The Mystic and the Corporate Life

25One of the commonest of the criticisms which are brought against the mystics is that they represent an unsocial type of religion; that their spiritual enthusiasms are personal and individual, and that they do not share or value the corporate life and institutions of the church or community to which they belong. Yet as a matter of fact, the relation that does and should exist between personal religion and the corporate life of the church frequently appears in them in a peculiarly intense, a peculiarly interesting form; and in their lives, perhaps, more easily than elsewhere, we may discern the principles which do or should govern the relation of the individual to the community.

In the true mystic, who is so often and so wrongly called a "religious individualist" we see personal religion raised to its highest power. If we accept his experience as genuine, it involves an intercourse with the spiritual world, an awareness of it, which transcends the normal experience, and appears to be independent of the general religiouis consciousness of the community to which he belongs. The mystic speaks with God as a person with a Person, and not as a member of a group. He lives with an immediate knowledge far more than by belief; by a knowledge achieved in those hours of direct, unmediated intercourse with the Transcendent when, as he says, he was "in union with God". The certitude then gained — a certitude which he cannot impart, and which is not generally diffused — governs all his reactions to the Universe. It even persists and upholds him in those 26terrible hours of darkness when all his sensee of spiritual reality is taken away.

Such a personality as this seems to stand in little need of the support which the smaller nature, the more languid religious consciousness, receives from the corporate spirit. By the very term, "mystic", we indicate a certain aloofness from the crowd, suggest that he is in possession of a secret which the community as a whole does not and cannot share; that he lives at levels to which they cannot rise. I think that much of the distrust with which he is often regarded comes from this sense of his independence of the herd; his apparent separation from the often clumsy and always symbolic methods of institutional religion, and the further fact that his methods and results cannot be criticised or checked by those who have not shared them. "I spake as I saw," said David; and those who did not see can only preserve a respectful or an exasperated silence.

Yet this common perception that the mystic is a lonely soul wholly absorbed in his vertyical relation with God, that his form of religious life represents an opposition to and an implicit criticism of tghe corporate and institutional form of religious life; this is decisively contradicted by history, which shows us, again and again, the great mystics as the loyal children of the great religious institutions, and forces us to admit that here as in other departments of human activity the corporate and the individual life are intimately plaited together.Even those who have broken away from the churches that reared them, have quickly drawn to themselves disciples, and become the centres of new groups. Surely, therefore, it is worthwhile to examine, if we can, the nature of the connection between these two factors: to ask, on the one hand, what it is that the corporate life and the group consciousness which it develops give the mystic; on the other, what is the treal value of the mystic to the corporate life of his church?27As to the first question: What is it that the corporate life does for the geat spiritual genius?—for I think that we may may allow the mystic to be that. First and most obviously, it gives him a favourable environment. he must have an environment: he must be affected by it. That is a certainty in the case of any living thing; a certainty so obvious that it would be hardly worth stating were it not that those who talk about the mystic craving for solitude — his complete aloofness from human life — seem often to ignore it. The idea of solitude in any complete sense is, of course, an illusion. We are bound, if we live at all, to accept the fact of a living world outside ourselves, to have social relations with something; and it only remains to decide what these relations shall be. The yogi or the hermit who retreats to the forest in order to concentrate his mind more utterly upon the quest of God, only exchanges the society of human beings for the society of other living things. Did he eliminate all else, the parasites of his own body, the bacterial population of his alimentary system, would be there to remind him that man cannot live alone. He may shift his position in the web of life, but its strands will enmesh him still. So, too, the monk or nun, "buried alive" in the cloister is still living a family life that is governed by special ideals.

Now it is plainly better for the mystic, whose aim is the establishment of special relations with the spiritual order, that the social consciousness in which he is immersed, and from which he is taking colour all the time, should have a spiritual and religious tendency; that the social acts in which he takes part should harmonise rather than conflict with his own deep intuition of reality. The difference in degree between that deep intuition and the outward corporate acts — the cult — which he thus shares may be enormous; for the cult is an expression of the crowd consciousness, and manifests its spiritual crudity, its innate conservatism, its 28primitive demands for safety and personal rewards. The inadequacy or unreality of the forms, the low level of the adoration that they invoke, may distress and even disgust him. Yet, even so, it is better that he should be within a church than outside it. Compared with this one fact — that he is a member of a social group which recognises spiritual values, and therefore lives in an environment permeated by religious concepts — the accuracy in detail of the creed which the group professes, the adequacy of its liturgical acts, is unimportant.

Next, the demands made and the restrictions imposed by the community on the individual are good for the mystic. Man is social right through; in spirit as well as in body and mind. His most sublime spiritual experiences are themselves social in type. Intercourse of a person with a Person, the merging of his narrowe consciousness in a larger consciousness, the achievement of a divine sonship, a spiritual marriage: these are tghe highest things that he can say concerning his achievement of Divine Reality. And they all entail, not a narrow self-realisation, but the breaking down of barriers, the setting up of wider relationships. It followes that self-mergence in the common life is an education for that self-mergence in the absolute life at which the mystic aims. Such self-mergence, and the training in humility, self-denial, obedience, suppleness, which is involved in it, is held by all ascetic teachers to be essential to the education of the human soul. Union with, and to a certain extent submission to, the church, to the family — to life, in fact — an attitude of self-giving surrender: this is the best of preparations for that total self-naughting of the soul which is involved in union with God; that utter doing away ofthe I, the Me, and the Mine, till it becomes one will and one loive with the divine will and love.

On these two counts alone — harmonious environment and salutary discipline — we shall expect, other things being equal29that the richest and most fruitful types of mystical experience will arise within religious institutions rather than outside them; and as a matter of fact, this is what we do find. The Hindu ascetic has his recognised place in the Hindu system. He has but reached the summit of a pyramid which is firmly based on earth. The Sufi is a good Moslem, and commonly a member of a religious confraternity which imposes a strict rule of life. The Christian mystic too grows up from the Christian society. His roots strike deep down into that favouring soil. Though his branches may shoot up to the heavens, and seem to draw thence all the light and heat by which he lives, yet he is really fed from below as well as from above. When he refuses to acknowledge this principle, when he abjures the discipline, the authority, the support of the corporate life and regards himself as a separate individual, dependent on direct inspiration alone; how quickly he becomes unbalanced and eccentric, how difficult it is for him to avoid the disease of spiritual megalomania. Refusing the support and discipline of organised religion, he becomes likea poet who refuses to be controlled bhe laws of prosody; which seem to limit, but really strengthen and beautify his work.

It is true that right through the history of Christian mysticism there has been a line of insurgent mystics who have made this refusal; whose direct vision of spiritual perfection has brough with it so overwhelming a sense of the imperfection, formalism, unreality, the dreadfulness of religious institutions, that it has forced them into a position of more or less acute revolt from the officioal church. So clear has been their own consciousness of the spiritual world that the soul's life and growth, its actual and individual rebirth, have shone out for them as the only things that matter. Hence the dramatisation of these things in ceremonial religion, the effort to give spiritual values a concrete form, has seemed to them like a blasphemous parody. Unable to harmonise the 30inward and the outward — the all-penetrating reality of religion as they understand it, with its crude expression in the external cult, where formal acts and intellectual assents so often seem to take the place of inward changes — in the end they solve the problem by repudiating the external and visible church. this rebel-type, victims of exaggerated individualism, which would make the special experiences of a few the standard for a whole race, has persisted side by side with the law-abiding type; who have preserved, if not always a perfect balance between liberty and obedience, at any rate a more reasonable proportion between them. Often the corruption of the times in which he lived has seemed to the mystic to make rebellion inevitable. This is particularly true in the case of George Fox, whose ragings were directed less against organised religion than against unreal religion; and who might, had he lived in 14th century Germany, have found a congenial career as one of the Friends of God. Yet, even so, the careers of these rebels have been on the whole unfruitful compared with those who remained within the institutional framework and effected their reforms from inside. They seldom quite escape the taint of arrogance. There is apt to be a touch of self-consciousn ess in their sanctity. We have only to compare the influence exerted by the outstanding figures of the two groups, to realise which type of spiritual life has had the best and most enduring influence on the spiritual history of the race; which, in fact, best stands the pragmatic test.

On the rebel side we have of course the leaders of many dead heresies and sects. The Montanists of the second century, with their claim to direct inspiration, their cult of ecstatic phenomena and prophetic speech; the numerous mystical heretics and illuminati of the Middle Ages, often preachingthe most extravagant doctrines and always claiming for them divine authority — for instance, the Brethren of the Free Spirit, who claimed the possession of the Holy Ghost as an excuse, not only for theological but also for moral aberrations. later, there are the Quietists, a particularly poisonous brand of unbalanced contemplatives; and contemporary with their revolt against Catholic forms andauthorities, innumerable mystical revolts against Protestant forms and authorities, the very names of whose originators are now almost forgotten. Amongst these two mighty figures stand up: Jacob Boehme and George Fox. But wejmust remember as regards Boehme that, although he certainly spoke with great violence against the rror of confusing external acceptance of religion with internal adherence to God, "historical Christians" with "new men", he never disowned the Lutheran Church within which he was born. On the contrary it ws that church that persecuted and finally disowned him. As to that great and strange genius, George Fox, who aimed at nothing less than a world religion of a mystical type, the free and conscious contact of every soul with the Spirit of God, I believe that any unbiassed student of his Journal must allow that, enormous as his achievement was, it might have been far greater had his violent sense of vocation, his remarkable spiritual gifts, been disciplined and controlled by the corporate consciousness as expressed in institutional religion. then, some of the energy which he expended in denunciations of steeple-houses might have been employed in healing the disharmony between the visible and invisible church; helping that vision of the Eternal by which he was possessed to find concrete expression within traditional forms. here, as elsewhere, the Inner Light would have burned with a better and truer flame had it submitted to the limitations of a lamp.

I do not suggest that these people, even the most extravagant of them, were not truly spiritual or truly mystical. The sort of criticism that divides mysticism into two groups — the orthodox, who are inspired by God, and the heretical, who are inspired by Satan — of course belongs to the dark32ages of theology. On the contrary, these rebel-mystics most often possessed — sometimes in a highly-developed form — the sharp, direct consciousness of the Divine Life which is the essential quality of the mystic. this was to them the central fact; by comparison with it they judged all other things. What they did not possess was the balancing, equivalent consciousness of, and reverence for, corporate human life; that group-personality which is the church, and its value and authority. they lacked the sense that the whole organism, the whole herd, with all its imperfections, is yet interdependent, and has got to move together, urged from within by it's more vivid spirits, not stung from without, as if by some enthusiastic spiritual mosquito. To a greater or lesser extent they failed in effect because they tried to be mystical in a non-human instead of a human way; were "other-worldly" in a bad sense of the word. They have not always remembered that Christ Himself, the supreme pattern of all mystics, lived a balanced personal life of clear personal vision, unmediated intercourse with God on the one hand, and gentle and patient submission to the corporate consciousness on the other hand. Though severely critical of the unrealities and hypocrisy of current institutionalism, he yet sought to form the group, the "little flock" in which His ideas should be incorporated within, and not over against, the official Jewish Church; and thus gradually to leaven the whole.

Put now against these vigorous individualists the names of the mystics who have never felt that their passionate correspondences with the Eternal Order — their clear vision of the adorable Perfection of God and the imperfection, languor and corruption of man — need involve a break with the corporate religious life. Observe how these have continued for centuries to be fruitful personalities, often not merely within their own communion, but outside it too; how they have ascted as salt, as leaven, permeating and transmuting the 33general consciousness of the Body of Christ. Often, too, these have been reformers — drastic, unrelenting disturbers of the established order of things. St Bernard, St Hildegarde, Mechthild, Jacopone da Todi, St Catherine of Siena, Tauler were passionate in their denunciations of slackness, corruption, and disorder. But they made their protests, and brought back the general consciousness to a closer contact with reality, from within, and not from without, the Christian Church. Consider St Bernard and Richard of St Victor, whose writings influenced for centuries the whole of the religious literature of Europe; St Hildegarde, St Gertrude, Mechthild of Magdeburg, great mystics, good churchwomen, but severe denouncers of formalism and unreality; St Francis of Assisi who removed evangelical poverty from the sphere of notion to the sphere of fact; Sty Catherine of Siena, who changed Italian politics; St Joan of Arc, who altered European history; the soaring transcendentalism of Ruysbroeck, who was yet content to be a humble parish priest; the great mystical movement of the Friends of God, ardent Catholics and ardent reformers too. Even our own great mystical poets, Donne, Crashaw, Vaughan, Herbert, Traherne, Coventry Patmore, and Francis Thonpson, were one and all convinced institutionalists. Finally, look at some of the great cloistered mystics, of whom St Teresa and St John of the Cross are types; and see how, though they seem in the eyes of the world to be "buried alive" they are and remain the ardent centres of a spreading light, which perpetually stimulates and revivifies not only members of their own order or communion, but spiritually sensitive souls outside.

Perhaps it is in those contemplatives who lived within and were obedient to the rule of the great monastic orders that we can see most easily the nature of the link between the individual soul and the religious group within which it does or should develop; the enormous value to it of tradition34that huge accumulation of tendencies, ideals, systems, wisdom both speculative and practical, which is preserved in the corporate consciousness. Here the influence of the religious family, the rule of life, the ideal held out, the severe education in self-control administered to every novice, can always be traced; conditioning, and, I believe, helping and bracing the character of that communion with the Transcendent which the individual mystic enjoys. As the baby at birth enters into a civilisation prepared for him, and is at once supported, educated, even clothed by a tradition prepared by countless generations of the past; so the novice whose spiritual childhood begins within a great monastic family receives — supposing, of course, that the order is true to its ideals — the support and benefits of a tradition evolved during previous generations in response to the needs of other similar souls; and he is by so much the better off than he would be were he a solitary, or a deliberate rebel who refuses to accept the heritage of the past. he finds a life beautifully adjusted to his needs; yet, which being greater and older than his own, keeps his rampant individualism in check, nurtures and cultivates his growing spiritual consciousness, and opposes — by its perpetual demands on humility, obedience, and unselfishness — the vice of pride which the mystical individualist seldom escapes. Such a mystical consciousness would not necessarily die without the support of this corporate tradition, any more than the bay would necessarily die did it emerge into the conditions of the paleolithic cave instead of into those of the modern nursery. But in both cases the environment would be unfavourable, and the effort required to attain that position into which the child of tradition enters at birth would be an enormous drain upon the powers of the organism.

The instinct of many mystics for a certain measure of solitude is no contradiction of this. the hermits and the anchorites, even such rare and extreme types as St Anthony35of Egypt, who is said to have lived in perfect solitude for twenty years, did not withdraw from the Christian society; nor did they disown the validity of its external and institutional life. They sought to construct or find within the Christian church an environment in which their special tendencies could develop in a normal way; and this not merely for themselves, but also for the sake of other souls. Such a period of withdrawal was felt by them to be a necessary condition of their full effectiveness for life. So, too, the poet or the artist must retreat from his fellows if he is to commune with the eternal loveliness and interpret her to other men: for a total concentration on reality is the condition under which it is revealed. the Catholic Church has always recognised, and does still in the continued existence of the cloistered orders, the reasonableness of this demand. We do not as a rule say bitter things when a person od artistic or speculative genius leaves his family group and goes to Paris or Oxford in order that his special powers may become educated and more effective for life; nor should we feel resentment because the mystical genius sometimes feels that the life of the home circle, or even the normal life of the community, cannot give the special training which he requires. In a few cases the mystics have felt a long period of complete isolation to be necessary to them; but most often they have been accessible to those who really needed them, and helped these all the more because of the long periods of silence in which they listened to the Voice of God, too often inaudible for them, as for us, in the general bustle of the world. Their point of view has been beautifully stated by a young French mystic, Elizabeth de la Trinité, who died a few years ago. "I want," she says, "to be all silence, all adoration, that I may penetrate more and more deeply into God; and become so full of Him that I can give Him in my prayers to those poor souls still ignorant of His gift." She wants to be a channel, a duct, by which the loive and power of God, of which she is so strongly 36 conscious, can flow out to other souls. It is not for herself that she is working; it is for the world. Do we not find expressed there both the individual longing and the corporate responsibility of the mystic? And do we not touch here the intimate connection which should exist between the separate life of the great mystics and the corporate life of the church? On the one hand, the highly organised society, making it possible for the contemplative to develop his special powers in a harmonious environment, and preventing the frittering of his energies; on the other, that contemplative, like a special organ developed by the Body of Christ, gaining for the whole community contacts and certitudes, which it could not gain in any other way. News of God can only enter the temporal order through some human consciousness. Is it unreasonable that for so great an office certain individuals should be set apart — within the community, not over against it — and should live in a special way?

As a matter of fact, the church has gained a thousandfold by her acquiescence in the specvial vocation of the mystics; for the treasures they won were never kept for themselves but always showered upon her. True, she has not hesitated to scrutinise and control them; sometimes her attitude has seeemed to the enthusiast for liberty to be deliberately obscurantist and tyrannical. Yet, even here — an although in many cases there has clearly been ignorance, injustice and persecution — the mystic gains more than he loses by submission to the collective judgement. Even in their harshest form, discipline and tradition are still priceless for him. First they school him in the virtue of humility, the very foundation of the Christian character; which is seldom possessed by the spiritual genius who always leads and never submits, and whose triumphant formula, "God and myself!" too often winds up becoming "Myself and God!"

O caritate, vita, ch' ogn' altro amor e morto

non vai rompendo legge; nante l'observe tutto.37said Jacopone da Todi; that natural rebel who deliberately submitted himself to an uncongenial religious authority and there found perfect freedom.

Next, the solid sense of community, the mere fact that it always lags behind the more vivid spirits, that the forward moving shepherd who sees new pastures has got to take account of the slowest sheep — all this is a valuable safeguard against the notorious extravagances of a mysticism unfettered by authority. It is significant that the greatest mystics in all communions have ever raised up their voices most earnestly against spiritual licence; have been most eager to submit their soaring intuitions to the witness of their Scriptures or the corporate feeling of their church. They realise the fact that they owe to this church the huge debt which every individual owes to the tradition of his art or of his trade. The church represents a complete spiritual civilization, a conserver of values; were it not for her, every new spiritual genius who arose would have to begin at the beginning, at the Stone Age of the soul. Instead of that he finds himself placed within a social order enriched by all the contributions of his great predecessors. The bridges are built; the roads are made and named; his own experiences and discoveries are made more valid, less terrifying, more comprehensible to him, because othewrs have been this way before. Compare the clarity, the sure-footedness as one may say, of Ruysbroeck, of St Catherine of Siena, of St Teresa, with the entanglements, the sense of wandering in beautiful but trackless places, which one feels when reading even Boehme, Fox, or Blake; and others are far less coherent than they. man needs a convention, a tradition, a limitation, if he is not to waste his creative powers; and this convention the mystics find best and most easily in the forms of the church to which they belong.

So we see that the corporate life of his church gives the mystic a good deal. What does he, on his part, give to it.38Those who see in the mystic chiefly one who rebels against, or has no use for the corporate religious life, and acknowledges no authority but that of his own spiritual intuitions, usually conceive of his experiences as having value for himself alone. he cannot, they say, communicate them or teach others to share them. Often, therefore he is spoke of as useless, selfish, other-worldly: a "lonely soul." These phrases suggest that those who use them have a very narrow view of usefulness, a very materialistic view of the Body of Christ, and a very unevangelical view of the relative positions of Mary and Martha. As a matter of fact, the mystic, instead of being useless, selfish, and other-worldly is useful, unselfish and this-worldly. he is a creative personality, consecrated to the great practical business of actualising the eternal order within the temporal; and although the pursuit of this business brings him hours of exquisite joy, it brings him hours of great suffering, too — suffering which is gladly and patiently endured. he does it, or tries to do it, not because he seeks the joy, but solely for love — love of God, love of his fellow men — for he is perpetuating in a certain sense the work of Christ, mediating between his brethren and Divine Reality. Hence, where he is fuilly developed, he will, as Ruysbroeck tells us, swing like a pendulum between contemplation and action, between adoration of God and service of man. In him life has evolved her most powerful spiritual engine; and she uses it not for the next world, but for this world, for the eternalisation of the here and now, the making of it more real and more divine, more fully charged with the grandeur of God. Often the mystics special work is done in a positiveand obvious fashion which should satisfy the most practical mind, and which is not yet wholly actuated by his central intention, that of raising up — as he sometimes says — new children of the Eternal Goodness, bringing back the corporate life to a closer contact with God. "My little children, of whom I travail," says St Paul to his converts.39There is a typical mystic speaking of his life work. Can we call St Francis of Assisi, the most devoted and original of missionaries; St Joan of Arc, remaking the consciousness of France by the most active of methods; St Catherine of Siena, purifying the Italian Church, St teresa, regenerating the whole Carmelite order, and leaving upon it a stamp it has never lost; "lazy contemplatives"? Or St catherine of Genoa, the devoted superintendent of a great hospital, who never permitted her hours of ecstatic communion with God to interfere with her duty to the sick?

Taken as a class, the Christian mystics are distinguished by nothing so much as their heroic and unselfish activities; by their vasried and innumerable services to the corporate life of the church. From their ranks have come missionaries, preachers, prophets, social reformersm poets, founders of institutions, servants of the poor and the sick, patient guides and instructors of souls. We sometimes forget that even those knowen chiefly by the writings they have left behind them have sacrifice to the difficult task of reducing their transcendent experience to words, hours in which — were the popular idea of a mystic the true one — they might have been idly basking in the Divine Light. But these practical activities, though often great, are only a part of the mystics contribution to the corportate life. If his special claims about communication with the Transcendent be true at all — and this argument is based on the assumption that there is at least some truth in it — then he really does tap a source of vitality higher than that with which other men have contact. In the language of theology, he has not merely "efficient" but also "extraordinary" grace; a larger dower of life, directly dependent on his larger, more generous love. This is a claim to which his strange triumphs over circumstance, his conqwuests over ill-fortune, ill health, oppositions and deprivations of every kind, give weight. Not many strong and normal persons would willingly face, or indeed endure,40the hardships which St paul, St Francis, St Joan of Arc, St Teresa, gladly and successfully embraced.

This larger and intenser vitality the mystic does not and cannot keep to himself. He infects with it all with whom he comes in contact, kindles the latent fire in them: for the spiritual consciousness is caught, not taught. Under his influence — sometimes from the mere encounter with his personality — other men begin to lead a more real, a more eternal life. Ruysbroeck says that the Spirit of God, when it is truly received into a soul, becomes a sprerading light; and history confirms this. Corporate experience of God always begins in personal experience of God. The rise of Christianity is the classic illustration of this truth, but Hindu and Moslem religious history also declare it. Round each of the great unitive mystics little groups of ardent disciples, of spiritual children, have grown up. This is true both of those who remained within and those who seceded from the official Church — for instance, St Bernard, Eckhart, St Francis, Yauler, Ruysbroeck, St Catherine of Siena, St Catherine of Genoa, St Teresa, Boehme, Fox. Nor did their influence cease with death.

Further, in reckoning up the value of the mystics to the church as a whole we sometimes forget the extent top which that church is indebted to mystical intuition for the actual data upon which her corporate life is based. Christianity, it is true, is fundamentally a historical religion; but it is also a religion of experience, and its very history deals quite as much with the events which attend human intercourse with the Transcendent and Eternal as with concrete and visible happenings in space and time. The New Testament is thick with reports of mystical experiences. The Fourth Gospel and the Epistles of St Paul depend for their whole character on the soaring mystical genius their writers possessed. Had St paul never been caught up in the third heaven, he would have had a very different outlook on the 41world, and Christianity would have been a very different religion in consequence. had the Fourth Evangelist never known what it was to feel the sap of the Mystic Vine flow through him, his words would have lacked their overwhelming certitude. So, too, the liturgies bear the stamp of mystical feeling, and most of the great religious concepts which the church has gradually added to her store come from the same source. If we ask ourselves what the history of the world would be without the history of her mystics, then we begin to see how much of her light and colour emanates from them; how much of their doctrine represents their experience translated into dogmatic form. That communion with — that feeding on — the Divine Life which she offers to every believer in the Eucharist is the central fact of their existence. From Clement of Alexandria downwards, again and again they appeal to Eucharistic images in order to express what it is that really happens to the soul immersed in contemplative prayer. "I am the food of the full grown," says God to St Augustine. "Every time we think with love of the Well-beloved, He is anew our meat and drink," says Ruysbroeck. So, too, the church's language concerning new birth, divine sonship, regeneration, union with Christ, and the whole concept of grace, regarded as a transcendent life and love perpetually pressing in on humanity — all this is of mystical origin, and represents not the speculations but the concrete experience of the great mystics. They are pushed out, as it were, by the visible church like tentacles, to explore the unseen world which surrounds her, and drawn back again to her bosom that they may impart to the whole body the more abundant life which they have found. Were it not for the unfailing family of the mystics, thus perpetually pushing out beyond the protective edges of the organism, and bringing back official Christianity into direct touch with the highest spiritual values, and so constantly reaffirming the fact — by them felt and experienced —42of the intimate correspondence, the regenerating contact of God with the soul, the church would long ago have fallen victim to that tendency to relapse into the mechanical which dogs all organised groups. Then the resistance which she has sometimes offered to the freshness and novelty, the adventurous quality of the mystical impulse, where it has appeared without preparation and sought to correct by its own overwhelming certitude the spiritual conventions of the day, would have become that hopeless inertia which is the precursor of death.

So we may best look upoin the great Christian mystic as a special organ developed within the Christian body for a special use. His particular sensibilities, like those which condition artistic genius, are the gates through which messages from the Transcendent come to man.. he is findi ng and feeling the iInfinite; not for himself, but for us. His achievement, bridging the gap which lies between the normal mind and the supersensuous world, makes more valid and more actual to us the assumptions on which external religion is built; vindicating the church's highest claim, and hence the soul's highest claim — the claim that achievement of Eternal Life, communion with ultimate reality, is possible to the spirit of man. More, since all human lives interpenetrate, and isolation is impossible save in death, the more we, the social group, are willing to accept the claim of the mystic, and receive what he tells us in a spirit of humility instead of a spirit of criticism; the more completely he will be able to share his treasure with us, the more deeply we shall be able to enter into that consciousness which he represents, which he brings in his own person into the human scheme.

This, of course, the Christian church has said far more beautifully in her doctrine of the Communion of Saints; and that doctrine, rightly understood, is indeed the connection between the great mystics and the 43corporate life within which they arise. Were the activities of these more vital spirits whoolly hidden from us, wholly silent and supersensual — as they are not — it would be a grossly materialistic and violently un-Christian jusdgement which concluded from this that their lives were useless save to themselves. How can a life which aims at God be useless, if we believe that achievement of Him is the final destiny and only satisfaction of every soul? It would be an implicit debnial of the efficacy of prayer, of the "prevailing merits" of sanctity, its value to the society which produces it — the power of a great and loving spirit to help, infect, and reinforce more languid souls — did we agree that the life of the most strictly enclosed contemplative was wasted. Christians, who believe that the world was redeemed from within the narrow limits of Palestine, should not thus confuse space with power, or character with the manner of its self-expression. Without the ardent prayers of the mystics, the vivid spiritual life they lead, what would the sum of human spirituality be? How can we tell what we owe to the power which they liberate, the currents which they set up, the contacts which they make? The land they see and of which they report to us, is the land towards which humanity is going. They are like the lookout men upon the cross-trees, assuring us from time to time that we are still upon our course. Tear asunder their peculiar power and office from the office of the whole, and you will have on one side a society deprived of the guides which God has raised up for it; on the other an organ deprived of its real perfection and beauty, because severed from the organism which it was intended to serve.