584th OEDINAEY GENERAL MEETING, 



HELD IN THE CONFERENCE HALL, THE CENTRAL HALL, 

 WESTMINSTER, ON MONDAY, JANUARY 15th, 1917, 



AT 4.30 P.M. 



A. T. ScHOFiELD, Esq., M.D., in the Chair. 



The Minutes of the preceding Meeting were read and confirmed, and 

 the Secretary announced the election of Mrs. Sarah D. Nicholl and 

 Miss C. Hussey as Associates of the Institute, and the election of 

 Miss Ethel D. James, B.A,, Associate of the Institute, as a Member. 



The Chairman said that it was with very great pleasure that he called 

 upon the Very Rev. the Dean of St. Paul's to read his paper on 

 "Christian Mysticism." It was an occasion of gratification to the 

 Victoria Institute to be addressed by one who had devoted much of 

 his life and attention to so important and difficult a subject as that upon 

 which he was about to speak. 



CHRISTIAN MYSTICISM. By the Very Eev. W. E. Inge, 

 M.A., D.D., Dean of St. Paul's. 



The Mystic as Thinker. 



THE subject on wbich you have been so good as to invite me 

 to speak to you is one on which I have written and 

 spoken so much that I am afraid some of you may be able 

 to guess only too well the sort of thing which you have to 

 expect from me about it. I will try not to repeat myself more 

 than I can help, and the subject is very large — indeed, inexhaus- 

 tible. Moreover, if there is any truth in the contention of the 

 mystics themselves, it is so much bound up with vital experi- 

 ence that seventeen years of life — and that period has elapsed 

 since I wrote my Bampton Lectures — cannot go for nothing in 

 one's attitude towards it. For no one can talk or write profit- 

 ably about mystical religion, or Christian mysticism, unless he 

 is trying to some extent to make the experiences which he 

 describes his own. And in this quest experience, rather than 

 learning, is the educator. The mystics (says Koyce) are the 

 most thoroughgoing of empiricists. They are absolutists, no 

 doubt ; the spiritual world for them is an eternal fact, not an 

 ideal ; but their Absolute is at the same time the goal of 



