CHRISTIAN MYSTICISM. 



79 



through faith and prayer and submission ; and Jesus Christ is the 

 bond of union between the self and ' the God of the spirits of all 

 flesh.' We are all Mystics if we are in touch with the Eternal, 

 though we do not all put our philosophy into the same words." 



Mr. M. L. KousE, B.A., B.L., said that he had been much pleased 

 that the Lecturer had stated that it was not the miracles but their 

 intercourse with Christ, which had led the Apostles to accept Him as 

 the Messiah (Mr. Rouse here quoted the call of five of the Apostles, 

 recorded in St. John i, before the Lord had wrought any miracle). 

 Mr. Eouse asked "Have not Christian Mystics generally made 

 the mistake of living too much in retirement 1 " and instanced the 

 case of Madame de la Mothe Guyon, who confided her three very 

 young daughters to guardians in order that she herself might be 

 free to lead an ascetic life. Daniel, on the other hand, though he 

 devoted himself to prayer, yet w^hen his prayer was ended arose to 

 do the king's business, and did it so w^ell that his adversaries could 

 find no fault in him. 



Lecturer's Reply. 

 The Lecturer, in replying, said he wished to express his thanks 

 for the kind things that had been said about his Paper. He hoped 

 some of the speakers would excuse him if in his reply, which must 

 be short, he confined himself to two only out of the points which 

 had been raised, the two w^hich seemed to be the most important. 

 The first was the objection that had been raised that the great 

 Mystics had on the whole expressed themselves in a hostile sense 

 towards human reason, and that therefore he very much over- 

 emphasized the intellectual side of his subject. It was necessary 

 to distinguish between the reasoning faculty and the higher reason. 

 According to the philosophy with which he had been dealing, 

 the discursive reason belonged to the soul and not to the higher 

 spiritual life, because its whole function was to distinguish between 

 things and ideas on the plane of the soul-life. Therefore we could 

 quite understand that some of the Mystics had insisted that we 

 must not stop short at the stage of reasoning in that sense. The 

 higher faculty was certainly not purely intellectual, but neither 

 was it destitute of intellect. It was rather the whole personality, 

 the whole man, the mind and will and aff'ections exalted into a 

 higher plane where they w^orked together. Therefore the vision of 

 God was vouchsafed to the whole man, and not to one particular 



