CHRISTIAN MYSTICISM. 



61 



It may be that the majority in every age must be conteiit to 

 live on tradition, to believe on trust, and to repose on 

 the common strength, but it is necessary that there should be 

 a select few who are called to see for themselves. They caniwt 

 take their convictions on hearsay ; they are not satisfied even 

 with what ordinary people call experience. They are impelled 

 by an inner necessity to come, if it may be, into immediate 

 contact with the spiritual realities which encompass us, to 

 taste and see how gracious the Lord is." The mystic is he 

 w]io has succeeded, at least in a measure, in this quest. Like 

 the Old Testament patriarch, he can say, " I have seen God face 

 to face, and my life is preserved." 



In this address I can only touch upon some aspects of a great 

 subject. The popular and approved method now of writing 

 about mysticism is to treat it as a chapter or branch of the 

 psychology of religion. A mass of literature has appeared 

 during the last twenty years, among it being works by W. James, 

 Starbuck, Coe, Leuba, Murisier, Delacroix (the ablest), and many 

 others. Materials have been collected in great abundance to 

 illustrate the varieties of religious ecstasy, the means by which 

 it can be induced or encouraged ; the state of health, age, and 

 condition of the experient ; the fluctuations between joy and 

 misery — the rapture and the dark night of the soul ; the dura- 

 tion of the visions and their contents — these and many other 

 subjects in which religion and medicine might dispute the right 

 to make a diagnosis of the case, have been investigated with 

 great industry and excellent results. Nevertheless, since I must 

 leave out something, I choose to leave out all this side of the 

 subject. It is, after all, an external method of treating a great 

 fact in the life and experience of the race — the fact, I mean, 

 that many thousands of men and women have been absolutely 

 convinced that they have had immediate assurance and con- 

 sciousness of the Divine, that they have seen Him Who is 

 invisible and visited the land which is very far off. The psy- 

 chologist does not deny the truth of these intuitions ; it is not 

 his business either to affirm or deny anything about ultimate 

 truth. But by his way of treating the mystics as medical 

 "cases," whose abnormal experiences are, if possible, to be 

 accounted for by the state of their nerves or by the austerities 

 through which they have gone, he does practically assume that 

 the mystical experience is purely subjective, or at any rate 

 that the most interesting part of the phenomena is in connexion 

 with psychopathy. That, I venture to say, is not the most 

 favourable attitude for studying the things of the spirit. The 



