experience of
the AUness of God, he desires his own con
sciousness to be at its highest tension.
This experience involves self-consciousness of
a certain sort, for, though he does not always
see it, the more real becomes his consciousness
of God, the more real becomes his consciousness
of himself as conscious of God. Every fiber of
his higher self is awake and active. Tennyson's
description of his "waking trances," though
they were not of a deeply religious type, illus
trates this:
This [a kind of waking trance] has come upon
me through repeating my own name to myself
silently, till aU at once, as it were out of the
intensity of individuality, individuality itself
seemed to dissolve and fade away into bound
less being, and this not a confused state but the
clearest, the surest of the surest, utterly beyond
words. At another time, as recalled by Tyndall,
Tennyson said of this state. It is no nebulous
ecstasy, but a state of transcendent wonder,
associated with absolute clearness of mind.*

* See Varieties of Religious Experience, p. 384, Note.

144 MYSTICISM AND MODERN LIFE
As one reads the narrative of the states of
apparent unconsciousness in which some of the
mediseval mystics beUeved they came into the
closest communion with God, the query rises
whether — apart from the question of the normal
ity of these experiences — psychology, or, if not
psychology, then humanity, will not come to
the conclusion promulgated by Hudson some
years ago, that there is no real, that is, com
plete, unconsciousness, that the spiritual mind,
or the seff, is by its very nature ever wakeful
and cognizant, in sleep, in coma, in all appar
ently unconscious states.'" This higher spiritual
consciousness of ours which keeps us in touch
with the spiritual universe corresponds to yet
contrasts with the subconsciousness which unites
us with the physical universe. It may be called
a superconsciousness by means of which, even
while we are occupied with more immediate
concerns, there break in upon us flashes from
that larger world of which we are already a
part." IV
As to suggestion, in its relation to mysticism,
it would require an entire volume to discuss
10 "The subjective mind is ever awake during the sleep of the body and
ever active" (Hudson: The Law of Psychic Phenomena, p. 180).
11 This may be what Professor James really meant, though be failed to
distinguish it clearly from the physical subconsciousness.

MYSTICISM AND PSYCHOLOGY 145
what suggestion is, and several more to discuss
the relationship between it and mysticism.
If one were to take the definition of sugges
tion given by Boris Sidis, there is apparently
little connection between it and mysticism:
By suggestion is meant the intrusion into
the mind of an idea, met with more or less
opposition by the person; accepted uncritically
at last; and realized unreflectively, almost
automatically.'^
The mystic's ideas_ar£jiQtJntrusive. uncritical.
and unreflective, though they are often so
regarded. Andyet the mystic is certainly one
who has what Miinsterberg would say is the
characteristic of suggestion — "a belief in an
idea, an acceptance of the idea as real, and the
dismissal of the opposite idea as unreal."'' In
fact, he may be called, as Boutroux intimates,
a man of one idea, a monoidealist. This, how
ever, as Boutroux goes on to say, is no dis
credit; for every genius, in fact every one with
a mission, is in a sense, a person of one idea."
It is, however, the character and relative value
of the idea — ^provided it be not too exclusive —
that determines sanity, and not its dominance.
" The Psychology of Suggestion, p. 15.
i» Psychotherapy, p. 100.
" La Psychologic du Mysticisme, pp. 19, 20.

146 MYSTICISM AND MODERN LIFE
"In such cases as Kant and Beethoven," says
Von Hiigel, "a classifier of humanity according
to its psycho-physical phenomena alone would
put these great discoverers and creators, without
hesitation, amongst hopeless and useless hypo
chondriacs."^ Yet, if this is insanity, most of
us would like more of it. Indeed, one might
well call a person insane whose ideas were all
on the same level, the higher failing to rule the
lower. As between suggestion and autosuggestion,
the mystic ranks as an autosuggestionist gather
than as one who takes suggestion readily from
others. He is reflective rather than mercurial,
inhibiting ideas that do not commend them
selves to his deeper spiritual intuition and
judgment. As such he is the conservator of
true religion and moral values, the foe alike
of conventional and of hysterical ideas and
activities. If one would know the extent of the evil
which these two latter types of mind — the con
ventional and the hysterical — have wrought,
let him study, on the one side, the history of
blind, unreflective religious conservatism, with
its obscurantism, its sluggishness, its perse-
cutions, its inquisitions, its heresv-hunl|ing.
and, on the other, the history of mental epi-
1' Vol. ii, p. 42, quoted by Miss Underbill, Mysticism, p. 72.

MYSTICISM AND PSYCHOLOGY 147
demies, as he will flnd it outlined, for example,
in Part III of Sidis's Psychology of Suggestion.
It is to the mystic mind, as well as to the
common-sense, rational mind, — quiet, self-as
sured, yet daring, and having something besides
criticism to offer, — that the progress toward
religious sanity and true faith has been largely
due. In a sense, therefore, the mystic doubtless
uses autosuggestion. But to allow that term
to explain the nature of mysticism, or to decide
the question of its objective reality, would be
like deflning love as a physical instinct and
stopping with that. Love is a physical instinct,
and more. Mysticism may be autosuggestive
and more.
There is both suggestion and autosuggestion,
thinks Bishop Brent, in prayer; but if so, that
does not remove from it the character of com
munion with God.
Prayer, which is at once an appeal to the
Source of Life to let loose saving health in our
direction and an opening of our being for the
reception of hidden and unknown aid, is a
higher form of psychic effort than either sug
gestion or autosuggestion, in that it includes
both, though not precluding the concurrent use
of either."

1" The Sixth Sense, p. 45.

148 MYSTICISM AND MODERN LIFE
"Autosuggestion," as Rufus M.« Jones says,
"may be only another way of saying that God
and man are conjunct in the soul, and that, in
the deeps of the soul, beyond our power of
knowing how. Divine suggestions come to
human consciousness.""
Psychology has undoubtedly opened a line
of attack by which the detractors of the mys
tical — to their own satisfaction and sometimes
to the consternation of such as are easily over
come by superficial reasoning — may resolve
religious experience away. On the other hand,
rightly interpreted, psychology has greatly
reemphasized the significance of the mystical
element in religion and has shown how deeply
it grounds in our total nature and constitution.

^ studies in Mystical Religion, p. xxxiii.

CHAPTER VII
NORMAL MYSTICISM
As one looks back over its history mysticism
appears an alihost shoreless sea — intangible in
its nature, multitudinous in its expression,
swept by diverse winds and currents. And
yet, with all its inclusiveness and wealth of
meaning, its variations, its inconsistencies, its
paradoxes, there is in it an untroubled deep,
an underlying motive which gives it unity. It
exalts spirit. It finds in life eternal realities
and values. "The mystic is one who sees all
things in God."' NoJ that God is conceived
in the same way by all the mystics. Their con
ceptions of him differ widely, some identffying
him with Nature, others with Spirit; some co^
ceiving him as the All, others as a Person. Yet
to all alike he is the Supreme Reality.
This common principle serves to set off
mysticism from all attitudes of mind which
either deny ihe existence of God, or, admitting
it, fail to make him real, and thus to "see all
things in him." Mysticism is radically opposed,
1 George A. Gordon: "The Mystic and his Ideal," Revelation and the
Ideal, p. 86. 149

150 MYSTICISM AND MODERN LIFE
that is, to all forms of naturalism, skepticism,
positivism, agnosticism, rationalism, and insti
tutionalism. Denial of God, or of direct access
to himj_is^to the mystical mind_thp. one preat
error and blindness, the one measureless Joss.
That this consciousness of God is vital, and
radically affects life and conduct, can hardly
be open to doubt. That which chiefly concerns
us in this chapter is to further differentiate
within mysticism, to distinguish between its
essential and peripheral, its normal and abnor
mal, forms and developments. In order to do
this more fully let us make a brief review of
mysticism in its broader aspects.
I
Three interblending but distinguishable mys
tical currents flow through the history of
reUgion. The first may be called instinctive
mysticism, the second contemplative or reflec
tive mysticism, and the third personal mys
ticism. The first, instinctive, or natural, mysticism, is
characterized by its close association with sense
experience and its comparative lack of reflec
tion. It is uppermost in many phases of primi
tive religion, in certain crude social cults, and
in nature worship. It may be induced by or
accompany either the inhibiting or the stimu-

NORMAL MYSTICISM 151
lating of sensation. In the form of sense inhibi
tion it is found in the Yoga, in various mystery
cults, in the self-denial of the anchorites and
certain of the monastic orders, and in the
asceticisms of the mediseval saints. In the
form of sense stimulation it is present in the
social phenomena of the mystery religions, in
various religious enthusiasms, and in lower types
of church revivals. The highest expression of
this form of mysticism is in the sensitive
response to nature on the part of nature lovers
and poets.
Contemplative or reflective mysticism finds its
chief embodiment in the Platonic type of
mysticism. Relying as it does upon intuition
as the method of reaching truth, and thus
attesting itself as essentially mystical, Platonic
mysticism nevertheless puts truth somewhat at
a distance, to be known by beholding rather
than by communion, to be attained or verified
by dialectic. It thus tends toward abstraction
and speculation rather than toward personal
realization. Contemplative mysticism passed
from Platonism to Neoplatonism and thence
into the speculative mysticism of Dionysius
and Erigena and greatly influenced the sub
sequent history of mysticism. In modern
philosophy it has had its representatives in
such thinkers as Spinoza and Emerson. Its

152 MYSTICISM AND MODERN LIFE
tendency has been to pass out of the mystical
into the rationalistic atmosphere. Yet it has
always avoided pure rationalism.
The third form of mysticism, personal mys
ticism, finds its center in personal relationships
and values and the inner secret of reality in
personal communion with a personal God.^
One may detect its beginnings in the proto-
theism of early religion. From primitive mys
ticism religion moved either toward the removal
of God to a distance, where he was all but lost
amid the urgent claims of practical polytheism,
or toward an ever clearer, deeper, and more
intimate conception of and communion with
the Divine Person. In personal mysticism
the Hebrew mind was foremost, as was the
Greek in contemplative mysticism. Moses, the
prophets, the psalmists, Jesus, Paul — these are
the predecessors of a great company of per
sonal mystics including Augustine, Saint Fran
cis, Luther, Wesley, George Fox, Jonathan
Edwards, Frederick Robertson, John G. Wmtr
tier, Phillips Brooks, and countless others.
* In this latter form of mysticism and this
body of mystics are found the strongest evi
dences of normality. These are the salt of the
earth, the leaven hid in the meal, the light of
' Of course these types of mysticism shade off into each other, but that
does not make the distiaction less valid.

NORMAL MYSTICISM 153
the world. Not that there are not mystics of
the other two types who have been as lights in
the world. Not that personal features are
wholly absent from the instinctive mysticism
which finds spiritual revelations in nature, and
in the contemplative mysticism which leads to
rational and profound interpretation of truth
and life; but the personal character of truth is
too subordinate in these forms.
Personal mysticism, while it is characterized
by the child spirit, is not therefore unreflective
and immature. It may be such in the eyes of
that "wisdom of this world which is foolish
ness," but in the real maturity which has
returned from youthful wandering after dis
tant truths to the homeland of the great,
simple, inexhaustible realities that lie beneath
the surface of the life, personal mysticism is
incomparably rich. II
Without seeking to fix any arbitrary canons,
as a result of our study, we may arrive at cer
tain conclusions as to what constitutes normal
mysticism, which may be summed up thus:
I. Mysticism is most normal when it is
anchored to the experience of God as a Per
sonal Presence and avoids all speculation which
does not flow out of and return to this experi-

154 MYSTICISM AND MODERN LIFE
ence. When speculation, as in the case of the
Neoplatonic mystics, gets away from experi
ence it is like a kite that has broken its cord.
Only as it is held firmly^ to_ experience can it
rise steadily to its_greatest height.
If it be asked, "What, then, is religious ex
perience?" care must be taken not to identify
experience with mere feeling. It is, rather, as
Schleiermacher held, both intuition and feeling.
It is the certainty that attaches to self-con
sciousness and the consciousness of others. It
is the sense of reality which ensues when one
person communes with another. It is the con
fidence that comes,
When one who loves and knows not
Learns from one who loves and knows.
It is the truth, that is, that not only comes
through personality but is itself personal truth. ^
2. Mysticism is wholly normal only when
it enters into service of some kind, either in
active helpfulness or unselfish suffering.
The mystics of the Orders, such as Francis,
Bernard, Clara, Francis of Sales, Teresa, Vin
cent de Paul, exemplified an actixe_m^sticism.
A wholly introspective, self-centered mysticism

3 "Practically, our knowledge of God is personal knowledge. The
knowledge of a person is easier, more direct, more certain, than tbe knowl
edge of a proposition. . We know whom we have believed" (M. H.
Buckham: The Very Elect, p. 27).

NORMAL MYSTICISM 155
cannot be other than abnormal, however
refined may be the results it produces in self-
discipline and devotion. Yet there is more
than one form of service, and those who are
shut out of active service may, by prayer and
vicarious bearing of suffering — whether it be
their own which has come upon them through
a disturbed moral order, or that of others —
fuffiU a true ministry of service. Through the
deepening sense of the solidarity of humanity
we are coming to see that love-suffering is a
vital part of the great redemptive process and
that he who accepts suffering, or limitation, in
this spirit, is helping, with Jesus, to bear, and
so to bear away, the sin of the world. This
essentially mystical experience places suffering
in a new and transforming light.
3. That only is normal mysticism which,
however deepl;f it seeks to enter into communion
with the Divine, never passes the bounds of
reverencei_either in reality or in expression.'
It would be captious, let me repeat, as well as
irreverent, to criticize, with cold nonchalance,
such saints as Teresa, Henry Suso, Juan of the
Cross, Madame Guyon, and David Brainerd;
and yet we cannot regard such extremes of
piety, however admirable, as wholly normal.
It is true that we have found the mystic way
and its stages to be grounded in general spiritual

156 MYSTICISM AND MODERN LIFE
experience, and that counterparts of purgation,
illumination, and even of ecstasy are to be
traced in normal present-day religious experi
ence. But the extremes to which all these
experiences were often carried in mediseval
mysticism cannot but seem to us, not unreal —
for in one sense they are most real and vivid —
but out of keeping with the harmony of a sane
and well-balanced life.
4. That only is normal mysticism — indeed,
mysticism at all — which avoids completely the
magical, whether in occultism, spiritualism,
ritualism, sacerdotalism, or any other form.
Mysticism and magic are opposing terms.
5. Mysticism is wholly normal only when
it keeps God, not apart from nature, but dis
tinct from nature. Whether speculatively, as
in Jacob Boehme's monism, or practically, as
in the cosmic mysticism of Bucke, Whitman,
and others, God is too closely identified with
the cosmos, the result is a defective sense of the
transcendent worth of personality and is likely
to lead to a depreciation of ethical values.
What is needed, as Bergson has said, is "to see
the life of the body just where it really is — on
the road that leads to the life of the spirit."
6. Above all. Christian mysticism is nor
mal only when it keeps in close touch with
Jesus Christ. It is, in one way, surprising to

NORMAL MYSTICISM 157
see how far Christian mysticism has at times
wandered from its orbit of fealty to Christ.
The Dionysian, speculative, absolutistic type
of mysticism is, in fact, quite as much, if not
more, Hellenic than Christian. It is Neo
platonism flowing on under Christian skies.
So influential was this type of mysticism in the
Middle Ages that many regarded it as the very
essence of mysticism.* Yet it is, in reality, a
deflection from the original and normal Chris
tian mysticism communicated by Jesus to his
disciples and concentrated in Paul's "in Christ"
mysticism. Although this personal, Christ-filled mys
ticism has at times received less of literary
expression, it has been vital and saline always.
In the great organizing and ministrant mystics,
like Saint Francis, Teresa, Catherine of Genoa,
Vincent de Paul; in the Friends of God; in
Jacob Boehme and William Law, and later in
Pietism; in Wesleyanism, and even in Evan
gelicalism — where it has burned on amid much
doctrinal dross — ^it has shown itself the power of
God unto salvation even to our own day. It
is true that this Christ mysticism became at
times widely detached from the historic Jesus.

* Instances of this recur constantly in philosophical and hi.storical as
well as theological discus.sions of mysticism. As a recent instance the
article by Professor Loofs, "Lutheranism and Mysticism," in The Con-
fltructive Quarterly of December, 1914, may be cited. See especially p. 741.

ir)8 MYSTICISM AND MODERN LIFE
In some of its phases, as in the trance-mys
ticism of mediseval saints and in the self-
suppression of the Quietists, it displayed abnor
mal and often repellent features. Yet it is
altogether too potent and pervasive a mani
festation of the universal Christian spirit to
be regarded, as it has been by Ritschlianism,
as a Roman Catholic type of piety. Professor
Hermann treats mysticism itself as in its very
nature a Christ-minimizing form of piety. ^ On
the contrary, barring the speculative current of
which we have just been speaking, mysticism
would seem to be, on the whole, deeply Christo-
centric. True, its Christ, as in the case of Paul
himself, is the living, indwelling Christ rather
than the historic Jesus; yet the latter, at least
among the practical mystics, is by no means
forgotten, but is, on the contrary, ever present
and determinative in the background, as the
ideal divine-human revelation of God. We
maintain that the personal, Christo-centric
form of mysticism is its most normal and vital
form. Ill
In the several forms of historic mysticism —
including the personal — are to be found many
exaggerated and one-sided developments and
* See his Communion with God.

NORMAL MYSTICISM 159
intensifications of truths beyond their due.
Indeed, we have discovered deficiencies and
limitations attending the very nature of mys
ticism which require to be supplemented in the
interest of life as a whole. All of these — ^both
exaggerations and limitations — arise from the
same cause, which we may perhaps call the
tendency to religious specialization.
In fact, mysticism, just because it is religion
in its purest and most characteristic form, is
prone to push the claims of religion — ^if one may
so speak — to excess, overweighting the natural
balance and proportion of lffe.
Is it possible, then, to be too reUgious? Can
one possess too much of this best and highest
of all good things? Yes, if religion is under
stood in one way; no, ff understood in another.
An arresting and significant sentence of Baron
von Hiigel may serve us here. It is this: "Our
entire religious activity is but one element of our
complete spiritual life." Religion itself, that
is, does not compass the entire impact of God
upon human life, although it constitutes the
heart of it and hallows the whole. Human
life is marvelously wide and varied and absorb
ing in its interests and activities. It is just
this fact that may be either its glory or its curse.
That it has been too often its curse is the fact
that many a world-fearing mystic has seen and

160 MYSTICISM AND MODERN LIFE
sought_to_£scaper-even at the cost of the im
poverishment and mutilation of life. Offended
by his right hand, he has cut it off, and by 'his
right eye, he has plucked it out, and thus has
entered, though maimed, into life. That this is
far better than having both hands and eyes to
be cast into the hell of materialism, sensuality,
and worldliness there can be no doubt. And
yet denial, impoverishment, mutilation is not
the- ideal Ufe. It Is, as Jesus implies, an expe
dient for the divided life — a resort for the be
leaguered man rather than a principle for the
free man. Jesus himself came eating and
drinking, taking life with a generous and vic
torious freedom, and so in the end will it be
with his disciples. The new mysticism, as we
have seen, is rightly seeking simplification, not
by exclusion but by unification.
All of life is sacred and may mediate God to
men. Science, art, commerce, industry, labor,
"•society — all may be made holy. This is what
the mystics of the past could not, except in
rare instances and with limited vision, see.
Therefore they sought to escape the perils of
life by entering at once and as far as possible
into the inner sanctuary of religion, whence
they did not often enough emerge to transform
life with the mystic vision. Thus they became
too often priests only, and not also prophets.

NORMAL MYSTICISM 161
IV
Granted that mysticism has a place at the
very heart of life and has proven itself invaluable
to a large number of men and women, is it
adapted to all? Can it meet this searching
test of normality — adaptability?^ Can it be
shown to be an experience, not necessarily
restricted to an especial type or temperament,
but so deeply and thoroughly human that
without it, in some form, no one can realize his
true selfhood? That is much the same as ask
ing ff a personal religious experience of some
sort is possible to every man. In view of the
almost limitless divergences of human per
sonality, this is a bold assumption. Mysticism!
has not made it in any assertive or propa-i
gandist fashion, yet it is implicit in its very
nature. However deficient in endowment he
may be, however steeped in sin, Christianitv/
assumes that every man is capable of religioi^
In saying "If any man is athirst," it is implied
that every man is athirst, for he is made for God,
as Augustine said, and cannot rest untU he.
rests in him.
There is, to be sure, a great difference in the
degree of religious susceptibility among men;
but upon closer view this is seen to be, in part

" This question has been already broached in the chapter, "Cosmic
Mysticism," but its importance calls for further consideration.

162 MYSTICISM AND MODERN LIFE
at least, a predisposition toward a given form
of experience only. Mysticism, Uke religion
itself, of which it is the core, has, as we have
seen, many forms and manffestations. Some-
"times it is intense and passionate; again it is
serene and reflective. It has many forms of
expression. One mystic, like Anthony, cleaves
to his cave; another, like Thomas k Kempis,
to his cell; another engages in untiring activity,
like Saint Francis; one, like Joan of Arc, battles;
another, like Saint Teresa, prays without ceas
ing; one elects to preach, agitate, reform, like
Savonarola; another, like Fra Angelico, to paint
pictures; one, like Luther, is robust and ener
getic; another, like Catherine of Siena, delicate
and anemic.
Professor Hocking, commenting upon the
diversities of mysticism, writes as follows:
But note well that while the mystic of genius
is a natural product, the mystic impulse is not
a matter of special temperament, for there are
mystics in all temperaments. This incentive
is deep enough in human nature to take various
forms according to the dispo.sition of the
mind. . . . There are practical and world-
moving mystics as well as dreamy ones. . . .
The love of God also will be colored by every
defect of the lover.''

7 The Meaning of God in Human Experience, p. 361.

NORMAL MYSTICISM 163
The term "mystic" has been quite too com
monly confined to the more intense and impas
sioned of their number. The impression has
thus been formed that, because the less highly
endowed of men have no very intense religious
experiences, these exceptional saints are the
only mystics. It would be far more reasonable,
instead of confining mysticism to its con
spicuous representatives, to make due account
of its differing degrees and varieties. One must
take into account, for instance, the difference
between a Scotch mystic and a Negro mystic.
As Boutroux has said: "Taking the word 'mys
ticism' in its large historic sense, it does
not seem that one has the right to class the
mystics among the sick (malades)."^ Indeed,
it might be truer to say that the man who has
no mysticism in him is the abnormal mah7
One wonders ff it were not mysticism, under
cover of music, that Shakespeare had in mind
when he said that its absence indicated fit
ness "for treason, stratagems, and spoils."
At all events, the person who is entirely
without a touch of mysticism in him is a
rarity. As Father Tyrrell said: "Every one
is something of a mystic, no one is nothing
but a mystic.""
^ La Psychologic du Mysticisme, p. 6.
3 See Hibbert Joumal, vol. x, 2, p. 428.

164 MYSTICISM AND MODERN LIFE
V
The mystic mind shades off into the general
religious mind so imperceptibly that a com
prehensive history of mysticism would be almost
coincident with a history of religion itself in its
deeper underflow. To select here and there a
person or a group of persons to be entitled
mystics means to pass by myriads of others,
many, perhaps, quite as worthy of the name.
There are, it is true, exceptional mystics, who
are in the van of the religious life, and when
we speak of ihe mystics it is to them that we
refer. But, they are only the leaders. The
great company of mystics is more than can be
numbered, out of every nation and of all
tribes and peoples, standing before the throne
and serving Him day and night in his tem
ple. There are, it is true, many apparently "non-
religious" persons. But there is no telling when
the most irreligious of men may be shaken to
the very center of his being by an experience
that quickly transfers him to the ranks of the
mystics. To err is human; to be spiritually
callous is human; but to be spiritually-minded
is still more human. Schleiermacher goes so
far as to say, "Supposed instances of a human
self-consciousness that is destitute of the God-
consciousness disappear on close analysis, except

NORMAL MYSTICISM 165
in those individuals whose intelligence is entirely
undeveloped."" The question whether a man can be normal
without being religious is by no means settled
when you have pointed to the plentiful number
of desirable citizens and good neighbors who
attend no church, subscribe to no creed, and
engage in no stated forms of devotion. Millions
have religious experiences, more or less intense,
who have never avowed them, and other mil
lions might have them who have not. We
must go deeper than the outer forms and ask
whether there is not some mystic spring in every
normal person, hidden perhaps even from him
self, that is secretly watering his life and giving
it worth and verdure. It is an assertion quite
within the bounds of moderation that one
cannot be really good without being, in some
sort and degree, mystical; without having,
that is, something of the tenderness and sympa-/
thy for his fellow men and of outreach toward af
life beyond the world of sense inseparable from/
personal faith. Until this faith is awakened in
a man he is subhuman, abnormal.
A serious oversight has been made in over
looking the social nature of mysticism. While
it is true that the typical mystics are in the best
sense individualists, and while mysticism tends
" Cross: The Theology of Schleiermacher, p. 154.

166 MYSTICISM AND MODERN LIFE
to develop all the distinctive highest capacities
of the individual, it is also true that it gives
the individual^ fullest and^ freest _toucirivith- his
f ellQws_and..-also that it exists in and enriches
the lives of men and women who seem incapable
of rising to anyj^ery marked individuaTreligious
life of their own. Such persons are not to be
set down either as nonentities or nonmystics.
"They are," as Dr. W. M. MacGregor says of
them, "faithful, sober, reverent, and, on occa
sion, they may reveal depths of Christian
feeling, but they have little knowledge of the
solitudes of God. Their life is rooted in the
community and whatever color and fragrance
and fruitfulness it exhibits, would seem to be
determined by influences which are common."''
But does not this inclusion of a social type of
mysticism directly contradict our definition of
mysticism as an immediate experience? I
think not. The experience comes to the indi
vidual in any case only relatively alone. He
is dependent upon his membership in a religious
community. And whether the experience comes
to one in solitude, or in company with his
fellows and through sense media, it is still his
and is recognized as such by him.
Unless religion is the dominating power in
human relationships, society is less than human.
12 Christian Freedom, p. 372.

NORMAL MYSTICISM 167
It took the insight of Jesus to brand the non-
mystical type of life in one graphic, consuming
sentence: "They ate, they drank, they planted,
they builded, they married, they were given in
marriage until  ." Something is bound to
happen to a civilization like that. It cannot
continue. Either it goes down in wreck and
flood, or it finds again its spiritual heritage.
Only a society in which the mystical — that is,
the religious — element is awakened and active,
imparting to life idealism, sympathy, devotion,
can be normal. After all, the question is not
whether mysticism can meet the test of nor
mality, but whether life without it can be normal.

Part III
VALUES OF MYSTICISM
'Hold fast that which is good."

CHAPTER VIII
LESSONS FROM THE MYSTICS

Mysticism teaches three great lessons in
truth. The first is to look for reality within.
It is thus that the mystics find God, by turning
from outward proof and argument to the inner
witness of the soul itself. Many mystics dis^
covered this only after long years of search.
Thus Augustine cried, "I was seeking Thee
outside of myself, and could not find the God
of my heart."' "I asked Thy creatures of
Thee," wrote Fenelon, "and not once thought
of finding Thee in the depths of my heart,
where Thou hadst never ceased to dwell. "^
"Halt! whither runnest thou? Heaven is in
thee; seekest thou God otherwhere, thou missest
him ever and ever," exclaimed Angelus Silesius.'
Madame Guyon sought for God in vain until
her confessor told her to seek him within. Then
she knocked and it was opened unto her.
1 Confessions, vi, 1. 2 Christian Counsels, ii.
' steiner: Mystics of tbe Renaissance, p. 260.
171

172 MYSTICISM AND MODERN LIFE
Thus it has been with the mystics as a whole.
That downright, honest-hearted mystic who
did more perhaps than any man of our time to
^arouse men to a sense of reality, Tolstoy, has
described for us in words of burning sincerity
his vain search for God through the under
standing, and how, finally, after years of de
spair and living upon the verge of suicide, the
light came to him on a day in spring in the
woodland :
I had only to know God and I lived; I had
only to forget him, not to believe in him, and
I died. What was this discouragement and
revival? I do not live when I lose faith in the
existence of God; I should long ago have kiUed
myself if I had not had a dim hope of finding
him. I really live only when I am conscious of
him and seek him. "What more, then, do I
seek?" a voice seemed to cry within me. "This
is He, He without whom there is no lffe. To
know God and to live are one. God is life. Live,
to seek God, and life will not be without God."
And stronger than ever rose up life within and
around me, and the light that then shone never
left me again.*
So, also, Christ is to be found within, not in
the heights nor the depths, but in the heart.
* My Confession, chap. xii.

LESSONS FROM THE MYSTICS 17:5
He, indeed, is God within. Tauler closes his
striking sermon from the text, "What went ye
out into the wilderness for to see?" with the
words: Hence we have need of the true Moses, even
Jesus Christ, that he may at all times guide
and lead us, and draw us to himself, so that we
may go out after him into the wilderness of our
own hearts, wherein God lies hidden to us. May
God help us all to attain thereto !
This insistence upon the withinness rather
than the withoutness of reality is not, of course,
a spatial distinction with the mystics. It is,
rather, an insistence upon the personal, as dis
tinguished from the nonpersonal, as the tru®
abiding place of the Divine. ^
God, Christ, truth, holiness, all lie — the
mystic is ever asguring~us-— in themner spirit
worlds All who seek ultimate reality in the
external world with the scientist, or in the world
of sense with the hedonist, or in the past with
the historian, or in the world of pure ideas
with the philosopher, are doomed to miss it.
The inner door is the entrance to reality. It
is here too that religious certainty alone is to
be found. Not in church, or book, or creed,
but in the whisper "oF~the~stin sffial1~VDice.
"It is the Inner Witness, my son," said Samuel

174 MYSTICISM AND MODERN LIFE
Wesley to John, "the Inner Witness." Only
after all outward search is abandoned and one
turns to the world within, will he find what he
seeks and what every soul, when it awakes,
must desire above everything else.
II
A second lesson in truth taught us by the
mystics is, to find meaning in mystery. To
the scientist, as such, mystery is a challenge, a
foe, a problem to be attacked and resolved
into its understandable factors. For the pur
poses of science this is the only right attitude.
Let us not fail to recognize to the full the value
of science. Without her it would have gone
hard with humanity. For, as far as the mystic
is concerned, we might still be groping in a
semicivilized world. Not that the mystic is
superstitious. Superstition is as far from his
frame of mind as from that of the scientist;
but as relates to the material world he is not
Concerned with finding out its secrets — at
least, not after the manner of the scientist —
or with utilizing to the full its resources. The
world has another meaning to him than that.
Its mystery to him is prescient, purposeful,
prophetic. It invests him, yet does not oppress
him, for he feels that within it are veiled great
and gracious meanings. The mystic would

LESSONS FROM THE MYSTICS 17.1
not choose to live in a world where everything
is understood, to the last and least item. To
him such a world would be commonplace,
mechanical, unworthy- of God, the God who
"hideth himself," not in order to conceal him
self, but because he can reveal himself only to
the inquiring miind and heart.
Ill
A third and kindred truth-lesson of mysticism
is to find the eternal in the temporal. This, as
Inge asserts, is the very heart of mysticism,
regarded from the point of view of truth. At
first it seems as if the essence of mysticism
were to find the eternal apart from the temporaK*
It is a characteristic doctrine of one type
of mysticism, that to reach the eternal and
unchangeable one must detach himself com
pletely from the world of things, from sight,
and sound and touch of everything temporal,
and fly to the Abyss, the Darkness, the Silence.
Dionysius and Erigena and Eckhart are not
the only mystics who teach this. It is found
throughout doctrinal mysticism. Jacob Boeh
me's first dialogue of The Supersensual Life
begins :
The disciple said to his Master: Sir, how may
I come to the Supersensual Life, so that I may

176 MYSTICISM AND MODERN LIFE
see God and hear God speak? The Master
answered and said: Son, when thou canst throw
thyself into THAT, where no creature dwelleth,
though it be but for a moment, then thou hearest
what God speaketh. Disciple : Is that where no
creature dwelleth near at hand, or is it afar oft'?
Master: It is in thee. And if thou canst, my
son, for a while but cease from all thy thinking
and willing, then thou shalt hear the unspeak
able words of God. Disciple: How can I hear
him speak when I stand still from thinking
and willing? Master: When thou standest still
from the thinking of seff and the willing of self.
When both thy intellect and will are quiet and
passive to the expressions of the Eternal word
and Spirit; and when thy soul is winged up and
above that which is temporal, the outward
senses and the imagination being locked up by
holy abstraction, then the Eternal Hearing, See
ing, and Speaking will be revealed in thee, and
so God heareth and seeeth through thee, being
now the organ of his Spirit, and so God speaketh
in thee, and whispereth to the Spirit, and thy
spirit heareth his voice.
Yet, when the searcher after the eternal has
thus renounced and transcended the temporal
in order to attain the eternal, he comes back
with it, so to speak — unless he is too loath to
linger, as the supermystics were, in the realm
of the transcendent — into the world of time

LESSONS FROM THE MYSTICS 177
and sense and finds the eternal set in the heart
of things. Boehme detects something super
sensual in the "jovial luster" of the burnished
kettle and then finds it again in the grass and
trees and all things. To him the eternal has
become the secret of the universe. Thus the
world is transformed into something symbolical,
allegorical, translucent. Through it gleam and
flash the revelations of the eternal. All order
is a reflection of eternal order. All beauty is
a mirror of eternal beauty. As Angelus Sile
sius wrote:
The rose whose beauty glads thine eyes to see.
Blossomed in God ere time began to be.
All the noblest nature mysticism finds its
secret gladness and inspiration in this imma
nence of the eternal in the temporal. Words
worth beholds it as the "flashing of a shield."
Emerson hears it as a melody, "a sky-born
music." 'Tis not in the high stars alone,
Nor in the cups of budding flowers.
Nor in the redbreast's mellow tone,
Nor in the bow that smiles in showers.
But in the mud and scum of things
There alway, alway, something sings.
This Reality that seems to the supermystic

178 MYSTICISM AND MODERN LIFE
in his "flight of the alone to the Alone" to be
the Divine Darkness, not only supersensuous
but superrational, to the rational mystic seems
the all-pervasive Reason, the Eternal Logos,
the unfolding Revelation.
Mystical truth is clearly as far as possible
from literalism. One who lingers within the
walls of literalism has not attained unto the
freedom of the House of Mysticism. He must
escape the letter before he can enter into the
spirit. "For while I read the Scriptures in the
letter," wrote Augustine, "I was slain in the
spirit."'^ There is, to be sure, a species of liter
alism among the mystics. It is literalism in
the application of truth, not in its conception.
Truth, for him, is ever fresh and free and untram-
meled. Nor has pure intellectualism any affinity with
[the mystic mind. Not that mysticism lacks
in intellectual vigor and acumen; but when the
intellectual becomes so regnant and repressive
as to pass over into the dry, cold, critical
temper it has lost all touch with vital reality."
It is not the intellect primarily according to
mysticism, as we have seen, that makes seizure
of ultimate truths. The power by which such
truths are grasped and held — swfft, strong,
8 Confessions, v, 14.
B Part ii, chap. ii.

LESSONS FROM THE MYSTICS 179
unerring, unrelaxing — is, in the language of
philosophy, intuition, in the language of reli
gion, faith.
Thus it sometimes happens that these two
faculties, the intuitive and the intellectual, are
pitted against each other — the one representing
the life of spiritual self-consecration, the other
that of intellectual seffishness. The experience
of Frances Willard affords an illustration. The
crisis in her religious experience occurred during
an almost fatal illness in her twentieth year,
in which, as she writes:
Two voices seemed to speak within me, one
of them saying: "My child, give me thine heart.
I cafled thee long by joy, I call thee now by
chastisement." The other said: "Surely, you
who are so resolute and strong will not break
down now because of physical feebleness. You
are a reasoner and never yet were you con
vinced of the reasonableness of Christianity.
Hold out now and you will feel when you get
weU, just as you used to feel."'
She finally yielded to the first voice and be
came an avowed Christian. This experience is
interesting as illustrating a not uncommon
conflict between two faculties not in themselves
hostile, but which may become so unless the
J ' Glimpses of Fifty Yeara, p. 686.

ISO MYSTICISM AND MODERN LIFE
intellect assents to the deeper reason. It is
only when "heart and mind, according well,
make one music" that the soul is at peace with
itself.
IV
Three great lessons in valuation the mystics
have for us. The first is the value of true solitude.
He who thinks that the mystics sought solitude
as a penance makes a great mistake. Thomas
a Kempis went to his cell, as Emerson went to
his "sylvan home," drawn by its unfailing
attraction and power of enrichment. Solitude,
to the mystics, is a state not only of sweetness
but of strength. It is in solitude, they feel,
that a man gets his bearings, hjsjcalm, his
poise. AlKempis was wont to insist, quoting
Seneca, that as often as he went forth into the
world he returned a poorer man.' "Let a man
stand fast, then, as an axis of the earth,"
wrote a modern mystic, "the obsequious meri
dians will bow to him, and gracious latitudes
will measure from his feet.'" It was through
solitude that the mystics gained their per
spective, their large outlook upon life. Unlike
world folk, they were not "made happy by a
little gossip or a little praise." Alone, they
s "One said, 'As oft I have been among men, I returned home less a man
than I was before' " (Imitation, chap. xx).
8 Benjamin Paul Blood. . . . See "A Pluralistic Mystic," by WiUiam
James, Hibbert Journal, vol. viii, 4, p. 754.

LESSONS FROM THE MYSTICS 181
f ound^ themselves _and God; and with shining
faces they came forth, like the mystic Moses,
cleansed, purified, enheartened, to their tasks.
Solitude has often meant to the mystic, not
detachment, in the negative sense, but attach
ment — a coming into relation with the larger
lffe of humanity through reading and reflection.!
"The man," wrote Schiller, "who wants to b^
himself, who strives for inner harmony, must
live as a stranger to his surroundings, a stranger
to his time; he must remove himself from the
belittling influences of the ambitions of the
multitude, scorn all participation in quest for
outward success; fill himself with what the
best and finest of all ages have dreamed and
accomplished; he must dwell in the idea of the
beautfful." Are we losing the grace of solitude out of
our modern life, along with the sense of sin and
the spirit of reverence? The modern man does
not go apart with his cherished ideal, very
much, to ask himself and his God how he may
be a better man. We are apt to be more
anxious over our bills to-day than over our
sins. We are more absorbed in our schemes
than in our ideals. It is a sordid and abnormal
frame of mind. We are in constant danger of
degeneration through our materialisms. Spir
itual simians may live in stone fronts as well as

182 MYSTICISM AND MODERN LIFE
in trees. To-day he who has any desire to be
alone for his soul's good is too apt to be looked
upon askance as a survival from an age when
mankind was afflicted with a mental disease
called piety — a strange hallucination that lffe
is too serious a matter to be lived without
Divine help — times of ignorance which men now
wink at. Of course I do not mean that this
attitude of mind is universal, but it has its
area, and a wide one. Little does it know of
the wealth of true solitude.
There is something else which we are in
serious danger of losing along with solitude, as
its close dependent, and that is true social life.
For society needs solitude as a source of supply.
How can men gain their best thoughts, affec
tions, aspirations, how can they develop person
alities with which to enrich society, without
solitude? When this fails society will suffer.
We may still have "company" — the simians are
gregarious — but not true social lffe. Let the
mystics teach us to recover the grace of soli
tude, not to overvalue it, not to undervalue
simple, wholesome human intercourse, but to
keep the two in right and responsive relation
to each other. V
A second lesson in valuation coming to us

LESSONS FROM THE MYSTICS 183
from the mystics is the wealth of simvlicitv.
Stripping life of its accessories, to them meant
adding to its fundamental values. Lady
Poverty Jbecame LadyiBfluntifiil to Saint Fran
cis Relaxing the clutch upon mine meant the
opening of the hand to receive larger riches.
"All things are yours" becomes a reality as
one becomes Christ's.
There is something prophetic, as well as
pathetic, in the wistfulness with which men
look back to the period of childhood as ap
proaching most nearly the ideal life of the
soul. Again and again the yearning finds
expression. Sometimes it is in a tone of hope
less lament. Sometimes it foreshadows a new
and richer childhood — as when Bunyan ex
claimed in his darkness, "I wished with all my
heart that I might be a little child again."
The experience of the mystics as a whole offers
a striking exemplification of the saying of
Christ as to the lffe of the Kingdom consisting
in a renewed childhood. Not that such a life
has the weaknesses and Umitations of child^
hood, but, rather, its vision, its faith, its conj
fiding communion. Two descriptions of the
spiritual significance of childhood of rare
beauty and significance have lately fallen to
our possession. One is from the pen of that
uproarious modern mystic whose cheerful and

184 MYSTICISM AND MODERN LIFE
intrepid faith has been a tonic to our depressed
and be-problemed time, Chesterton. It occurs
in his volume Orthodoxy, and is entitled "The
Ethics of Elfland." The other is from the
seventeenth-century mystic, Thomas Traherne,
whose Centuries of Meditations was first pub
lished hy Bertram Dobell in 1908. Describing
his childhood, Traherne says, in the "Third
Century" :
I was a little stranger, which at my entrance
into the world was saluted and surrounded with
innumerable joys. My knowledge was Divine.
I knew by intuition those things which, since
my Apostasy, I collected again by the highest
reason. My very ignorance was advantageous.
I seemed as one brought into the Estate of
Innocence. All things were spotless and pure
and glorious: yea, and infinitely mine, and
joyful and precious. . . . The corn was orient
and immortal wheat, which never should be
reaped, nor was ever sown. I thought it had
stood from everlasting to everlasting. The
du!5t and stones of the street were as precious as
gold: the gates were at first the end of the world.
The green trees when I first saw them through
one of the gates transported and ravished me,
their sweetness and unusual beauty made my
heart to leap, and almost mad with ecstasy,
they were such strange and wonderful things.
The Men! 0 what venerable and reverend

LESSONS FROM THE MYSTICS 185
creatures did the aged seem! Immortal Cher-
ubims ! And young men glittering and spark
ling Angels, and maids strange seraphic pieces
of life and beauty. Boys and girls tumbling '
in the street, and playing, were moving jewels. '^
I knew not that they were born or should die;
but all things abided eternally as they were in
their proper places. Eternity was manifested
in the light of the Day, and something infinite
behind everything appeared; which talked with
my expectation and moved my desire. The
city seemed to stand in Eden, or to be built in
Heaven. The streets were mine, the temple
was mine, the people were mine, their clothes
and gold and silver were mine, as much as their
sparkliag eyes, fair skins, and ruddy faces. The
skies were mine, and so were the sun and moon
and stars, and all the world was mine; and I
the only spectator and enjoyer of it. I knew no
churlish properties, nor bounds, nor divisions;
but all properties and divisions were mine: all
treasures and the possessors of them. So that
with much ado I was corrupted, and made to
learn the dirty devices of this world. Which
now I unlearn, and become, as it were, a little
child again, that I may enter into the King
dom of God.
If one desires a perfect commentary on the
words of the Master concerning becoming a
Uttle child again, surely Thomas Traherne has
written it.

186 MYSTICISM AND MODERN LIFE
VI
A third lesson in valuation the mystics bring
home to us, the superioritv of being, above
having or doing. Many and earnest are the
persuasfons which the mystics utter against
the subtle and deadening power of possession.
The sense of mine is the root of all sin, as the
author of the ^TTE^ologica Germanica" sees it.
The penetrative sentence of Hawthorne, in
which he describes Judge Pyncheon "with his
landed estate, public honors, offices of trust, and
other solid unrealities," well sums up the view
which the mystics take of property. It was
Hawthorne too — though he is not to be quoted
as among the oracles of mysticism — who wrote,
"Cursed be what by possession charms us."
"Having" means little to the pure mystic.
Nor does "doing" mean to the mystic the
height of attainment. He would not recognize
that spirit of our day which condemns as use
less everyone who does not "get out and do
something." The mystic too believes in doing
things — and does them. But his doing grows
so naturally out of his inner life that what he
does carries his whole personality with it and
gains its significance from that fact. What he
most longs for is to "be"; he knows very weU
that he cannot then be barren or unfruitful.
How true that ideal is the history of mysticism

LESSONS FROM THE MYSTICS 187
proves. Even those quiet souls who have done
little but Uve, or live and produce what, from
the standpoint of the man of deeds, seem only
"words, idle words" — like Dante, or Thomas
k Kempis, or Alfred Tennyson, or Frederic
Amiel (who made a flat failure of everything
except the chief thing, life) — such are doing
more to-day for the good of the world than those
who have spent life in mere hectic and ill-
ordered activity. After all, what did Jesus do?
Organize, reform, agitate? No; a few years of
teaching and healing — that was all. Yet what
he was and is is making a new humanity. '
Moreover, the mystics are well assured that
the chief, the only way to be, is to come into
touch with the Source of all being. Hence
their strong insistence upon contemplation,
which, when it is of the right sort, is itself
true action. As Joubert wrote: "Penser a
Dieu est une action." Such thinking issues in
conduct, as the seed develops into the flower.
If, as Matthew Arnold said, conduct is three ,
fourths of life, motive is three fourths of con
duct; and the springs of motive lie far back in
the hills where the receptive soul receives of
the Divine Fullness. vn
Three great lessons in virtue come to us

188 MYSTICISM AND MODERN LIFE
through the mystics. The first is-Jo_^^nd_con-
tentmmt in humility. Nothing seems to the
mystic more unreasonable, more contrary to
a true and happy life, than the love of pre
cedence, the effort to get the advantage of
others. Strife, restlessness, unhappiness, spring
— he conceives — from this root. He would
therefore remove it completely and in its place
plant lowly humility, the heart of contentment
and true peace. Swedenborg offers a beautiful
comment upon humility in his description of
the conduct of the angels :
As all good and truth come from above, so
does all life. Because they believe this, angels
refuse all thanks for the good they do, and are
indignant and retire ff anyone attributes good
to them. They wonder that anyone should be
lieve that he is wise of himself, and does good
of himself.'"
Nor is humility to the mystic a superhuman
virtue, one that he puts on as a kind of badge
of blessedness, upon which is inscribed: "Per
suade yourself that you are worse than you are."
No; he really sees and feels his imperfection.
It is no make-believe with him. It is only
necessary, he perceives, to know oneself, in
order to be humble. "Whoso knoweth himself,"

10 Heaven and Hell, HO.

LESSONS FROM THE MYSTICS 1811
writes Thomas k Kempis, "is lowly in his own
eyes !" The mystic is the only one humble enough
to take a rebuke, as Saint Francis took his of
the rude peasant on the way to La Verna.
This is the highest proof of humiUty. UntU
one is able to take a reproof — even though
unjust — an injury, a slight, without smarting
under it, he has not attained to the truest
humility. VIII
Another lesson in virtue which the mystics
teach is to find victory in self-sacrifice. It is
they, more than any others, who have caught
the full meaiiing of Jesus's word, "He that loseth
his lffe for my sake shall find it." This is the
supreme paradox of the spiritual life — not to
be reached by "plain common sense," or matter-
of-fact living. It involves the principle of the
dual self which few of the mystics worked out,
although the philosophy of self-surrender was
clear to them all. As Martineau wrote:
Here we alight upon an interpretation of the
doctrine [of prudence] characteristic of the
Christian mystics — that Self is the center
and essence of all Sin, and the surrender of self
the one simple condition of union with God. . . .
To have no wish, no claim, no reluctance to be
taken hither or thither, but to yield oneself up
as the organ of a higher spirit, which disposes

190 MYSTICISM AND MODERN LIFE
of us as may be fit, constitutes the mystic ideal
of perfect life."
The thoroughness with which the mystics
enforced self-sacrifice, ia teaching and practice,
was heroic; yet self-sacrifice with them was
never divorced from a larger end. With char
acteristic simpUcity and depth Eckhart de
clared :
Wo du mit deinem WUlen und deinem Wissen
2_wahrhaft ausge^t, da geht Gott wahrhaft und
willig mit seinem Wissen ein und leuchtet da in
Klarheit.'^
Jacob Boehme makes the same assertion in
another form :
If thou forsakest the world, then thou comest
into that out of which the world is made, and
if thou losest thy life, then thy lffe is in that for
whose sake thou forsakest it."
The truth which Nettleship put so arrestingly,
"To live is to die into something more per
fect," has been richly verified in mystical
experience. IX
The third and crowning lesson in virtue
which the mystics teach — a lesson also in truth
11 Types of Ethical Theory, vol. ii, p. 79.
*2 Sermon: "Von der Dunkelheit." "When thou divestest thyself of
thine own will and thine own wisdom then God freely and willingly enters,
with bis clear-shining wisdom."
" Dialogues of the Supersensual Life, ii.

LESSONS FROM THE MYSTICS 191
and in value — is to find self-fulfillment and
happiness in love. The-nnrtive Ufe, the highest
suramit of the mystic ascent, is a life of love.
On this height, in this atmosphere, the goal is
reached, the soul is at home, the self is fulfilled.
This is the Christian Nirvana, attainable in
this lffe, yet not attained, reached only in
swift ecstatic experiences by all who follow the
Christ in the mystic way. Faith in love, "the
love of Love" — ^how it floods the mystic mind
with joy, driving sorrow, defeat, doubt, dis
may, afar! Love is the innpr spcrwt, thp whole
secret, the open secret, of mysticism. God is
Iqye^nd truth is love, and life is love, wasTfie
message that came to men through the Christ.
It awoke a response in many hearts. Men fled
to the desert with the priceless secret. They
sold all other pearls and bought this of great
price; and yet they did not keep it. They gave
it away, and the more they gave of it, the more
they had of it. They lost it in the darkness of
the world and of self, and found it again and
rejoiced. To the mystic love is able to transform
even the most humdrum service and make it
beautfful. That joyous saint of the pots and
kettles. Brother Lawrence, gives this account
of his experience, as related in the Conver
sations :

192 MYSTICISM AND MODERN LIFE
When outward business diverted him a little
from the thought of God, a fresh remembrance
coming from God invested his soul, and so
inflamed and transported him, that it was dif
ficult for him to restrain himself. Therefore
he said :
That he was more united to God in his ordi
nary occupations than when he left them for
devotion in retirement. . . . That the most
excellent method which he had found of going
to God, was that of dmng our common business
without any view of pleasing men, and (as far
as we are capable) purely for the love of God.^*
"Love is the fulfilUng of the law," exclaimed
the enfranchised mystic of Tarsus. "God is
love," breathed the mystic seer of Ephesus.
"Love is stronger than death," sang the mys
tic martyrs, and faced the lions and the flames
undaunted. "Love can win all," caroled the
mystic missionaries, and dared forest and frost
and savage sword. "Love is more precious
than the world and all its ambitions and
pleasures," whispered the mystic monks and
nuns, and withdrew into the monastery, the
hermitage, the hospital. "Love is the final
wisdom, the only freedom, the only bond of
union," joyfully taught the Friends of God in
Germany. "He that loveth, flieth, runneth,
i< The Practice of the Presence of God, Third and Fourth Conversations,

LKSSONS PROM THE MYSTICS 3!i:',
and rejoiceth," wrote the tender-hearted author
of the Imitation. "Divine Love is the mystic
wound that heals the soul," confessed the
Quietists. "Love is the highest excellency,"
echoed the voice of the mystic Edwards from
the wilderness of the New World. "Love is
the warmth diffused by the Inner Light,"
asseverated the Quakers. "Love is immortal,"
chanted the mystic threnodists of "Adonais"
and "In Memoriam." "Love is the heart of
melody," sang the mystic musicians, and wove
its sacred sweetness through all their chords
and symphonies. "Love is the root of right
eousness, of holiness, of fideUty," proclaimed
the mystic prophets and preachers, aflame with
the love that never faileth. "Love is the only
talisman that will insure social justice and
human brotherhood and bring in the golden
age of man," cried the mystic humanitarians,
and, bathed in its puissance, have gone bravely
to their regenerating toil.
All these have lived and wrought in the light
of a great assurance. Knowing that love is
the triumphant secret of the universe, they
have "smiled to think God's greatness flows
around our incompleteness — round our rest
lessness, His rest."

CHAPTER IX
THE TREASURY OF CHRISTIAN
MYSTICAL LITERATURE
The mystics have greatly enriched lffe. They
have also greatly enriched literature. It is a
sayiag of Maeterlinck that "a work can never
grow old except in proportion to its anti-mys
ticism." Whatever qualification such a state
ment may need, certain it is that the books of
deep and genuine mystical spirit, full of "old
essential candors," possess a vitality greater
than that of oaks and sequoias.
If we commence with the New Testament
and pass in swift review some of the most
precious volumes ia the treasury of Christian
mystical literature, it may seem a heterogeneous
company of books that we bring together, from
different ages and races and mental environ
ments, yet it will serve to show the remarkable
range and wealth of Christian mystical litera
ture. No attempt at completeness will be made,
and many a gem will doubtless be missed, as
worthy of a place as some of those that are
included. 194

MYSTICAL LITERATURE lOr,
I
The light of a new and surpassing era of the
Spirit pervades the New Testament. The
mystic note finds anticipatory utterance in the
Magnificat and the Benedictus, with their sense
of imminent and immeasurable good. The
Sermon on the Mount, though a setting forth of
the ethics of the Kingdom, is pervaded and
vitalized by mystical, teaching, without which
it would be quite robbed of its warmth and
motive power. The Beatitudes (Matt. 5. 3-12),
the Appeal to Perfection (5. 48), the True
Nature of Prayer and Fasting (6. 5-15), the
Inner Light (6. 22, 23), the beautiful nature
lesson of Freedom from Anxiety and Inner
Calm (6. 25-34), the Way of Access to Infinite
Bounty (7. 7-11) are all clad in mystic radiance.
The parables too, especially the Kingdom
parables — the Pearl of Great Price, the Mus
tard Seed, the Hid Treasure, the Net — are full
of a suggestive wisdom and subtle beauty that
reveal Jesus's deeply mystical spirit.
Much as there is of the mystic in Paul, none
of his writings is a singly woven and consistent
piece of mysticism. Yet there are passages in
his letters which ensue upon the dash and fer
vor of argument, exhortation, and admonition,
breathing a harmony, a depth, a universality,
which make them masterpieces in the literature

196 MYSTICISM AND MODERN LIFE
of mysticism. The Poems of Saint Paul, they
may well be called, for example, the Song of
the Spirit-Filled Life (Rom. 8), the Parable of
Christian Union (1 Cor. 12), the Hymn of
Love (I Cor. 13), the Paean of Exalted Humility
(Phil. 2), and The Unfolding of the Great
Mystery (Col. 1. 9-29).
Peerless and incomparable among the texts
of Christian mysticism is the Fourth Gospel.
Here is mysticism at its noblest — emotion as
rich as it is restrained, thought that moves in
the cadence and measure of eternity, symbolism
to which nature yields as if she had no other
end, faith that has passed within the portals of
reality and become knowledge, spiritual matur
ity that has found moral obligation identical
with the will of God, love as boundless as the
sky. Like the experience out of which it grew,
this Gospel is a well of water springing up into
everlasting life. II
Passing from the New Testament into the
later Christian literature, we note at once the
little volume which has touched the heart of
Christendom as few have done, Augustine's
Confessions, with its intimate self-disclosures,
its insights into truth, its prayers in the language
of an archangel and in the spirit of the chief of

MYSTICAL LITERATURE 197
sinners, its passionate penitences and exulta
tions. Out of the night of the middle ages
there blazes upon us that bright, consummate
star of mystical poetry — the Divine Comedy,
the self -revelation "of him who from the lowest
depths of hell, through every paradise and
through aU glory, Love led serene." So true
and vivid an interpretation of the life of the
soul is Dante's great poem that its mediaevalism
is lost in its universality. Very inconspicuous
and lowly as compared with the Divine Comedy,
and yet not to be overlooked, is the tender song
out of the heart of Saint Francis of Assisi, so
full of joyous nature mysticism, The Canticle
of ihe Sun. Wholesome and devout, with a
piety that goes to the heart of things, is Brother
Lawrence's Practise of the Presence of God.
In the fair and fruitful garden of German mys
ticism as it sprang up in the fourteenth century,
there bloomed many fragrant flowers of faith,
one of which has become widely known and
loved — the Theologia Germanica, a fragrant
lily of piety growing upon the strong stem of
right reason. John Tauler's pithy and profound
Sermons have won a lasting place in the litera
ture of mysticism. From the Brethren of the
Common Life came a little book of such exqui
site purity and piety, such utter unselfishness
and devotion, such penetrative spiritual insight

198 MYSTICISM AND MODERN LIFE
and freshness of feeling, that humanity has
taken it very close to its heart, "a lasting
record of human needs and human consola
tions," unfailing in its spiritual ministrations —
the Imitation of Christ of Thomas a Kempis.
Jacob Boehme's Dialogues of the Supersensual
Life will come to be better known as one of the
choice products of a marvelous mind.
ni
Turning to the hterature of EngUsh mys
ticism, one is struck by the mystical note in
Piers Plowman, though it is somewhat faint
and strained. Passing reluctantly by Spenser's
Faery Queen and Hymne to Heavenly Beauty,
and Shakespeare's Tempest and Sonnets — since,
with all their idealism and mystical atmos
phere, they are not avowedly religious — we
mention first the quaintly devout poems of
George Herbert, The Temple, with its "lays
upon thine altar burnt," redolent with the
incense of true piety. One is strongly tempted
to add that devout and reposeful nature
book of Herbert's biographer, Izaak Walton,
The Compleat Angler or Contemplative Man's
Recreation, with its benediction upon "aU that
are lovers of virtue and dare trust in Providence
and be quiet and go a-angling," but for the sake
of those to whom fishing is inconsistent with

MYSTICAL LITERATURE 199
the love of "all things, both great and small,"
we pass it, too, by.
John Bunyan's Grace Abounding, and Pil
grim's Progress assuredly belong among the
great mystical texts, the one recounting the
experience through which the author "changed
his drossy dust for gold," the other the incom
parable allegory, translated into more than
seventy languages, wherein we "lose ourselves
and catch no harm," and "read ourselves and
read we know not what, and yet know whether
we are blest or not."
George Fox's Journal, rising like a flame from
the cold and dismal piety of a formal and faith
less age, has enough of mystic warmth in it still
to kindle the dullest heart. Beside it should be
placed that other Quaker Journal, equally noble
and serious, but gentler and more winsome, John
Woolman's Journal, and, in company with both,
William Penn's Some Fruits of Solitude. Jeremy
Taylor's Holy Living and Holy Dying have so
much of the flavor of mysticism as well as of
sagacity in them, seasoned with the salt of
humor — and upon what subject is godly humor
more needed than upon that of holy dying? — as
to assure them a permanent place in mystical
literature.' Not so, it is to be feared, with The
* W. K. Fleming makes much of Sir Thomas Brown's Religio Medici as
a mystical writing, and there are quaint and mystical touches in it; but it
ifi also the quintessence and classic of a strong common-sense view of

200 MYSTICISM AND MODERN LIFE
Sainfs Everlasting Rest, whose occasional declam
atory piety and rigid Calvinism overshadow its
really beautiful mystical portions. Doddridge's
Rise and Progress, searching and earnest as is its
piety, is foreign to the mystical mind. Nor can
Law's Serious Call be included among mystical
books, although his Spirit of Love and Spirit of
Prayer, written after he had felt the touch of
Jacob Boehme, rank among the choicest pro
ducts of English mysticism.
It seems unfitting not to include Milton's
Paradise Lost and Paradise Regained among
the classics of mystical literature, but in spite
of their noble reverence and lofty imagination
they fail, largely because of the prevaUing
deism reflecting the period in which they were
written, to take us within the inner temple of
experiential religion. Not so, however, the
Sonnet on His Blindness.
The virile apostles of ideaUsm who roused
Great Britain from her materialism and spiritual
lethargy in the nineteenth century were filled
with the mystical as well as with the ethical
spirit. Coleridge's Aids io Reflection, though
formal and intellectual, may nevertheless claim
a place among the classics of mysticism, for its
religion and belongs, it seems to me, rather in that category. There is aa
much, if not more, of mysticism in that equally cheerful little book, written
in deep adversity. Sir Thomas More's Dialogue of Comforte Agaynste
Tribulacion.

MYSTICAL LITERATURE 201
influence in molding spiritual thought and life.
Wordsworth, greatest of all religious nature
mystics, has done much to impregnate our age
with true mysticism, and in his Ode on Immor
tality, Lines Above Tintern Abbey, and in many
of the Sonnets and other poems has made price
less contributions to the undying literature of
the spiritual life. Carlyle, too, in spite of his
growling pessimism, is often found among the
prophets, with messages not only of righteous
ness but of profound trust. That piece of
stormy earnestness Sartor Resartus almost
deserves a place in mystical literature. Far
more certainly does Ruskin's sparkUng gem,
glowing with mystical feeling and beauty.
Sesame and Lilies.
Here and there in Keble's Christian Year,
especially in the Morning Hymn and Evening
Hymn, one comes upon a fine strain of the
mysticism that marked its gifted author, but
much of this prized book of devotion is too
conventional and churchly to be truly mystical.
In the Victorian poets we reach a full current
of mystic thought, flowing deep and strong
between banks of richest verdure. In such
poems of Tennyson as The Higher Pn.nthei..<im..
"7n Memoriam, and The Ancient Seer, and in such
poems of Browning as Paracelsus, Easter Eve,
and Abt Vogler^ we have a mysticism whose

202 MYSTICISM AND MODERN LIFE
wealth of thought and of imagination attest the
age in which they were written, as well as the
spiritual culture of two poets of extraordinary
religious insight. Mrs. Browning, too, deftly
unclasps the book of lffe and lets us read therein
such tender secrets as are found in A Child's
Thought of God, and The Rhyme of the Duchess
May. Nor can we say that the canon of mysti
cism is closed when out of the heart of the
London waif, Francis Thompson, who has been
called "the greatest mystical poet of our time,"^
in our own prosaic day, come poems of such
thrilling spiritual power as The Hound of Heaven
and The Kingdom of Heaven. IV
Turning again from England to the Con
tinent, we should not fail to take account in
French devotional literature of a volume that
gleams with peculiar luster — Pascal's Thoughts.
It is a book of star flashes ra,ther than of sun-
beams, scintillating with wisdom that has
issued from a great mystical experience, though
charged with a subtle skepticism that by no
means belongs to mysticism as such. Less
brilliant, but nearer to the heart of mysticism,
are Fenelon's writings. His Spiritual Letters are
like an autumn harvest field bathed ia the light
* Evelyn Underbill: Mysticism, p. 161.

MYSTICAL LITERATURE 203
of Christian love. Madame Guyon's Method of
Prayer, which she calls "the application of the
heart to God and the internal exercise of love,"
is one of the few satisfying books upon prayer.
Very different in its atmosphere, yet imbued
with the same spirit, is the Journal of Frederic
Amiel, an enkindling record of victory over
modern skepticism, with its calm and heroic
joyousness and its revelations of the strength of
a suffering and loving soul that has found the
secret of true peace. German literature is alto
gether too ample a field for me to invade. Its
richly mystical character, from the Nibelungen-
Lied onward, is manff est upon even the slightest
acquaintance. The mysticism of Schiller and
Goethe is pervasive. That of Goethe, though
often pagan in character, is always illuminated
by Christianity. German philosophy too has
produced many a volume deeply mystical in
spirit, notably Fichte's Vocation of Man.
Coming to "visions and revelations," the
reader of mystical literature halts deeply
impressed before the writings of Emmanuel
Swedenborg, whose message, especially in
Heaven and Hell, has found so many groping
hearts in their hour of darkness and brought
a clearness of vision and a comfort which mere
vagaries could not permanently produce.
Tolstoy's moving autobiography of a serious

201 MYSTICISM AND MODERN LIFE
soul. My Confessions, is a thoroughly mystical
solution of the ancient quest after the living
God. That acknowledged and grateful, though
not always consistent, debtor to the mystics
Maurice Maeterlinck has given us in some of
his writings, especially The Treasure of the
Humble, a beautiful expression of the mystical
spirit, as also in that bit of Ariel literature
which bas captured so many hearts. The Blue
Bird. Not many American books have become
world texts of mysticism. Not that there are
not many volumes of spiritual insight and
beauty in American literature; but few have
been enshrined among the world's masterpieces.
The conspicuous and ever-vital contribution of
America to the literature of mysticism is, of
course, the Essays of Emerson, lofty, serene,
bathed in the light of the Over-Soul — reverent
contemplations of the universe by a beholding
soul. Whittier's poems rank next, quiet and
sacred, like woodland paths in the "ieverish
ways" of modern lffe, full of the hush and
serenity of the spirit world. Very different in
tone and structure, yet stirring in their own
impetuous mysticism, are some of the poems of
the hobo mystic Walt Whitman, who well
illustrates how even a soiled singer can be at
times purified of dross. Cherished poems of

MYSTICAL LITERATURE 20.".
other American poets, such as Bryant's To a
Waterfowl, Lowell's Commemoration • Ode, La
nier's Marshes of Glynn, many of the poems of
Henry W. Longfellow, Oliver Wendell Holmes,
William Vaughn Moody, E. R. Sill, Emily
Dickinson, Henry van Dyke, and others, while
they could not all be called classics, touch a
chord that makes the spiritual world real and
magnetic. If we were to enter the field of fiction in this
survey, we would find so much of the mystical
element as to make many a work of fiction
almost a book of devotion. Deeply hallowing
and mystical are some of the stories of the
writers who touch the heart most tenderly,
like Scott, Dickens, Hawthorne. Victor Hugo.
Charles Kingsley, and (jeorge Macdonald.
Heie, tUU, are sucTi natSre parables as bain-
taine's Picciola, and such character portraits as
John Halifax, the Vicar of Wakefleld, Colonel
Newcomb, David Elginbrod, Doctor MacLure, and
hosts of others. In how many of us has some
noble tale of fiction stirred the chords of sym
pathy and admiration, till the mystic music of
idealism and aspiration has rapt us away into
another world! V
Of all the springs and streams from which

20(> MYSTICISM AND MODERN LIFE
the heart of Christendom drinks, none is so
perpetual a source of refreshment as the Chris
tian hymn book. There are hymns and hymns
— militant, doctrinal, patriotic, didactic, hor
tatory — but the hymns that upon the whole are
the dearest to the heart of the Christian are
the mystical ones. Such modern hymns — not to
speak of the mediaeval — as Nearer, My God, to
Thee; In the Cross of Christ I Glory; Jesus, Lover
of My Soul; Abide With Me; 0 Love Divine That
Stooped to Share; Dear Lord and Father of Man
kind; 0 Love That Wilt Not Let Me Go — so
simple, yet so profound and universal in their
appeal — nourish the heart with an almost
miraculous food.
.The books of prayer too furnish mystical
manna, to be gathered daily. The Book of
Common Pra«/er, though marred by externalism,
institutionalism, and occasional abjectness, is
imbued with the spirit of mystical communion,
and in this lies its real strength and grace.
The prayers of the ages, as they have been
gathered in various collections, retain their
spiritual fragrance, like attar of roses. Nor
have all the prayers been uttered that spring
from the confidence in God that grows out of
fresh-felt needs. Witness Stevenson's Prayers
and that uplifting contribution to devotional
literature by Dr. Rauschenbusch, Prayers far

MYSTICAL LITERATURE 207
the Social Awakening, with their revelation of
what may still result when the spirit of man
rises to meet with the Spirit of God.
VI
Deep and true, pure and exhilarating, is the
literature of mysticism, "the sweet food of
sweetly uttered knowledge," and far richer in
extent than we have even indicated. The
best outcome of our undertaking is, perhaps, to
show its impossibility. Nor is there any reason
why this literature may not be even richer in
the future than in the past. As the spirit of
mysticism embodied in Christianity comes into
closer touch with the mystic mind of the race
at large, with its varied and inexhaustible pos
sibilities of worship and joy, there will be ever
new impartations of truth, new outpourings of
prayers, new libations of song. For nothing,
save human refusal, can quench the flow of the
Divine Spirit as it imparts itself to men. It
was but yesterday that there came, from the
heart of Bengal, Song Offerings, whose freshness
and purity have made every reader newly
aware of the power of the Eternal to awaken
a response in the listening soul.
When thou commandest me to sing it seems
that my heart would break with pride, and I
look to thy face, and tears come to my eyes.

208 MYSTICISM AND MODERN LIFE
All that is harsh and dissonant in my life
melts into one sweet harmony — and my adora
tion spreads wings like a glad bird on its flight
across the sea.
I know thou takest pleasure in my singing. I
know that only as a singer I come before thy
presence. I touch by the edge of the far-spreading wing
of my song thy feet which I could never aspire
to reach.
Drunk with the joy of singing I forget myself,
and call thee friend who art my Lord.

CHAPTER X
MYSTICISM AND THE MODERN
CHURCH
If one takes the wings of the morning and
makes his way back to the days of the early
church, he finds that the secret of its lffe was
primarily a mystical fellowship.^ Not that it
lacked organization and activities, offices and
charities, but these were all actuated and infilled
by one uniting and vitalizing Spirit. It is the
presence of this Spirit, in fact, that made and
still makes the church. Where two or three
gather together constantly in Christ's name
there is a church. Ubi Spiritus; ibi Ecclesia.
And where this mystic Christ, this quickening
Spirit, is not present, there is no church, in the
true sense. Polities, creeds, clergy, sacraments,
ministries — important as these are as instru
ments of the Spirit — do not constitute and can
not preserve a church.
The one supreme concern of the church

1 "Whoever bas any understanding at all for mystical religion will
increasingly recognize how intensely it was at work in early Christianity.'*
(Adolf Deissmann: "New Testament Research," The Constructive Quar
terly, vol. ii, 4, p. 798). 209

210 MYSTICISM AND MODERN LIFE
should be to seek and to respond to the Spirit,
both in its worship and in its work; in other
words, to keep open the channels of the lffe
that we have been calling mystical. It will be
the purpose of this chapter to consider how this
may be done more fully than at present and
what the results would be, if the church were
but more responave to the Spirit. We will
think first of the place of mysticism in the.
woiship„Qf_±he_church, then'^ itsjplacejn the
werk.-ofJiLe church, and lastly Qfuts relation_to
the Jurther ance «f church unity.
Something is wanting in our worship to-day.
Something always has been wanting, — yet not
wholly. Else (as Emerson would say) how
could we know that it is wanting? What is 11.!*
The celestial fire, the divine breath, the invisible
presence, the Holy Spirit. Call it what you
will, it is the one reality, without which worship
is a desert waste and with which it is a fountain
of lffe. Whatever the secret of worship is, it is
an indefinable spiritual experience. It has a
psychology, a methodology, but it wholly
transcends these. It will not yield to analysis
or formula. Rare as the spirit of true worship
is — transient, elusive — it is as germane to the
soul as fresh air to the lungs, as beauty to the
eye, or harmony to the ear. Once experienced,
worship will never be abandoned. We go

THE MODERN CHURCH 211
through the forms perseveringly, always hoping
that through them, in some way, the Spirit will
return, yet seldom asking what we have done to
lose it and how it may again be won.
It is only as we approach public worship as
a mystical reality that we can hope to realize
it. Treated either externally or analytically, it
escapes and leaves only ashes. If we ask what
can be done to make worship effective in order
to win men back to the church for the sake of
the church, or for any other ulterior end, the
spirit of worship will surely elude us. If we
seek only how to worship God in spirit and in
truth we shall find the Spirit Himseff seeking
us. But ff we would unlock the door of worship
with the key of mysticism, we must first meet
the objection: Is not mysticism, in its very
spirit and nature, out of touch with common
worship.'' Is not the mystic the man who can
worship alone and anywhere, who needs neither
place nor fellowship for his devotion.? True;
but the fact that he can worship alone is just
the reason why he can best worship with others.
Moreover, the mystic, though he does not
always recognize it, needs common worship to
sustain his individual worship. It is the fusion \
of individual religious aspirations and experi
ences that gives reality and power to common

212 MYSTICISM AND MODERN LIFE
worship. Each individual worshiper brings to
the common worship much — and carries away
more. The accumulated intensity of corpo
rate mystical experience is a most striking
fact. The psychology of the congregation is
very different from that of the crowd. It is
to the two or three together that the Christ
presence becomes most real. It is when those
who have been already touched by the Spirit
are with one accord in one place that the Spirit
comes upon them like a rushing, mighty wind.
To recover the heart of worship, clearly the
first step is one of purification. We have too
far lost the soul in the form; the outer has
imprisoned the inner. We are fettered by our
forms and stifled by our conventionaUties.
Cleansing must come before enrichment. We
must find out what is defeating our worship
and expel it. A candid scrutiny of pubhc
worship, as it is carried on to-day, cannot fail
to disclose certain factors out of keeping with
purity of worship. I
First of all, of course, is that ancient and
insidious foe of worship — ^impurity of heart and
motive. Men cannot worship while they are
cherishing wrong thoughts and motives. The
Old Testament might have taught us this.

THE MODERN CHURCH 213
Much more, Jesus. "Leave there thy gift
before the altar." First reconciliation, human
relationships righted, then worship. In Thomas
More's Utopia all family differences and jars
are set right before attending public worship.
"Thus all little discontents in families are
removed, that so they may offer up their
devotions with a pure and serene mind; for
they hold it a great impiety to enter upon
them with disturbed thoughts; or when they
are conscious to themselves that they bear
hatred or anger in their hearts to any person."
It is of no use for us to try to evade this law.
If our churches are selfishly upholding wrong
economic conditions, or cherishing an un-
brotherly spirit, we cannot expect them to be
filled with the spirit of worship. Whether they
are or not, whether any individual church is
doing so or not, belongs to no outside critic to
say. It does behoove the church as a whole,
as well as each individual church, to ask itseff
the question in all honesty and searchingness of
heart. And with it belongs the question whether
we can hope to have the true spirit of worship
while we cherish sectarian and denominational
pride and iadifference. Those who serve one
God should draw together for worship, if they
expect to have his Spirit with them.
In the conduct of worship itseff there are

211 MYSTICISM AND MODERN LIFE
manifest abuses that directly antagonize its
spirit. Chief are what may, perhaps, be
termed choirism, pulpiMsm amA^ewism. Choir-
ism is pntlSTst because it is most obnoxious to
the mystical spirit. It is not the choir as such
that is objectionable, for music has always
been a foremost factor in ideal worship. It is
jonly the contrast between the celestial choir
Ifind the ecclesiastical, and that, not so much in
the quality of the music as in its motive and
inspiration. Music as an exhibition is one
thing; music as praise is another. An operatic
choir, that has no sympathy with Christian
worship, installed in the most conspicuous
place in the church, dominating the entire
service, its members blighting, by their conduct,
all parts of the worship, comes very near ful
filling the prophecy of the abomination of deso
lation set up in the holy place. It is said that on
the occasion of an exchange of pulpits of Horace
Bushnell and Nathanael Burton one of them
found in the desk of the other an order of service
in which the principal items were: Ballooning
by the choir; m,ore ballooning by the choir, and
closiag: Benediction, hurry for the doors,
silence and the restored presence of God.
Worse than the Covenanters feared from the
introduction of music into the church service
has happened in a large number of the wealthier

THE MODERN CHURCH 215
Protestant churches. Must we have another
Puritan uprisal to purify our worship.''
Pulpitism is another serious obstacle to true
worship. By pulpitism is meant the obtrusion
of the minister's individuality — not his per
sonality, for that is hidden in the process — his
peculiarities and poverties of mind and spirit,
his crotchets and conceits, his notions and
nostrums, so that the better man within — the
Christ man — is obscured and makes no contact
with his congregation. The freedom of the
Protestant pulpit is at once its blessing and its
bane. It gives to a weak man the same oppor
tunity to display his weaknesses as to the strong
man to exercise his strength. As a consequence,
there is sometimes a degradation of worship
through a use of the pulpit which is neither
reverent nor Christian.^ In reporting a ques
tionnaire on the subject of "Non-Religious Per
sons," Professor Edward S. Ames quotes one
respondent as saying, "Apart from its dog
matism, the pragmatic attitude of all evangelical
Protestant churches I have known arouses

2 Dr. Charles Cuthbert Hall pointed out this temporary decadence of the
Christian ideal in an interview in the Presbyterian Banner in 1907. The
cardinal weakness of the ministry to-day, be .said, "is putting the chief
emphasis on the institutional side of Christianity rather than on its mystical
side: by that I mean that the appeal of the ministry is too predominantly
a call to social service. I appreciate the pressing call to social service,
but would first lead ministry and people to the true source of power in
mystical communion with God. There must be a jierennial fountain before
there can be a stream. The iimer side of Christianity is being undervalued."

216 MYSTICISM AND MODERN LIFE
instinctive prejudices in me."' He who has
not felt something of that repulsion must be
either exceedingly charitable or exceedingly
fortunate. The preacher who surrenders to
self-assertion, to captiousness, to scolding, or
to sensationalism must bear the heavy respon
sibility of perverting his pulpit and of aiding
in driving the spirit of worship from the
church. As for pewism as a deadener of public worship,
who does not know what that is.'' The chronic
critic, or the man with proprietary rights and
bearing at the end of the pew on the center aisle
with his retinue beside him, facing the whole
service in the attitude of: "I have paid for this
affair and it must be carried out to my approval"
— is he a worshiper? Heaven save the mark!
If he does not succeed in reducing the spiritual
atmosphere to the freezing point it is only
because the mystic in the free pew counteracts
him. It is because much of the salt of the earth
is still in our churches and because the mystic
chord in the heart of all of us is sometimes
stirred, even by the most bungling efforts, that
the spirit of worship still abides in our churches.
To eradicate the impervious, incorrigible, un-
worshipful pewism from some churches is as
difficult a task as the church confronts. And
3 "Non- Religious Persons," The American Journal of Theology, iii, p. 553.

THE MODERN CHURCH 217
yet even the stoniest pew-holder has some
thing of the mystic in him and will yield to the
tide of spiritual worship ff it only becomes
strong enough to humble him.
How meagerly and incompetently the church
is using the noble resources of common wor
ship! What unrealized possibilities are here!
If the church could but command the heart of
music, instead of merely its services, if by some
miracle of grace the organists and choristers
of the churches could all be transformed into
devout and dedicated worshipers, so that sacred
music could be seen and felt to be "the love of
God made manff est to the sense"; ff the hymns
could be sung again as they were in the days of
Luther; ff prayer could become what prayer
might be as an expression of the deep, ineradic
able longings of the human soul, met and ful
filled by the inflow of divine love; ff the pulpit
everywhere could but become the true organ
and interpreter of the divine message, trained,
responsive, enkindled; ff the people would but
commit themselves to the great act of worship
in the mystic sense of its measureless power and
joy, we should see worship assume its rightful,
incomparable, uplffting place in human lffe.
II
As the worship of the church thrives upon

218 MYSTICISM AND MODERN LIFE
the mystical impulse, so also does its work.
Much of the world's work goes on through the
compulsion of necessity. Not so with that of
the church. Its work should flow from a deeper
and freer motive. If the church is to be in the
world, like its Master, "as one that serves," it
must have his motive, and his sustenance for
service. The present emphasis upon social service,
practical Christianity, in the church is most
hopeful and Christlike. The awakening of the
church to social righteousness is a true reUgious
awakening. To belittle it is to misjudge one of
the chief spiritual revivals of our time. And
yet there is a danger that this movement wiU
either die of inanition or become a purely
mechanical and heartless thing, unless it is fed
with the spirit of faith and love which burns
on the altar of Christianity, but which vnll not
take care of itself.
Nothing can take the place of a deep and
passionate sense of the worth of personaUty, or,
in older parlance, "the value of an individual
soul." This is essentially a mystical valuation.
It finds its most intense expression in the New
Testament, in such parables as the lost sheep
and the prodigal son. Whatever society, aided
by the church, may do to redeem the wilder
ness where the sheep get lost, or to reform the

THE MODERN CHURCH 21!)
far country where the prodigal goes astray, is
most desirable; but ff the sheep itseff, or the
son himself, is lost sight of in the process the
end disappears in the means. As Dean Shailer
Mathews, one of the foremost among the
exponents of the social gospel, writes, "Reli
gion, to be anything more than humanitarian-
ism, must give us companionship with the God
of our spirits."
Yet it is not mere contact with others that
we need so much as humanized, personalized
contact — such contact as is exemplified by the
true social settlement worker who loves "folks"
more than "better conditions," or, rather, who
works for better conditions for the sake of
folks. It is a significant fact that so many of
the social workers in America are members of
churches. It is clear where they have gotten
much, at least, of their original impulse and
inspiration. Here is a new form of mystical
service, springing up in our day and sending
men and women into slum and alley instead of
into hermitage and monastery. Of these newest
mystics, Vida Scudder writes :
Who could to-day honor the mystic who, in
a great modern city, should shut his ears to the
cries of the distressed and dedicate himself to
the pursuit of a metaphysical light, or the
solitary practice of the presence of a heartless

220 MYSTICISM AND MODERN LIFE
God? Saint Teresa is organizing settlements
instead of convents. Saint Catherine of Genoa
is head of a training school for nurses which .
leaves her scant leisure for ecstasies of "Pure
Love." The social situation forces materialism
on us all, ff by materialism is meant a primary
and troubled preoccupation with the bodily
and social needs of the human race.^
The danger is that, as this splendid work for
the betterment of social conditions continues,
it may get farther and farther from its source
and lose the original motives which prompted it,
that it may become so immersed in the reform
of outward conditions that it will overlook the
persons who are, after all, the chief concern.
Miss Scudder detects this danger and writes:
No thinker was ever satisfied with the descrip
tion of Saint James. To do justly and to love
mercy is all very well, but how about walking
humbly with one's God? Detachment, recol
lection, impassioned union with the Eternal
are no mere delusions of the childhood of the
race, fading with the advancing day; they are
the deepest necessity of humanity's manhood.
Already a reaction is in order; the quest after
the ultimate meaning of this mysterious lffe of
ours revives on every hand.

* "The Social Conscience of the Future," Hibbert Journal, vol. vii,
3, p. 593.

THE MODERN CHURCH 221
It should be a cause of serious concern that
the present revival of mysticism is not so much
in the church as outside. The church, which
has always done so much to nourish the mystical
lffe, has of late years too far forgotten the un
failing need and value of this quiet, incon
spicuous ministry and has been somewhat
feverishly throwing herseff into social service,
as ff this were her chief mission.^ It is her
mission to undertake the task of social reform
when no other agency will assume it, but her
chief mission is after all to nourish motive, to
enkindle the passion that sends men and women
out into social service with a faith which re
moves tenement house mountains and trans
forms desert areas of cities into gardens.
Whatever the church does, as a church, in social
work, should be done more for the purpose of
showing that she is in earnest in her spirit and
message than because such service is properly
hers. Hers is the higher mission of developing
spiritual personality, of kindUng and replenish
ing the fires of faith, of bringing men into touch
with God, and thus sending them forth en-
heartened for individual service and for larger
cooperation in social service than any single
church can secure.
' The best discussion of tte mutual relations of social service and mystical
religious experience that I know of is that contained in tbe sixth chapter of
Professor Rauschenbusch's Christianizing tbe Social Order.

222 MYSTICISM AND MODERN LIFE
in
In nothing is there greater need for the
reaUzation of the dependence of the church
upon the Divine Spirit than in the movement
toward Christian unity now in progress. A
common experience alone can supply the basis
and bond of unity. The essence of Christianity
has been made too exclusively either a historical
or a philosophical problem. Both of these it
is, in fact. But the question, what constitutes
the essence of Christianity, formally and
doctrinally, is subordinate to its essence as
spiritual experience. It is only as we grasp
that which is common in Christian experience,
in the first century and in our own, and in all
that intervene, that we understand the essence
of Christianity, which is a filial communion
and cooperation with God, so deep and real
as to transform life. This spirit came through
Jesus. Not that it was absolutely new with
him, but it was so intense and fructifying as
to exercise an almost creative influence upon
those who came to share it with and through
him. Through all the history of Christianity this
inward Christian experience has survived, over
laid and even contradicted by ecclesiasticism,
theologism, and sectarianism. Mystical litera
ture, especially the Bible, has served as the

THE MODERN CHURCH 22:1
vial, the chalice, for the preservation of the
vital and essential spirit of Christianity. Our
hymns, too, are transmitters of this common
experience. We have reason to believe that the time has
come when experiential Christianity is to be
regnant, as it never has been before since the
flower of early Christianity faded. The hour
seems at hand when the outward and incidental
and divisive will give place to the inner and
essential and unitive. As Bishop Brent has
said, "When the disturbed and broken Chris
tian Church comes to rest in the large scheme
of unity, planned by its Founder, then the
mystical life of man will gain a power and
a splendor which now is but a vision and a
hope.'" Protestantism is undergoing a most hopeful
transformation in the direction of experiential
unity. It shows itseff in the widespread revolt
against the supremacy of doctrinal theology —
a rebellion which has, however, too far taken
the form of a senseless root-and-branch attack
against theology itself, instead of against its
dogmatic perversion — in a growing distrust of
literalism and narrowness, and an increasing
tendency on the part of denominations and
individual churches to draw nearer together in
« The Sixth Sense, p, 104.

224 MYSTICISM AND MODERN LIFE
sympathy and cooperation. "The conscious
presence of God," declares Dr. Peter Ainslee,
"is the normal height of the soul's attainment,
and Christian union is the pathway by which
we will attain unto that abiding communion
with the Unseen for which we long and without
which we shall never be satisfied."' Nothing
but inner experience, a common spiritual Ufe
which all Christians share — however varied in
expression — will serve to account for this trend
toward union or bring it to its fulfillment.
How far will this affect our relation to the
Roman Catholics.'' The effort on the part of
the Ritschlians to prove that mysticism is an
essentially and solely Roman Catholic form of
piety seems singularly arbitrary in view of its
history. The attitude of the Roman Church
toward mysticism has never been any too cor
dial. It has, in fact, been too often characterized
either by an attitude of toleration toward a
haff-alien habit of mind or by favor shown to
mystics, not so much on account of their piety
as of their power.* At times, as in the cases of
Molinos and Madame Guyon, it has resorted to
open hostility and suppression. The mystics

7 The Message of the Disciples for the Union of tbe Church, p. 37.
8 A great deal might be said, though I think, on the whole, unfairly, in
support of tbe thesis that the most representative Roman Catholic Eccle
siastical mysticism is that which runs into theurgy and spectacularism,
represented by such writers as Gorres aud Ribet. See Inge, p. 264.

THE MODERN CHURCH 225
on their part have either sought relief from the
trammels and evils of the church by instituting
or joining monastic orders, or have found
themselves compelled to attack the reigning
evils and dogmatisms of the church, as have
Savonarola, Dante, Michael Angelo, Tyrrell,
and so many others. The loyalty which, on
the whole, the mystics have maintained toward
the church has been a loyalty to the ideal
rather than to the actual church.
The marked honor paid by Protestants to
the great Catholic mystics and their writings is
significant. Dante has probably had more —
and more appreciative — readers among Pro
testants, ia recent years at least, than among
Romanists. Madame Guyon has had far
greater favor and influence among Calvinists
than among the members of her own household
of faith. The Spiritual Guide of Molinos has
been a formative influence in the Society of
Friends. The most appreciative histories of
mysticism have been written by Protestants.^
Indeed, Protestantism has as close if not
closer affiliations with mysticism than Roman
Catholicism, provided mysticism is taken in
a broad enough sense. One has but to glance
backward to realize this.
** Miss Underbill's books, especially her "Mysticism," dedicated "In
Honorem Omnium Animarum Mysticarum," offer an outstanding instance
of Protestant appreciation of Roman Catholic mj'stics.

226 MYSTICISM AND MODERN LIFE
IV
The rise of the Reformation, for example,
may be traced intellectually to the Renais
sance, spiritually to mysticism. The revival of
learning, through the influence of such scholars
as Erasmus, ReuchUn, and Melanchthon, pre
pared the way for intellectual freedom. The
renewal of piety, through men of such purity
of vision and devotion as Peter Waldo, Wick-
Uffe, and Luther, prepared the way for spiritual
freedom. Not that the two impulses were
separate or divorced. On the contrary, the
striking fact is their remarkable harmony in
the earlier period. There is much of the mystic,
as well as much of the scholar, in most of the
great reformers and their precursors. Wick-
liffe, for example, together with his love of
learning and hatred of imposture, had in him
a pure and joyous mystical vein. The secret
of the serenity with which he faced church and
state undaunted is disclosed in such words as
these: Contemplative lffe hath two parts; the lower
consists in meditation, or thinking of holy
scripture, and in other sweet thoughts of Jesus,
and in sweetness of prayers. The higher part
is in beholding of heavenly things, having the
eye of the heart among the heavenly citizens,
thinking on God, the beauty of angels, and holy

THE MODERN CHURCH 227
souls. Contemplation is a wonderful joy in
God's love, which joy is a loving of God that
cannot be told. And that wonderful love is in
the soul and for abundance of joy and sweetness
it ascends into the mouth; so that heart, tongue,
body, and soul, joy together in God.'°
How this harmony of the rational and the
mystical, the intellectual and the spiritual,
which characterized the beginnings of the
Reformation, was displaced by schism, mani
festing itseff in the Anabaptist controversy
and the rise of the sects, rending the inner life
of Luther himseff, and ending in the barren
Scholasticism of Protestant theology, is a sorry
and familiar story. Protestant fanaticism and
Protestant Scholasticism were the bitter ex
tremes reflecting the schism in religious life
following the Reformation.
To restore the broken harmony between the
rational and the spiritual, to make theology
once more vital, and to furnish a rational basis
for piety, was a task which Protestantism was
slow in taking up and which it has not even
yet fully accomplished. Melanchthon felt
deeply the need of harmonizing doctrine and
piety, and did much to keep the two from
disruption; but he was too far under the

"> Of Active Life and Contemplative Life.

228 MYSTICISM AND MODERN LIFE
domination of Scholasticism to create a spir
itual theology. Calvin, with all his noble
service to righteousness, was too much of a
legalist, scripturalist, and dogmatist. Thus both
Lutheran and Reformed theology proceeded in
the direction pf formalism and orthodoxism and
became more and more estranged from the mind
of the Spirit.
Yet the fire of mystical devotion was never
expelled from Protestant thought, any more
than from Protestant piety. It survived in
such men as Caspar Schwenkfeld, Sebastian
Frank, and Valentine Weigel, searched the
deeps of thought and piety in Jacob Boehme
and William Law, and at length burst forth in
surprising wealth in the great Wesleyan move
ment. The truth has never yet been rightly
sifted from the error in the doctrines of the
persecuted Protestant mystics, nor in such
ill-understood sects as the Mennonites, Schwenk-
feldtians, and others in Europe and in Penn
sylvania. There are not wanting indications
that there is about to occur a revision and
reestimate of the period following the Refor
mation. A more careful discrimination will
undoubtedly disclose among those valiant here
tics hitherto too carelessly lumped together
as "Anabaptists" — men like Hans Denckj Felix
Manz, and Simon Menno — many who are

THE MODERN CHURCH 229
deserving of greater honor as heralds and
defenders of true faith and freedom than they
have ever received." V
That which is common to both Catholics
and Protestants is every day enlarging, as the
study of mysticism progresses. Eckhart and
Boehme had much in comnion; so had the
Friends of God and the Pietists, the Waldenses
and the Wesleyans, the Quietists and the
Quakers. Catholicism and Protestantism may
have little in common, but Catholics and Pro
testants have much. Professor Loofs has but
lately pointed out the real kinship between the
sola fide (salvation by faith alone) of Pro
testantism and the piety of such mystics as
Saint Francis, and concludes :
Not to the dogmatics but to the piety of both
camps must we look if we would measure how
far-reaching is the possibflity of mutual under-
standiag. And here there has long been evidence
that true Protestant piety, resting upon sola
fide, can feel at home in high-thinking Catholic
piety. The converse has also happened.'^

" See in this connection. Professor R. M. Jones, Spiritual Reformers of
the Sixteenth and Seventeenth Centuries; also chapter ix in Kuhn's The
Sense of the Infinite.
" The Constructive Quarterly, vol. 1, 1, p, 47. It would be difficult to
overestimate the value of this Quarterly in promoting mutual understand
ing among all sects and denominations.

230 MYSTICISM AND MODERN LIFE
If Saint Francis was almost as much of a
Protestant as a Catholic, Tersteegen (to select
one of many) was almost as much of a Catholic
as a Protestant.
The great defect of Roman Catholicism from
the standpoint of mysticism is that it fails to
call out and cultivate individual reUgious
experience. It does not foster the Christian
freedom characteristic of the New Testament.
On the other hand, it does cultivate that com
mon religious instinct, that social type of mys
ticism, which is so germane to the mystical
experience, although in doing so it has resorted
to questionable and sometimes vitiating meth
ods. Protestants cannot possibly overlook the
superstition of the mass, which even its mystic
symbolism cannot offset, or the utter incon
gruity between the papacy and Christianity.
But neither should we forget the common
bond of origin and of devotion to one Lord,
and the possession of great essential doctrines
in common. Above all, we have a common
Christian experience. Faith and truth and
love are universal in nature and speak one
language. That which Whittier said of Quak
erism might weU be said of mysticism: "It
has no church of its own; it belongs to the
church universal and invisible." Many a

THE MODERN CHURCH 231
reader of the Imitation does not know whether
the author was Roman Catholic or Protes
tant. Indeed, in Christian mysticism, as such,
there is neither Romanist nor Protestant,
orthodox nor liberal, but Christ is all and in all.

CHAPTER XI
MYSTICISM AND MODERN SOCIETY
For mysticism to mold modern lffe it must
itself be of a very generous mold. It should be
able not only to domicile and function amid the
ideas and activities of advancing oivilization,
but to transform and exalt them. While this
requires variation in the form of mysticism, it
does not necessarily involve change in its heart
and spirit. It means new wine in new bottles,
but wine still. The old order has" passed,
giving place to new. Through the spirit and
application of science has come a larger under
standing and use of lffe; and this enlargement
will doubtless continue.
The mystics of the past were more or less
apart from the "secular" life of their time,
either scorning it, or rebuking it, or ignoring it.
The modern mystic is in far closer touch with
the life about him. He cannot renounce it
without renouncing genuine spiritual values.
The semi-Christian character of modern civil
ization constitutes at once his opportunity and
his danger, his advantage and his problem. He
232

MODERN SOCIETY 233
is called upon to exercise careful and constant
discrimination. A time like our own, which is
characterized at once by philosophical idealism
and practical materialism, a great altruistic
social awakening and a strong tide of Anarchistic
syndicalism, an unprecedented advance toward
world peace followed by a fearful outbreak of
war, a deep demand for social purity and a
widespread mania of sexualism, a universal
deepening of the Christ spirit and a universal
turning away from the church — such an age
calls neither for wholesale condemnation nor
for uncritical confidence, but for the spiritual
man "who judgeth all things."

One thing seems certain with reference to
the mysticism of the past. It is that, while we
must recognize, on the one hand, its distance
and disparity from our civilization, on the other
hand we cannot afford to ignore our spiritual
heritage in it. Unless we turn back often,
with reverence and teachableness, to the saints
of the ages, we shall detach ourselves from our
spiritual kin and leave unused a great fund of
inspiration and refreshment.
One comes from fellowship with the great
mystics in somewhat of the frame of mind in
which he returns from a mountain climb. H^

234 MYSTICISM AND MODERN LIFE
has breathed a purer air and caught a wider
vision. It may be that he has no desire to
live upon these heights; the air is almost too
rare, the sublimity too great, the majesty too
overwhelming. Yet he brings something of
their loftiness of spirit away with him and is
as one who has been a guest of the immortals.
We are too unaspiring, the mystics teach us,
too easily satisfied. There are splendors await
ing and heights unreached and we stay in the
taverns and lounging places of lffe and are
content. These "Pilgrims of the Lonely Road"^
have heard the call of the heights and obeyed.
They have not been disobedient to the heavenly
vision. Companionship with these saints of the ages
is sacramental. One can hardly acquaint him
seff with their lives without being ready to
exclaim, with Thomas k Kempis:
What pure and upright intentions kept they
toward God! They spent all their time with
profit, every hour seemed but short for the
service of God. And by reason of the great
sweetness they felt ia contemplation, they
forgot the necessity of refreshment for the
body. . . . Outwardly they were destitute,
but inwardly they were refreshed with grace

1 The title of a fascinating volume of studies of mystics by Rev. G. Glenn
Atkins, D.D.

MODERN SOCIETY 235
and divine consolation. They were strangers
to the world but near and familiar friends to
God. . . . They were grounded in true humil
ity, they lived in simple obedience, they walked
ia love and patience; and therefore they grew
daily in the Spirit, and obtained great grace
in God's sight. They were given for an example
to all religious persons. Their footsteps yet
remaining testify they were indeed holy and
perfect men; who fighting so valiantly trod the
world under their feet.^
The author of the Imitation writes as ff the
mystics (or, as he calls them, the saints) were
all behind him; and yet, from our point of view,
he himseff was one of the inner circle; and the
succession has gone on unfailingly to the
present day. It is impossible, that is, to write
a history of mysticism as of a movement that
has closed, because the mystics are a priest
hood after the order of Melchisedec, having
neither beginning of days nor end of life. One
may write of groups or types of mystics in the
past tense, but not thus of mysticism itself;
for it lives to-day and will, as long as religion
lives. Mysticism has in it a certain timelessness,
a habit and disposition of mind which belongs
to man as man when he has reached a certain

' Imitation, xviii.

230 MYSTICISM AND MODERN LIFE
stage of spiritual progress, a spirit which links
the nations and generations in a single brother
hood, which makes Plato and Moses, Jesus and
Saint Francis, Dante and Francis Thompson,
Bernard of Clairvaux and Phillips Brooks, the
author of the Bhagavadgita and Emerson,
Joan of Arc and Frances Willard, akin. The
mystical mind in every age, in spite of temper
amental, individual and environmental differ
ences, is essentially one. And yet each age and
each individual must work out its own sal
vation, and our age is in need of a mysticism
consonant with its own peculiar aspirations
and visions. It must be no longer remote and
world-renouncing. II
It would contradict much of what has gone
before to say that in his world-scorning, self-
repressive, self-denying devotion the mystic of
the past failed entirely of realizing and enjoying
the best things of life. On the contrary, he
entered into many of its largest and deepest
satisfactions. His eyes were unsealed to nature,
and he often became, half unconsciously, a
nature lover and a poet. Love and compassion
toward his fellow man grew up in his heart,
and he entered into the joy of service as well
as of comradeship. The common tasks of life

MODERN SOCIETY 237
were lightened for him by the spirit of love
and self-abnegation which filled his soul. He
knew the secret of banishing meanness and
drudgery from life. And along with these,
the mystic banished a still greater human
enemy, fear.* The mystic is the Siegfried , who
has slain the dragon Fear. He is released from
this ancient enemy. Abiding under the shadow
of the Almighty, he fears no evil. In the
quaint verse of Crashaw, he may address the
earthbound and fearful:
There is no storme but this
Of your owne Cowardise
That braves you out;
You are the storme that mocks
Yourselves, you are the rocks
Of your owne doubt;
Besides this feare of danger, ther's no
danger here;
And he that here fears danger, does
deserve his fears.'
And not only has mysticism done much to
save life from fear and sordidness, it has
brought out and fostered many of Time's
sweetest and choicest flavors. Ill
It would be interesting and revealing if some

•Quoted by Bishop Brent: The Sixth Sense, p. 82.

238 MYSTICISM AND MODERN LIFE
one would make a study of the place of humor
in mysticism. If the facts were only available,
it would not be surprising to find that much
of the most deUcate, playful and high-hearted
humor that has issued from the heart of
humanity has come from the mystical mind in
its gayer moods. For the mystics could be
gay. Did not Saint Francis and his com
panions call themselves God's jongleurs? Only
the mind that is secure and far from fear can
give itself over to unreserved playfulness. The
child may romp and riot most when out of the
mother's sight, but it is in the play that he has
at her side and under her smile that he is freest
and sunniest. The fevered chaotic mirth of he
donism, — let us eat and drink, for to-morrow we
die — the self-abandonment of unfaith, the mys
tic dreads and shuns; but of the humor that
takes every misfortune lightly and finds food
for jest where the stolid practicalist sees only
solemn hopelessness and an end of all his
schemes, of that there is much in mysticism —
another evidence of its normality.
It is true that there is very little in mystical
literature that reminds one of Punch, or
Fliegende-Blatter, or Lffe; but one has the
feeling that if more than one mystic, who might
be named, had chosen to turn his hand to
that sort of thing, he could have done at least

MODERN SOCIETY 239
as well. As it was, he felt that he had some
thing more essential on hand. Yet ff a flash
of righteous irony breaks into a high message
here and there, as in Isaiah, Plato, or Dante;
or a quaint phrase adds piquancy to the mean
ing of a line of Donne or Herbert or a sentence
of Jeremy Taylor; or a love- winged arrow of
sarcasm speeds to its mark in an allegory of
Bunyan; or a lambent flame of kindly humor
plays about a sermon of Eckhart, or a comment
of JuUana of Norwich, or a poem of Browning,
it is all in the day's work — ^the natural out-
croppings of souls in love with God and man.
Such mystic humor often Ues very close to the
most serious and high-hearted devotion to a
great cause. One might not go far astray in
listing Lincoln among the mystics — ^humor
included. Life is never cheap to the mystic,
except in comparison with eternal lffe. No one
but a mystic or a hardened criminal could
have hailed his headsman as lightly as did Sir
Thomas More on the day of his execution.
If any man of his time knew how to make the
most of lffe it was the author of Utopia; yet
he could lay it down with an easy pleasantry,
for "he knew Whom he had believed."
On the whole, with all their renunciations
and austerities, one will look long before he
finds a company of men and women who have

210 MYSTICISM AND MODERN LIFE
gotten so near to the heart of life as the mystics.
If they have brushed aside its outer petals
somewhat roughly, it is only that they might
get straight to its heart where is the hidden
honey. Losing lffe for His sake, they have found
it again. Through seff-denial they have becMne
masters of the art of true living. Such mastery
of life and all its conditions is the only thing
that will permanently satisfy the human soul,
with its insatiable urge toward perfection. And
yet theirs was too much a mastery by renuncia
tion, not by appropriation. Their enjoyments
came to them almost in spite of themselves,
for they did not fully perceive that "the earth
is the Lord's and the fullness thereof."
It is this limitation which, as I have tried to
show, should be left behind in the cultivation
of a mysticism neither excessive nor repressive.
It were well for us to be altogether such as
they, yet "without these bonds."
IV
It is a very general assumption that mys
ticism is inherently and exclusively individual
istic, and therefore ill-adapted to social wel
fare. It is here, probably, that the largest
question mark confronts mysticism. To this
question let us again address ourselves briefly
in closing.

MODERN SOCIETY 211
Two apparently alien volumes have by
chance been standing amicably side by side
upon one of my book shelves during this
study — Eckhart's Mystiche Schriften, and Rau
schenbusch's Christianizing the Social Order.
Can the objects and aims represented by these
two volumes really go together, not only in
books but in life? Many would answer "No."
But would it be the right answer, the well-
considered and final answer?
It is true enough that the forces and motives
that make for social progress are some of
them very unmystical and matter-of-fact. One
of the two leading motives that have furthered
democracy is, as we have seen, quite non-
mystical — the assertion of individual rights,
the struggle for material betterment.^ Scien
tific investigation of the conditions under which
men and women live and scientific knowledge
of the means by which those conditions can
be remedied have also played a large part.
Still more potent have been the "rise of the
masses" and the organization of labor. This
movement has flourished largely upon material
and self -regarding aims. Socialism, notwith
standing that it has so much not only of justice
but of class altruism and even of idealism in it,
is steeped in economic materialism. As such
* See Part ii. Chapter i.

242 MYSTICISM AND MODERN LIFE
it is abnormal, for it puts that first which
should be second. The socialist state, if it
should ever be realized as at present preached
by the main body of Socialists, would be non-
spiritual, nonreligious, and so far nonhuman.
It would be that "ghastly, smooth life, dead at
heart," which is the bane of so many victims
of prosperity. For the Socialist as well as the
capitalist, for all of us in fact, Tolstoy's Message
to Mankind is a word to be received with deep
respect. Nevertheless, when all the purely economic
factors in social progress, and those of seff-
interest as well, have been given full recogni
tion, it is still true that in its main impulse and
ideal the social and industrial awakening of
our time is religious, mystical. Christian.^ It
springs from that other and greater force in
bringing in the new Social Order, altruism;
and altruism is rooted in mysticism. It is true
that mysticism cares less for material good
than for spiritual, less for institutions than for
individuals, less for reformations than for con-

* "Mysticism may be said to express the inmost core of religion, because,
in its insistence upon tbe 'nearness' of God and tbe fatherhood of God, it,
ipso facto, conveys the sterling truth of the 'nearness* of man to man;
in other words, the brotherhood of all men. It is thus tbe greatest incentive
to works of altruism, to self-sacrifice on the nloblest scale. The true mystic
can never be a self-centered individual. He must recognize tbe image of
God in every fallen brother" (J. Abelson, "Mysticism and Rabbinical
Literature," Hibbert Journal, vol, ji, 2, p. 429).

MODERN SOCIETY 243
versions. But it does not follow that it is neces
sarily indifferent to social and institutional
agencies. The very fact that the mystic seeks
spiritual values may well make him eager to
remedy all material conditions that stand in
the way of the soul. His desire for the highest
good of others leads him to befriend any means
that will promote it. He is enlisted in behalf
of civilization, though not as an end but as a
means. If the storming of the Bastile was a
landmark in the coming of the new social order,
so also was the Proclamation of Emancipa
tion. If democracy has come ia by the assertion
of rights, it has come in also, as Benjamin
Kidd has shown, by the conferring of rights.
If it has come in by battle, it has come in also
by prayer. If industrial liberty has been won
chiefly by the strike, it has been won also by
public sympathy for the striker.
As the altruistic motive and ideal have
played so large a part in bringing the new
social order thus far on its way they will surely
play a still larger part in the future. In a
striking paper, "Democracy a New Unfolding
of Human Power," Robert A. Woods, of the
South End House, Boston, one of the pioneers
in this country in social settlement work, has
written:

214 MYSTICISM AND MODERN LIFE
Perhaps the surest ground of confidence
that humanity is actually passing into this
further stage of progress is found in the pres
ence of a growing and spreading moral dynamic
which is essentially new as a social phenomenon.
There is, in fact, in the movement toward social
democracy a peculiar sense of mystic power.
It brings to the ordinary man that strange
reassurance of the larger life which comes of
itself through channels of loyalty. There is that
scattereth and yet increaseth. A large intensity
of service and cooperation goes into every one
of the bewildering maze of human groupings,
and is followed by a great recompense."
There is a social mysticism, as well as an
individual mysticism, which is carrying us on,
with nameless might, into the larger human
life. It is grounded in that which is the heart
and soul of mysticism, — love. Do despite to
love as we may, it will gradually mold humanity
into its own image. As that valiant mystic,
William Penn, wrote, in Some Fruits of Solitude:
"Love is above all, and when it prevails in us
all we shall all be lovely and in love with God
and one another." This social mysticism is
also personal. The social consciousness is
not something impersonal, sui generis — mass-
generated — but is made up of individual con-
« Page 97.

MODERN SOCIETY 245
sciousnesses, however different the composite
consciousness may seem to be from the aggre
gate of the individuals composing it. There
is mysticism in aggregates of men as well as
in individuals. The power of the Spirit is
silently at work in concerted, as well as indi
vidual, convictions and advancements. The
peace movement, for example, while it has its
economic and social, as well as humanitarian
motives, is at bottom spiritual as well as
ethical, and roots in that love of man which is
the obverse of the love of God.
V
Let us cease to look upon mysticism as
essentially abnormal in nature or as past. It
has had a noble history. Yet it belongs to the
present and the future also. The potencies of
mystical religion as it deepens and broadens,
both for the individual and the race, are bound
less. The "traffic of Jacob's ladder" rises "be
tween Heaven and Charing Cross." All the
relations of lffe are capable of spiritual
values. A deeper sense of the reality and scope of
spiritual verities is surging in upon us, as the
Umitations of science are more clearly recog
nized. Scientific finaUties are following theo
logical dogmatisms and smug conventionalities

246 MYSTICISM AND MODERN LIFE
into limbo. We are climbing out of the valley,
and the horizon broadens. So far from leading
back to ancient mists and shades, the mystical
pathway is the line of advance into a larger
fulfillment of the possibilities of the world
within through which the world without gets
its meaning.
"The quest after the ultimate meaning of
this mysterious lffe of ours revives on every
hand." It may seem for the present as ff this
quest were a forlorn hope amid the brutality
of an apparently wholly materialistic age. But
in quietness and confidence is strength. The
powers of an Invincible Order are with love and
over it. The future is theirs who follow the
Gleam. For that mystic Gleam, Uke the
mystic Rock, is Christ.
In the quenchless light of the mystic vision,
by the power of that Spirit which was in the
beginning, is now, and ever shall be — incarnated
in the Redemptive Christ — ^humanity will not
fail of its Divine Goal, a conviction nobly
voiced in words put into the mouth of a
shadowy mediseval mystic by one of the sun
niest and sanest of modern mystics:
For these things tend still upward, progress is
The law of life, man is not Man as yet.
Nor shall I deem his object served, his end

MODERN SOCIETY 247
Attained, his genuine strength put fairly forth.
While only here and there a star dispels
The darkness, here and there a towering mind
O'erlooks its prostrate fellows; when the host
Is out at once to the despair of night.
When all mankind alike is perfected.
Equal in full-blown powers — then, not till then,
I say, begins man's general infancy.
. . . So in man's self arise
August anticipations, symbols, types
Of a dim splendor ever on before
In that eternal circle life pursues.
For men begin to pass their nature's bound,
And find new hopes and cares which fast supplant
Their proper joys and griefs; they grow too great
For narrow creeds of right and wrong, which fade
Before the unmeasured thirst for good; while peace
Rises within them ever more and more.
Such men are even now upon the earth.
Serene amid the half -formed creatures round
Who should be saved by them and joined with
them.'
In conclusion, let me add a word as to the
relation of mysticism to Christianity. Normal
mysticism merges into Christianity, as a river
into the sea, and both loses and finds itself in
the larger truth. As R. C. Moberly has finely
said: "All Christians profess belief in the
Holy Ghost. Had only aU Christians under-
^Browning: Paracelsus.

248 MYSTICISM AND MODERN LIFE
stood and lived up to their belief, they would
all have been mystics; or, in other words, there
would have been no 'mysticism.' "*
All studies of religion, including that of
mysticism, lead to a fresh realization of the
depth, the comprehensiveness, and the finality
of Christianity, as it opens ever greater reaches
and depths of human experience and reveals
its exhaustless capacity for human needs and
human progress. Instead of Christianity being
a form of mysticism, normal mysticism is an
element of Christianity.
What we need, then, is not so much a new
mysticism, as a larger realization of the mystical
element in reUgion as it culminates in Chris
tianity. ^ Atonement and Personality, p, 316.

Grant us grace to rest from all sinful deeds
and thoughts, to surrender ourselves wholly
unto Thee, and to keep our souls still before
Thee like a still lake; that so the beams of
Thy grace may be mirrored therein, and may
kindle in our hearts the glow of faith and love
and prayer. May we, through such stillness
and hope, find strength and gladness in Thee,
0 GOD, now and forever more. Amen.
— Joachim Embden.

INDEX

Abelson, J., 242n.
Absolute, 62, 64
Absolutism, 22
Adams, George P., 119n.
Ainslee, Peter, 224
Albee, Helen, 39
Alfred, 112
Altruism, 242
Ames. E. S., 215
Amiel, 187, 203
Anabaptist, 227
Angelus Silesius, 108, 171,
Anthony, 162
Antinomianism, 109
Arnold, Matthew, 187
Asceticism, 41, 42, 56, 57,
60
Atkins, G. G., 234n.
Augustine, 15, 30, 67,
130, 131, 152, 161, 171,
196
Autosuggestion, 147, 148
Awakening, 29, 30, 36

Beethoven, 146
Being (vs. Doing), 186
Bergson, 23, 128, 156
Bernard, 154, 236
Bhagavad Gita, 30, 236

Bible, 38, 102, 222
Bigelow, John. 38, 39
Blood, B. P., 180n.
Boehme, 32, 79, 82, 136, 157,
175, 177, 190, 229
Bonaventura, 111
Boutroux, 24, 136, 145, 163
Brainerd, David, 155
Brent, Bishop, 87n., 147, 223
Brooks, Phillips. 152, 236
Brown, Thomas, 199n.
Browning, 201, 239, 247
177 Browning, Mrs., 202
>" Bryant, 205
Bucke, Dr., 40, 77, 79, 81, 82,
156
68, Buckham, M. H., 154n.
Bunyan, 183, 199, 239
Burton, N., 214
Bushnell, 214

106,178,

Caird, E., 14
Calvin, 130, 228
Carlstadt, 101
Carlyle, 201
Catherine of Genoa, 31, 36,
53, 110, 157
Catherine of Siena, 30, 112,
162
Chalmers, 69

251

252

INDEX

Chesterton, 20, 184
Christianity, 115, 117, 222f.,
248
Christian Science, 63, 65, 66,
70
Church, 101, 209f.
Church Music, 214
Clara, 154
Coe, 122, 136
Coleridge, 52, 98, 124, 200
Cosmic Consciousness, 81, 82,
83
Crashaw, 237 D
Dante, 30, 53, 79, 101, 187,
197, 225, 236, 239
Deissmann, 209n.
Democracy, 114, 115, 241,
243
Denck, 228
Dialectic, 127, 128
Dickens, 205
Dionysius, 62, 66, 107, 151,
175
Disasters, 46f.
Discipline, 41f.
DobschUtz, Von, 102n.
Doddridge, 200
Dogmatism, 71
Donne, 239
Dresser, H. W., 93
Diihm, 93 E
Eckhart, 62, 103, 107, 175,
190, 229, 239, 241
Ecstasy, 35, 36, 51

. Eddy, Mrs., 62
'Edwards, Jonathan, 82, 152,
' 193
Emerson, 151, 177, 180, 204,
^ 210, 236
Erigena, 62, 151, 175
Eternal, 70, 175f.
Eucken, 23
Evil, 107f.
Experience, 16, 118, 119, 154,
162, 166, 222, 230
F
PAielon, 171, 202
Ferrando, G., 22n.
Fichte, 119, 203
Finney, Charles G., 52, 79
Fleming, W. K., 52, 199n.
Fourth Gospel, 196
Fox, George, 38, 67, 199
Fra Angelico, 162
Francis of Assisi, 30, 67, 81,
152, 154, 157, 162, 183,
197, 229, 230, 236, 238
Francis of Sales, 154
Frank, 228
Friends, 225
Friends of God, 82, 157, 192,
229

Gautama, 77, 79
Goethe, 15, 75, 203
God, 15, 18, 46, 51, 75, 117,
126, 132, 137, 142, 143,
149, 152, 153, 159, 173,
191, 211, 213
Gordon, G. A., 121, 148n.

INDEX

25:i

Guyon, Madame, 30, 31, 35,
155, 171, 203, 224, 225
H
Hall, Cuthbert, 215n.
Hall, G. Stanley, 136
Hawthorne, 97, 186, 205
Health, 60, 61, 67f.
Hegel, 119.
Hermann, 115n., 158
Herbert, George, 112, 198,
239
History and the Historic
Christ, 115f.
Hocking, 13, 21, 35, 93n., 162
Holmes, 205
Hudson, T. J., 22n.
HUgel, Von, 21, 37n., 108, 159
Hugo, 205
Humility, 188
Humor, 237f.
Hymns, 206, 217 I
Ideas, 12 If.
Illumination, 29, 33, 47, 48,
50
Immediacy, 16, 123f.
Individualism, 97, 98, 100
Indwelling Christ, 82
Inge, 15, 16n., 21, 51n., 52
Inner Light, 99
Intellect, 125, 180
Intellectualism, 178
Interpretation, 119, 122, 129
Intuition, 120, 124, 128 .
Isaiah, 239 y^

/"

James, William, 21, 23, 24,
49, 52, 61, 65, 75, 85, 86,
87, 93, 137, 229n.
Jeffries, R., 76, 79
Jesus, 30, 42, 71, 77, 116, 117,
154, 157, 160, 167, 195, 222
John, Father, 63
Joan of Arc, 162, 236
Jones, R. M., 15, 21, 37n.,
110, 112n., 148
Joubert, 187
Juan of the Cross, 98, 104,
155
Juliana of Norwich, 239
K
Kant. 18, 146
Keble, 201
Kidd, Benjamin,, 243
Kingsley, 205
Kuhns, Oscar, 75n.

Law, William, 157, 200, 228
Lawrence, Brother, 69, 112,
191, 197
Leuba, 133n.
Life a school, 42
Lincoln, 239
Longfellow, 204
Loofs, 157n., 229
Love, 36, 80, 91, 92, 105, 126,
147, 191, 236, 244, 245
Lovejoy, A. O., 23n.
Lowell, J. R., 52, 205
Loyola, 69

254

INDEX

Luther, 42, 67, 69, 101, 103,
112, 152, 162, 217, 226
M
Macdonald, George, 205
Macgregor, 166
Maeterlinck, 122, 194, 204
Manz, 228
Martin, A. S., 22n.
Martineau, 189
Mathews, Shailer, 219
Melanchthon, 227
Menno, 228
Michael Angelo, 225
Milton, 200
Moberly, R. C, 16n., 247
Moody, William Vaughan, 205
Molinos, 224
Moore, Mrs. Stuart, 61, 68
More, Thomas, 112, 213, 239
Moses, 152, 181, 236
Monasticism, 56
Moravians, 105
Milnsterberg, 136n., 145
Mystery, 13, 174
Mysticism, Christo-centric,
158; contemplative, 151;
defined, 14f.; forms of,
162f.; instinctive, 150, 153;
normal, 154f., 248; per
sonal, 152, 153; Protestant,
226; revival of, 21f.;
Roman Catholic, 158,
224f.; speculative, 151
N
Neoplatonism, 62, 151
Nettleship, 190

New Birth, 40
New Thought, 61, 65, 66
New Testament, 195, 230
Nicoll, Robertson, 102n.
Nirvana, 191
Non-mystics, 85, 86
O
Occultism, 20, 156
Overstreet, H. A., 122n.

Pascal, 16, 79, 126, 202
Pater, Walter, 128
Paul, 42, 53, 79, 101, UI, 152,
195, 196
Peabody, F. G., 105
Penn, 199, 244
Pepper, G. W., 17
Personality, 42, 126, 186, 218
Peter Waldo, 226
Philosophy, 23
Pietism, 137, 229
Plato, 10, 74, 118, 127, 236,
239
Plotinus, 36, 79
Pratt, J. B., 17, 84, 138
Prayer, 92, 147
Prayers, 206, 207
Presence, 92
Protestantism, 41, 42, 223,
225
Psychology, 133f.
Purification, 29, 39, 41
Q
Quakers, 193, 229
Quietists, 158, 193. 229

INDEX

255

R
Racejac, 20n.
Rationalism, 125
Rauschenbusch, 8, 206, 22In.,
239
Reality, 85, 122, 125, 171, 177
Reason, 124f., 180
Reformation, 226f.
Religion, 8, 18, 22, 146, 160,
166
Revelation, 13, 117, 178
Ritschlianism, 158, 224
Robertson, Frederick, 69, 152
Roman Catholicism, 224
Rose of Lima, 34
Royce, 101, 124n.
Ruskin, 201

Savonarola, 100, 112, 162, 225
Schelling, 119
Schiller, 181, 203
Schleiermacher, 119, 154, 164
Schwenkfeldt, 228
Scott, 205
Scudder, Vida, 219, 220
Self-sacrifice, 190, 191
Sensitiveness, 56f.
Shakespeare, 79, 163, 198
Sharpe, A. B., 54n., 80n.
Shelley, 88
Sidis, 147
Sill, E. R., 205
Simplicity, 183
Socialism, 241, 242
Social Service, 218, 219
Solitude, 181, 182

Speculation, 154
Spenser, 198
Starbuck, 136
Stevenson, R. L., 69, 206
Stratton, G. M., 16n., 133n.,
136
Sub-consciousness, 134, 137f.
Suggestion, 144
Superconsciousness, 144
Suso, 30, 31, 33, 45, 155
Swedenborg, 38, 188, 203
Syllogism, 125
Syme, 136 T
Tauler, 67. 112, 173, 197
Taylor, Jeremy, 199, 239
Tennyson, 124, 143, 187, 201
Teresa, 53, 104, 154, 155, 157
Tersteegen, 230
Theologia Germanica, 29, 186,
197
Theology, 23
Thomas I Kempis, 104, 162,
180, 187, 198, 234
Thompson, Francis, 58, 202,
236
Tolstoy, 172, 203, 242
Traherne, 184, 185
Trine, R. W., 62
Troeltsch, 24n.
Tyrrell, 163 U
UnderhiU, Edith, 16n., 21, 32,
34, 36n., 37n., 112n., 146n.,
225n.
Unification, 29, 35
Unity of the Church, 222f.

256

INDEX

Van Dyke, 205
Vaughan, 21
Vincent de Paul, 154
Virtue, 187f.
Vision, 93, 94 W
Walton, Izaak. 198
Weaver, 68n.
Weigel, 228
Wesley, 152, 173
Wesleyanism, 157
Wesleyans, 228, 229
Whitman, 77, 79, 204

/

Whittier, 152, 204, 230
Wickliffe, 226
/• Willard, Frances. 179, 236
Wobbermin, 116n.
Woods, R. A., 243
/Woolman, John, 69, 199
Wordsworth, 52, 74, 82, 84,
177, 201
Work, 43
Worship, 210f. Y
Yoga, 151
Younghusband, Francis, 73,
74

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