CHAPTER VIII

THE MESSAGE OF PAUL THE MYSTIC TO THE CHURCH OF TO-DAY.

IN using the expression "according to my gospel," Paul felt that he had a message to give which was peculiarly his own, minted in his own mind, and stamped with his own individuality. It was a message which expressed what he
had come to know and experience of Christ and of His religion. The fundamental facts which lay at the heart of it being historical, were fixed and unchangeable; but the message itself took shape from his own personality, as water takes the shape of the vessel into which it is poured. What Paul gives us is not a bare record of outward fact, but an interpretation of outward fact in the light of personal experience. The personal equation which enters into his message, and which makes it unlike any other, is that which gives to it its special value. It does not contain the whole truth, but it gives a distinct note, which is needed to make up the symphony of truth.

The most personal and distinctive thing in Paul's message is undoubtedly the mystical element which underlies his juridical doctrine of justification by faith. Nor is this grafted on to it, but grows naturally out of it, inasmuch as the relationships involved in the soul's adjustment are spiritual and personal.

Breaking up Paul's mystical message into its component parts, we find that it includes the following declarations:

1. That the formative thing in Christian experience is the personal contact of the soul of man with the living Redeemer.--In that supreme moment when Christ was revealed to him, and entered with saving power into his life, the mystical message of Paul was born. The mystical, transcendental Christ was henceforth the only Christ he knew, the only Christ he sought to make known to others. The human Christ he had not known, except by hearsay; nevertheless, as Wernie says, "it was he who best understood him." He did not belong to the favoured circle of disciples among whom the Lord went in and out. Upon the blessed face of the Master he had never looked, the gracious words which proceeded out of His mouth he had not heard. He knew Him as we must know Him if we
know Him at all, in the reality and power of His spiritual presence.

It is noteworthy that Paul makes hardly a reference to the earthly life of our Lord. The only exceptions are when he refers to His birth, death, and resurrection, and those he makes for purely doctrinal purposes; yet he must have been familiar with the events of that life, especially if the Gospel of his pupil Luke was written, as is generally believed, under his influence and direction. But so absorbed was he in the glory of the risen Christ, whom he had seen and heard, that he declared, "Though we have known Christ after the flesh, yet we know Him so no more" (II Cor. v. 16). With something of impatience he answers the boast of those who gloried in the fact that they had been acquainted with Christ in the flesh, saying in effect, "That is now behind you; it belongs to a past condition of things: you can no more live upon it than your forefathers in the desert could live upon the manna of the day before; you cal3 know Christ in that way no longer; you can know Him now not as the Man of Galilee, but as the living Christ who holds personal contact with your souls." It is in that way that the world must know Christ to-day.

Since the time of Paul down to the present, the testimony of the Church to the presence of the living Christ has been continuous and cumulative. It has been the bridge which has connected the past with the present. The Church has lived because He has lived within her. Throughout the centuries she has toiled, and suffered, and triumphed, because of the unshaken assurance that her heavenly Bridegroom has not forsaken her. She has looked upon her indwelling Lord as her actual ruler and leader, the source of her illumination and strength. Her power has waxed or waned in proportion as this assurance has been bright or dim. Every revival in the Church has been a revival of the sense of the Master's presence.

During recent years the historical method of New Testament study has been somewhat closely followed, with the result that the evidential value of the experience of the living Christ has been in a measure obscured. The historical method sends us back to the first century to find our Christ. It puts Him more than nineteen hundred years away. It does not give us a Christ who is alive to-day. It sends us to seek the living among the dead. All that the Gospel story can give us is the evidence of the Christ who was. To find evidence of the Christ who is, we must look elsewhere. That evidence is found in the working of His Spirit in our hearts. That Christ is here, that He has not left His people in a state of orphanage, that He has fulfilled His promise made at the time of His departure, "I will not leave you desolate, I will come unto you," is a matter of present experience. "Serious, sober-minded men may still be found the whole world over, who say that they are conscious of this presence as a fact; while as the result of this power and presence the same things are being done and suffered in the Apostolic and every after age." 1 The supreme proof that Christ is alive is that He is living with us and in us. Ever since He left this earth His people have been able to give confirmation to the words, "Whom not having seen ye love; on whom, though now ye see Him not, yet believing, ye rejoice greatly with joy unspeakable and full of glory" (I Pet. i. 8).

1 Personality Human and Divine, J. R. Illingworth, p. 198.

Whereunto then serveth the historical record of the Christ who once lived on this earth? We answer, it explains who and what the Christ is who now lives among us. It makes known to us His true character, setting it before us as the perfect model for our imitation. Indeed, it gives us all the certain knowledge which we possess of what He really is. We need, therefore, to go back continually to the historical record to gain fresh knowledge of the Life of Lives, that we may carry over from it all the ethical qualities and ideals which it contains and transfer them to the Christ whom we now know, with Paul, after the spirit. We need to become acquainted with the Man of Nazareth, who blessed little children, fellowshipped with social outcasts, healed the sick, fed the hungry, comforted the distressed, died for the ungodly, that in Him we may see the kind of Christ who is with us to-day---the Christ in whom we are to trust, and in whose footsteps we are unfalteringly to follow. We shall thus be saved from the mistake of M. Loisy, who draws a contrast between the Christ of history--" a figure purely human and unmiraculous," and the Christ of faith--" risen, glorified, divine." Both Christs being one, the one is no less divine than the other.

When Phillips Brooks first spoke to Helen Keller of Christ, she at once exclaimed, " Oh, I never knew His name before, but I always knew Him." She was acquainted with Him as the Christ of experience, the Universal Christ who
lighteneth every man coming into the world; but she did not know Him as the Christ of history, the Christ who lived a human life in Palestine long years ago. Alas! there are many who know Him as the Christ of history who do not know
Him as the Christ of experience. They know His name, but they do not know Him. They are familiar with the facts of His earthly life, they accept His system of teaching, they follow Him as an impersonal and abstract ideal, but they have
not experienced the dynamic power of His living personality. They know Him as the Christ who came, but they do not know Him as the Christ who is here. The complete knowledge of Christ is possessed by those alone to whom the Christ of history has become the Christ of experience.

We are indebted to Paul for making known to us the spiritual Christ, the Christ of experience, the Christ of to-day; yet it must be acknowledged that his failure to turn back to the Christ of history and linger lovingly over the details
of His life, so as to understand Him as the Christ of experience, has made His testimony one-sided, and has rendered it comparatively valueless to those to whom the natural way of reaching the divine Christ is through His human life. It may have been one of the results of his making so little of Christ's earthly life, that some of those who came after him went to the extreme of denying the humanity of Christ altogether, so that the Apostle John had to set himself against their error by declaring that whosoever denied that Jesus Christ is come in the flesh is not of God. In the present day the tendency in the opposite direction has often been so strong, that there may be need to declare that whosoever denieth that Jesus Christ is come in the spirit, is not of the household of faith.

The Church of to-day needs Paul's mystical message that she gain a revived consciousness of the presence of her Lord. She needs to realise that the same Jesus of whom we read in the Gospels, the same Jesus whom the disciples saw going up into heaven, has returned in another form, and is now in her midst; the unseen host at every sacramental supper; the unseen guest at every common meal. This truth is the life-blood of her faith. This truth, and not the doctrine of justification by faith, is the article of a standing or a falling Church. Take away from the Church the conviction of the presence of a living, working, and abiding Christ, and you tear the very heart out of her religious life.

The world, too, needs Paul's mystical message to give it a new sense of the reality of Christ, a vivid realisation of His actual presence. It is not enough to know that He once lived on earth, what men want to know is that He now lives,
and that His saving help is now available. Important as it is to know what He has done for them, it is still more important to know what He can now do for them. In the story of his life, Mr. S. H. Hadley, the well-known mission worker of New York, tells us how the sense of a Christ who was present to help first came to him. He says, "I was sitting one day in a saloon, a hopeless drunkard, when I seemed to feel some great and mighty presence. I did not know then what it was. I did afterwards learn that it was Jesus the sinner's friend." He made his way to Jerry M'Auley's Mission, where, after listening to the testimonies of others to the saving power of Christ, he prayed, "Dear Jesus, can you save me ?" The sense of deliverance was immediate. Then he adds, "Never with mortal tongue can I describe that moment. Although up to that moment my soul had been filled with unutterable gloom, I felt the glorious brightness of the noonday sun shine into my heart. I felt I was a free man. Oh, the precious feeling of safety, of freedom, of resting on Jesus! I felt that Christ with all His brightness and power had come into my life; that, indeed, old things had passed away, and all things had become new." This is the Saviour that sinful men, the world over, need; a Saviour who is within reach; a Saviour who lives, and loves, and saves; a Saviour who is not merely "the incomparable man" whose memory is fondly cherished, but a divine and living Saviour to whose Almighty hand struggling, sinking souls may cling, and be lifted up out of the mire of moral pollution, and have their feet set upon the rock of eternal righteousness. This is the Saviour whom Paul the Mystic has given to the world.

2. That the essential thing in religion is not its outward form, but its inward spirit.--From beginning to end the teaching of Paul was opposed to the religion of form. It was decidedly anti-ritualistic. Paul never ceased to thunder against the religionists of his day, who put stress upon the puerilities of piety. So little value did he put upon rules and ceremonies, that he seems at times to disparage the externals of religion. "Weak and beggarly elements" he calls them (see Gal. iv. 9-11). At best they were crutches for the lame, to be thrown away when the vivifying power of Christ had been
experienced. Dependence upon them, on the part of a Christian, was a return to legalism. To assign saving efficacy to them was to fall from grace.

On the other hand, Paul put emphasis upon the religion of the spirit. In his contention with his Judaizing opponents his battle-ground was that of the spirit versus the letter. He stood for the spiritual interpretation of Christianity. The keynote of his ministry is contained in the words, "Neither is circumcision anything, nor uncircumcision, but a new creation" (Gal. vi. 15). All his interest centred in the vital things of religion; and he never wearied of warning against the danger of making the performance of prescribed ceremonials the test of discipleship, instead of the transformation of the heart and life through faith in Jesus Christ. Rites and ceremonies were to him the mere costume of religion. Their value lay in their spiritual significance. The material emblems of the Lord's Supper spoke to him of a mystic bread and wine with which the soul was fed. He saw beneath the circumcision which was "outward in the flesh," a "circumcision made without hands" (Col. ii. ii); a circumcision "of the heart in the spirit, not in the letter, whose praise is not of man but of God" (Rom. ii. 29). There was nothing he dreaded more than seeing his converts " subject themselves to ordinances " (Col. ii. 20); thus bringing themselves under the heavy yoke of ceremonialism from which they had been delivered. He repudiated the idea that Christianity is an ironclad system of rules; and declared, "Where the Spirit of the Lord is, there is liberty" (II Cor. iii. 17). Forms he used just so far as they were of use; but he did not tie himself down to them. He was freed from their slavery. He exercised his common sense in adapting them to existing conditions, breaking, if need be, "the law of commandments contained in ordinances" in the letter, that he might keep it in the spirit.

Mysticism has always come in as a rebound from formalism in religion. The use of set forms tends to formality; ritualism has a way of becoming mechanical; the strict observance of the letter is apt to strangle the life of the
spirit. This tendency to externality, which is especially strong in the Western mind, will, if allowed free course, develop into a religion which consists in something lying outside of experience, something to be studied as you  might study botany or astronomy. To this tendency mysticism furnishes an antidote, by appealing from form to life. In times of barren- ness it exerts a freshening force, by bringing the Church back to what is vital in religion. Professor Stearns says, "In every age when the life of the Church grows weak, and its inner fires die down, mysticism is needed. Christians must be made to realise that the hidden life of faith and communion with God is their true life." The watch-cry, "Back to Christ," may therefore be changed into" Back to experience"; for it is out of contact with Christ that Christian experience springs. To this original experience the mystic has always been calling upon the Church to return, even at the expense of forsaking everything external. The testimony which he has lifted in the face of prevailing formalism has been well expressed by Carlyle in his essay on George Fox: "First must the dead letter of religion own itself dead, and drop piecemeal into dust, if the living spirit of religion, freed from its charnel-house, is to rise on us newborn of heaven, with healing under its wings."

The only exception to the revolt of mysticism against ritualism has been in the case of the Roman Catholic mystic who has donned sacerdotal garments, and has hunted with the hounds of mysticism while running with the hare of
sacerdotalism. His sacerdotalism has been an excrescence, a contradiction, something that fettered his free spirit, and hindered the inner life from finding full expression. He has generally been a mystic in bonds. Spiritual freedom is a hard thing to gain, and a still harder thing to keep. Ritualism is religion made easy. External religion is the wide door by which the multitudes enter the Church. The loftier our ideals the fewer the converts. Yet there is the divinest wisdom in enthroning the spiritual--for that way ultimate triumph lies. Many have grown weary of the fractional religion of legalism, and are hungering for the larger religion of the spirit ; they are seeking to get behind outward
forms to the vital force which gave them birth. And if the pulpit of to-day would retain its ancient power, it must learn from Paul the Mystic how to minister to this important class, and lead them out of the house of bondage into the liberty and joy of the children of God.

3. That the distinguishing thing in the Christian religion is the possession of a spiritual principle or power, from which all goodness flows.--The tree is made good that the fruit may be good. In some mysterious way a heavenly influence
touches the spirit of men, arousing it out of its torpor, and making it alive to the things of the kingdom of God. This life-giving power Paul ascribes to Christ, as in the words, "You hath He quickened who were dead through your
trespasses and sins" (Eph. ii. 1). Whether he conceives of this power as vital or dynamical, he always speaks of it as divine. He represents it as "the power of God" acting upon the soul, uniting itself with it, and so reinforcing it that
there is victory over sin, and the attainment of righteousness. For the possession of this power he urges all men to strive; inasmuch as without it they must remain morally impotent. He shows that the way to possess it is through
faith--faith being the means of connection between Christ and man, the opening of the heart to the experience of the saving power of his instreaming life. It is through faith that the uncounted riches of Christ are transferred to us, and that unto us He is "made wisdom from God, and righteousness, and sanctification, and redemption" (I Cor. 1. 30).

Paul shows still further that the regenerating power which is in Christ for sinful men is mediated by the Holy Spirit; that the Holy Spirit not only takes the things of Christ and shows them unto men, but that He also takes the things of Christ and ministers them unto men. He is the unseen agent by whom Christ, who is no longer visible in the flesh, is made real to human consciousness and effective to human salvation. It is His work at once to reveal Christ to the
spirit of man as the source of spiritual life, and to effect a connection between the Christ and the spirit of man that his life may be communicated. To His co-operation Paul attributed all his success in the work of preaching the gospel. He reminds the Thessalonians that behind his spoken message was the unseen power that brought it home. "Our gospel," he said, "came unto you not in word only, but in power, and in the Holy Spirit, and in much assurance (I Ep.
1. 5). So necessary did he esteem the inward tuition of the Holy Spirit to a true understanding of Christ, that he declares that "no man can say that Jesus is Lord, but by the Holy Spirit" (Rom. ix. i). Before the Jerusalem council
he testified that when the Gentiles received the word of the gospel from his mouth, God gave unto them the Holy Spirit (Acts xv. 7, 8).For the coming of the Holy Spirit Paul never prayed; he believed in His continual presence,
and counted upon His constant co-operation. We must remember that Paul's ministry was begun shortly after the descent of the Holy Spirit at Pentecost. The mighty movement of spiritual power into which he had come was still
at flood-tide. Nor did it quickly exhaust itself. Paul enjoyed a perpetual Pentecost. Wherever he went "the Holy Spirit fell upon those who heard the word," and souls were saved and churches planted. He did not live long enough to witness any serious declension of the life of the Church, or any diminution of its converting power; hence he had never to go through the agony of praying for a revival. Long after his day the atmosphere of the Church remained surcharged with spiritual power; missionary zeal continued to grow; and an era of unparalleled conquest and enlargement was enjoyed. But that condition of things did not last. In later times there was a frequent recurrence of dark days, days of weakness and depression, days when the Lord seemed to be absent, and the connection of the Church with the Holy Spirit seemed to be broken. When these evil days have come, the Church has been under the necessity of going back to the beginning, putting herself in a waiting, praying attitude, and seeking a new influx of 
power. And whenever she has done this,--whenever, in other words, she has brought herself into direct touch with the Holy Spirit, and opened her heart to the inflowing and infilling of His power,--Pentecost has been repeated. A
warm breath of life has blown from the land of spices, and the spiritual atmosphere has been suddenly changed; the bands of frost in which her life has been bound have been unloosed; the naked trees in the Lord's garden have burst into leaf; the desert has begun to blossom as the rose. How this change came about, let those who deny the direct agency of the Spirit of God rise and tell. But mysterious as this operation of divine power is, it is not magical. Its effects are moral. Lives are transformed by it; bosom sins are slain; the onflowing tide of social iniquity is turned; a wave of faith succeeds a wave of unbelief; an unseen hand touches the strings of the heart, and celestial music is heard where before were only the harsh discords of a life out of tune with the Infinite. If the dictum of Cardinal Manning be true, that "wherever you behold a good thing there you see the working of the Holy Spirit," a work like that which has just been described will stand the test.

In every revival movement there is a mystical quality. The touch of the Spirit of God upon the spirit of man is immediate. The human, conditional element, which is never altogether absent from any moral state, is in the back
ground. Hearts are moved by a power which they cannot explain. The wind of the Spirit bloweth where it listeth. A sound is heard of a going upon the tops of the mulberry trees--the mysterious movement of a higher power. The tide of the Spirit sweeps in, lifting up souls that have been stranded on the muddy banks of the world, upbearing them upon its bosom, and bearing them forward into the open sea, and starting them upon their heavenward voyage. The whence and the whither of the Spirit's movements are beyond our ken. He works by a higher law than we can understand. He is therefore more likely to take us by surprise, than He is to do things in the way in which we expected to see them done. We look for Him to come in one form and He comes in another; we expect a down pouring rain, and His influence distils as the dew; we look for a rushing mighty wind, and He comes as a gentle zephyr; we expect a thunderbolt to fall from heaven, shattering the rocks in pieces, and He comes as a
voice of gentle stillness. Happy are those who stand ready to welcome Him in whatever guise He comes.

In no other way can the waning influence of the Church be recovered than by a new infusion of life, a new baptism of power. Before she can win back the alienated masses she must feel the quickening breath of the Spirit of God. She is
weak for conquest, because the deeper sources of life have been left untapped. The surface wells from which she has been drawing her supplies have been drained dry. She needs to go deeper, to live deeper; she needs to have her life "fed from the upper springs." Speaking of the division of the Church of England into High, Low, and Broad, the late Archbishop of Canterbury remarked, "What we need is deep Churchmen." What is needed everywhere is deep
Christians--Christians in whom the spirit of devotion runs as deep as the heart of Christ. Christian life can no more rise above the inner spiritual principle that controls it, than water can rise above the level of its source. The saying of
Herbert Spencer, that "by no political alchemy can we get golden conduct of leaden instincts," has a wider application than he ever dreamed of giving it. Changing the terms, it might be said that by no process of spiritual transmutation can we get golden conduct out of leaden motives. But while that is true, leaden motives can be changed into golden motives. And it is precisely this that Christianity does. It gives the golden heart from which comes the golden life.

The practical application of the teaching of Paul the Mystic touching the revelation of the inner life to the outer may be summed up in the Old Testament admonition: "Keep thy heart above all that thou guardest; for out of it are the streams of life" (Prov. iv. 23). Never did the Church stand more in need of this admonition than she does to-day. She is giving too much attention to "the outward business of the house of God" (Neh. xi. i6), while the hidden life is being neglected; she is giving money while withholding prayer; she is cultivating the social side of religion at the expense of the spiritual; she is making a sense of humanity a substitute for fellowship with God. The result of this is a shallowing of her life, a weakening of her power. Much of her activity is the force of habit, the momentum of past experience; the mechanical performance of outward works after the power which originated them has departed. In no other way can her spiritual efficiency be maintained than by balancing the centrifugal force of her activity by the centripetal force of communion with God.

4. That the source of authority in religion is found not in external things, but in the things of the spirit .--Paul looked upon the external as pedagogical. It was a schoolmaster to lead men to the spiritual. Those who follow the true order of development begin with finding authority in outward things, and end with finding it is in inward things. They hold on to external supports until they gain inward strength, as a cripple holds on to the crutch until he gains strength of limb. "When that which is perfect is come, then that which is in part shall be done away" (I Cor. xiii. io). When the pearl
of spiritual authority is grasped, the bauble of external authority falls from the hand. Reversing Emerson's lines, it might be said: 

"When the gods arrive,
Half-gods go."

In his posthumous volume on Religions of Authority and the Religion of the Spirit, Sabatier contends that the day of external authority is past, and that before us in the present day lies the alternative between autonomy and anarchy, the religion of the spirit and atheism. He declares that "the outward authority of the letter has given place to the inward authority of the Spirit," 1 and the sole authority which Christians to-day can recognise is that of the Holy Spirit speaking in Christian consciousness. With passionate earnestness he contends that if Jesus were with us now He would say, "0 men of little faith, all that has grown old and vanished with the religion of authority is empty wineskins and worn-out forms. Suffer the religion of the Spirit to appear." 2 To the same effect are the recent words of Principal Rainy, spoken in the New College, Edinburgh, out of the heart of the troubles of "The United Free Church": "There is a craving in many minds for something like a fixed authority. There is no such authority. The only security against apostasy is to be found in the presence and power of the Spirit, and in maintenance of fellowship with our Living Head. To place trust elsewhere is itself apostasy." Witnessing to the same truth, Thomas Erskine, with fine discrimination, reminds us that "our instruction may and does come from without, both in morals and religion, but the authority that seals it is within." To the same effect is the declaration of the Westminster Confession of Faith, that it is by the witness of the Spirit borne to him in his heart "by and with the Word" that the believer receives "full persuasion and assurance of the infallible truth thereof." 3

1 P. 259.
2 p. 277.
3 Chap. 1:5

It is here that Paul found a sure foothold for his faith. He rested in the spiritual. The witness which he received in his own spirit to the power of Christ was absolute and final. He knew no higher ground of authority than this. And in the nature of the case it was the only kind of evidence which he could possess. From the pitfall of external authority into which the Christian world has so often fallen he was mercifully saved. The Church which he knew laid no claim to be the keeper of the truth and of the conscience; all the authority which she possessed being that derived from her indwelling Lord. The Bible which he knew was the Old Testament Scriptures, the body of truth which composes the New Testament not being yet collected and written, and the Christ whom it reveals being still the Christ of tradition. How astonished he would have been had he been able to foresee the place of authority that was to be given to his own letters, which form so important a part of the sacred canon! All the authority he would have claimed for them himself would have been the authority they might acquire from the faithfulness with which they interpreted Christ to men. In making his appeal to others on behalf of Christ, he sought to "commend the truth to every man's conscience in the sight of God" (II Cor. iv. 2). "I speak as to wise men," he says, "judge ye what I say" (I Cor. x. 15). And again, "Prove all things; hold fast that which is good" (I Thess. v. 21). The final test of the gospel which he preached was its power to satisfy the spiritual nature of man. He believed that the truth as it is in Jesus carries with it its own evidence, and therefore speaks authoritatively to the heart of man.

In putting the source of authority in the things of the spirit, and thus making it accessible to all, Paul followed the teaching of the Master, who, while pointing to Himself as the supreme authority, saying, as against all who had gone before him, "Verily, verily, I say unto you," at the same time made His appeal to the moral nature of man. Outward authority of any kind He never imposed upon men. He knew nothing of an infallible Church or an infallible Book. His method of teaching was not arbitrary and dogmatic. He expected His word to be accepted only when it was seen to be the embodiment of the highest reason; He expected it to be obeyed only when it was seen to be the embodiment of the highest ethical ideal. He relied for His hold upon men upon the response which He was able to awaken in the human heart. "He spake with authority" because He spoke to the heart. The form of His authority was spiritual; and spiritual authority was something so altogether new, so utterly foreign to prevailing conceptions, that few understood its real nature. It is a matter of regret that the title of Sabatier's masterly and suggestive work already referred to, The Religions of Authority and the Religion of the Spirit, makes a contrast which is apt to obscure the point in question. By the religions of authority he means, of course, religions of outward authority. But is not the religion of the Spirit also a religion of authority? And is not the inward authority of the Spirit more satisfactory than any other
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form possibly can be? This Sabatier believes; and hence it is all the more unfortunate that he should have suggested a contrast which he himself tacitly repudiates. Regarding the satisfactoriness of this kind of authority, Mr. Bradley forcibly remarks that" the man who demands an authority more solid than that of the religious consciousness, seeks he does not know what." 1 So confident was Paul of the power of his appeal to the religious consciousness, that upon its results he was ready to stake all his hopes for the es~tablishment of the kingdom of God on the earth.

1 Appearance and Reality, p. 448.

To trust implicitly to spiritual authority as Paul did, has always been a difficult thing for the followers of Christ to do. There is usually some little remnant of the external to which everyone continues to cling. When all external props are taken away the cry is heard, "If the foundations be destroyed, what shall the righteous do ?" But the props are not the foundation, and the taking of them away may be the means of leading the soul to fall back upon the foundation. There is no other way of being saved from panic than by trusting in the witness of the Spirit. When we rest upon the spiritual we can never be paralysed by inquiry into the outward and subordinate sources of authority. What though the Church should err in her judgments, we have in the Holy Spirit an unfailing source of inward illumination; what though corruptions should creep into the text of Scripture, we have in the Bible of the soul, written directly by the divine finger, a present and personal revelation, speaking with an authority which no outward revelation can ever possess. This inner, first-hand revelation, to which every outward revelation is at best merely a commentary, is to be followed unhesitatingly. The cold, calculating, doubting spirit, which George Fox in his Journal characterises as "the Sadducean
intellect," is to be renounced. The pilgrim staff is not to be always thrust out so as to discover if the stepping-stones are still in their places, before the swollen river is crossed; but many a bold plunge forward is to be taken, in the confidence that bottom will everywhere be touched. A venturesome faith always justifies itself. Falling upon a seeming void, it finds the rock beneath.

From this part of Paul's mystical message the preacher of to-day is to learn to make his appeal to the spirit of man, that he may win his homage to the truth. Nothing is really true and authoritative to any man until he has proved it for himself. The preacher who remembers this will be less of an ecclesiastical attorney, and more of "a seer in the word of
the Lord." While not ceasing to say, "Come and let us reason," he will also say, "Come and let us see"; while pointing men to bygone revelations as aids to faith, he will also bring them to the burning bush out of which the I AM is still speaking, and let them hear Him for themselves; and while pointing them to external revelations as confirmatory of faith, he will also bring them face to face with the Christ of consciousness, that the original experience of His saving power, out of which the New Testament records grew, may be repeated in them, so that they may be brought to acknowledge Him as the Lord of the, conscience, the sovereign of the soul, who rules with undisputed sway over an empire in which no other ruler holds jurisdiction.

5. That the religion of the Spirit ought to be characterised by the fire of a holy passion.--There ought to be in it something of the mystic's ecstasy and rapture. This was certainly true of the religion of Paul; which "rose above the zero of rationalism," and has been well described as "morality aflame with passion" (Denney).1 The emotional element in Paul's nature was strong. He was an acute and profound thinker; but he was something more than a reasoning machine, he was a man of deep and intense feeling. "All his thoughts were steeped in feeling" (Wordsworth). He translated truth into feeling and feeling into truth. He was keenly sensitive to life's pains and joys. His nature was of the impulsive, and not of the phlegmatic and callous type. He was often swept along by the tide of his emotions. His writings show this. The consuming zeal which he manifested as a persecutor of the Church, he manifested as an Apostle of Christ. He was "baptized with the Holy Spirit, and with fire." As a fiery evangelist he blazed his way through the world, kindling a moral conflagration wherever he went. His preaching was marked by ecstatic accompaniments; and in the Churches which he planted there often sprang up scenes of the wildest disorder, which he had difficulty in quelling. As might be expected, he was himself subjected to swift alternations of feeling, his moods being changeful as the shifting clouds. The highest spiritual exaltation was followed by the deepest spiritual depression. He was particularly sensitive to social atmospheric conditions. His heart, like a brimming vessel, spilled over, in tenderest sympathy for others, at the slightest jar. Over his converts he travailed in spirit with a mother's anguish (Gal. iv. 19); he warned them with tears (Phil. iii. i8); he was in a continual flutter of agitation on their account. He was himself well aware of a tendency to emotional excess; and while accepting the current imputation that he was beside himself, he justifies himself by saying that he was beside himself "to God" (II Cor. v. 3). His zeal was "a zeal of God" (Rom. x.1) that is, a zeal for God and from God. More over, this Godlike zeal was by no means barren  of results. Instead of being a mere effervescence of pious sentiment, it was a practical force expending itself in beneficent deeds. For a life of religious emotionalism divorced from profitable activity Paul had no respect whatsoever. His exhortation, "Be not drunken with wine, wherein is riot, but be filled with the Spirit" (Eph. v. i8), is as far as possible from countenancing the idea of "an egoistic intoxication of the individual by supposed altruistic emotion, with an incapacity of corresponding self - sacrifice in action." 2 His own life gives the lie to such an interpretation of his words. Indeed, so full is his life of all the practical virtues, that Wernle goes to the extreme of regarding it as the normal type of the Christian life after the " excision " from it " of the really mystical  element." 3 But the excision of the mystical element would be the excision of the very element of "feeling" out of which all the practical virtues grew.

1 Instead of the formula of Matthew Arnold, "Religion is morality touched by emotion," Prof. James Mark Baldwin would substitute. "Religion is emotion kindled by faith" (Social and Ethical  Interpretations, p. 357). The point of present interest in all of these  definitions is the recognition of the place which emotion occupies in  religious
experience.
2 Natural Causes and Supernatural Seemings, Maudsley, p. 341
3 Beginnings of Christianity, vol. i. p. 358.

The emotional side of Paul's religion has been an interesting study to the psychologist. He has examined it symptomatically, diagnosing it as a physician might diagnose the disease of a patient. He has considered its pathological manifestations in order to determine whether they were abnormal and morbid, or normal and healthy. Looking at emotion as the thing that moves,--the propulsive power in life,--he has tried to discover what it was that moved a man like Paul so profoundly, and propelled him forward in the path of self-denying service. But with all his searching, the psychologist has been compelled to confess that he has hitherto failed to discover the secret of the Christian life. The reason for this failure is thus stated by Morris Jastrow: "Physiological psychology leads us further into the domain of soul-life than speculative philosophy; but it, too, must confess its inability to explore the innermost
recesses of this mysterious domain," 1 in which religious emotion has its birth. From this region, into which psychology cannot penetrate, the great tidal wave of emotion started which swept over the soul of Paul. On the side of his inmost being which opened towards God he was taken possession of by divine love. This love held him for ever in its overmastering grasp, constraining him to live a life of unselfish ministry to others. Some of the effects of this love the psychologist can measure; but the love itself, which forms the ultimate source of the Christian life, can be known only by those who have the power to see into the heart of God.

1  The Study of Religion, p. 278.

From the experience of Paul the Mystic comes a message which furnishes an antidote to the spirit of coldness which characterises much of the religion of to-day. Modern religion is prevailingly practical,--practical, that is to say, in the hard, outward sense. It is ashamed to show its heart--ashamed almost of having a heart to show. Its enthusiasm is suppressed; the fires of its devotion are banked; its fervour is smothered by conventionality; its general  condition is that of spiritual frigidity. There are, however, in many quarters signs of reaction. Mrs. Humphry Ward, who certainly cannot be charged with any prejudice in favour of emotional excess in religion, while expressing her satisfaction with what she calls "the down break of revelation and miracle," rejoices that "moral speculation is losing the note of Stoic
calm, and is taking the note of mysticism, of deep and passionate feeling." 1 This reaction is sure to grow. Decayed emotions have a way of sprouting up from the stump; repressed emotions have a way of breaking out at unexpected places. A fresh touch of the Spirit of life will bring a return of the mystic's holy ecstasy and his holy abandon. An upward rush of life will burst the husk of indifferentism, bring back the springtime of the soul, and cause the flowers and fruits of righteousness to appear. A whiff of the divine afflatus will do more to bring out the latent music of the soul, than the most careful drilling in musical technique. It was because of his appreciation of this fact that Goethe
called mysticism "the scholastic of the heart, the dialectic of the feelings." He saw that it kept religion alive by bringing the heart of man into immediate contact with the heart of God. He saw that it taught man to love, and that love set the heart aglow. This is certainly true of Paul's mysticism. It is "the scholastic of the heart." It stirs the heart to its deepest
depths by bringing it into contact with the Eternal Lover. It does not make it all of religion to love, but does make love the first thing, the essential thing in religion. To revive love in the Church is to warm her life-blood, quicken her pulse-beat, and cause her life to glow with the fire of a consuming zeal.

1 See article in Hibbert's Journal for Nov. 1903.

That there still is danger of Christians losing control of their feeelings, and becoming the victims of emotional inebriety, goes without the saying. Human nature is ever the same; and the thing that happened in Paul's day has been often repeated. The rudder of reason has been shipped, and souls have drifted upon the rocks; violent fires have been kindled, which have soon burned themselves out; a state of frenzy has been induced which has ended in collapse. In the presence of this danger there is a call for the exercise of self-control--a call for every Christian to hold himself well in hand. But while feeling ought to be restrained it ought not to be suppressed; its suppression being just as wrong and as harmful as its undue expression. As civilisation advances, feeling is toned down and held in check. To such an extreme has the repression of feeling been carried in the present day in the Western world, that the necessity no longer exists to turn the hose upon the fires of religious enthusiasm lest a devouring conflagration should burst forth. The danger lies in the opposite direction. The prevailing condition of the Church is that of half -heartedness, or lukewarmness. She is not "zealously affected." She needs more of that exalted feeling, arising out of inspiration, to which Plato gave the name of enthusiasmos. She needs more of that divine possession which will kindle the flame of a holy enthusiasm. Let her guard, as hitherto, against lop-sidedness in development, by carefully balancing the rational, ethical, and emotional elements in her experience; but at the same time let her cease to fear the consequences of losing her heart to Christ. When passionless she is powerless; but when a passion for Christ is the most commanding thing in her experience, out of it will come that passion for souls, for righteousness, and for the kingdom of God, which has ever been the most obvious source of her conquering power.

6. That the religion o/the spirit provides a centre of rest in the midst of the world's turmoil and strife.--All that was good in "quietism" Paul included in His Christian experience. He was a world-traveller; always on the move; always pushing forward to some new scenes of action; yet he was absolutely free from feverish restlessness. He lived " an unhasting, unresting life." He had found a centre of repose at the heart of the cyclone. His quietness of spirit did not come from insensibility, or stoical indifference, or indolent satisfaction with things as they were. It came from his faith
in God. Sitting down~ in the midst of the ruin of his creature comforts, he bent as the willow to the blast, and rejoiced in God as the source of all his joy. Having enjoyed God in all in the days that he abounded, he could enjoy all in God in the day when he suffered loss. Into this condition of repose he did not come at once. Not until he looked back over long years of discipline was he able to say, "I have learned in whatsoever state I am, therewith to be content" (Phil. iv. ii). The lesson of contentment he had learned in the school of experience, under the tuition of Christ, during the twenty-five years that stretched between his conversion and his imprisonment in Rome. In his youth he had been hot-blooded and impatient. If we turn to his earlier Epistles, we see the onflowing stream of his emotions dashing and foaming over the rocks; in his later Epistles the stream has quieted down, and flows on through fertile plains, deepening and widening as it nears the ocean in which it is finally lost.

But to say that Paul schooled himself in the difficult task of bringing his mind to his lot when he could not bring his lot to his mind, is only half the truth. He also schooled himself to look at things from God's point of view. From the heights of divine communion he looked serenely down upon the hurly-burly of life, and saw nothing worth worrying about. Carlyle's half-amused and half - compassionating question, "Why so hot, little man?" expresses what must have been his feeling as he surveyed the swarming anthill of human life. From his exalted position in the realm of the spirit, the affairs about which mortals toil and fret must have seemed as small as the world itself appears to the aeronaut who looks down upon it out of the clouds. This change in judgment-values was the result of applying a new standard of measurement. Into what small dimensions it caused some things to shrink, and into what large dimensions it caused other things to grow! To see things through God's eyes was to see them according to their spiritual worth; and to see them according to their spiritual worth was to be freed from all corroding care concerning their possession, and from liability to mistake concerning their use.

Christians of to-day need to recover the mystic's secret of repose, which Paul learned so thoroughly. They need to cultivate the habit of retreating into the secret places of the soul, as one might go from the hot and dusty street into the quiet and coolness of the cathedral. They live in a feverish spirit. Their work has about it too much of the clatter of machinery; too much of the "hustle" which belongs to the business world. A deeper, stronger, quieter type of religion is demanded. They need to be reminded that the value of service is to be estimated, not by its bulk, but by its quality; not by the noise it makes and the attention it attracts, but by what it expresses. The one act of the quiet, contemplative Mary, by which she ministered to the Master's higher necessities, outweighed the multiplied acts of Martha's bustling
kindness. Volumes of devotion lay behind it. It represented a ministry, which was the rich but infrequent flowering of a life which had developed the power of repose. This higher ministry the Church has often depreciated and neglected. When jaded and overdriven souls have made a mute appeal to her for rest, the only answer she has given has been another lash of the taskmaster's whip. Is it any wonder that when they have not broken down altogether, they have
eagerly clutched at any seductive opiate which might be offered them; allowing themselves to be blinded to the fact that its quieting influence was caused by the paralysis of the moral nature? Little heart have they to inquire into the foundations of a philosophy which seems to bring to them such substantial benefits. If fret and worry have been taken out of life, and the spirit of feverish restlessness out of work, they are not in a mood to grudge any price which has to be paid to obtain these results. To this class the Church must pay greater attention. She must come to them offering benefits while demanding service. She must preach to them the .gospel of rest along with the gospel of work. She must promise them a deeper and more heart-satisfying peace than anything else can give. This Paul was not afraid to do. He says to weary, care-laden men, "Live the life of faith, and the peace of God which passeth all understanding shall guard your hearts and your thoughts in Christ Jesus" (Phil. iv. 7). He expresses the earnest desire, "Let the peace of God arbitrate in your hearts" (Col. iii. i5); i.e. let it take away all jarrings and discords, reducing everything within the soul to perfect harmony. Well he knew that nothing short of God's own peace would meet the deepest needs of the human heart. His sentiment was afterwards voiced by Mrs. Browning in her song of trust:

"Oh the little birds sang east, and the little birds sang west,
And I smiled to think God's greatness flowed around our incompleteness,
Round our restlessness his rest."

Nor is this rest which Christianity promises, rest only when the battle is over, but rest while the battle is on; it is not rest only when the day's work is done and the hands are folded, but rest in the midst of arduous toil; it is not rest only
when the petty annoyances and rivalries of life have blown past, but rest while they gather around the head as a cloud of summer gnats; it is not rest only when the ambitions of youth have faded out, but rest while the visions of the future still urge on to fresh endeavour. It is to those who are in the thick of life's conflict that the assurance is given, "In quietness and confidence shall be your strength." Repose is the foster-mother of religion. It imparts strength to the weak and to the weary. If those who know how to work knew also how to rest, they would gain in power. In these days of strain and stress, when the balance is so easily lost between work and rest, there is special pertinence in the words of ù admonition, "Return to thy rest, 0 my soul!"

7. That the supreme interests of man as a spiritual being are connected with the spiritual universe.--The testimony of Paul the Mystic to the reality and power of the supersensible is of special value to the Church of to - day. By emphasising the fact that experience includes more than comes through the five senses, it supplies an antidote to the prevailing material istic tendency. Fortunately, materialism as a philosophy, with its gospel of dirt, has run its course. The spiritual origin of the universe is being recognised by scientists. They even speak of the spirituality of matter. Behind the atom is a great unseen force. The atom itself, which was once thought to be solid, is discovered to be a globe in which hundreds of electrons of electricity revolve. The physical basis of life becomes more and more elusive.
Those who search for it are brought to the borderland of a new kingdom. Scientists have ceased to speak of dead matter, for all matter is seen to pulsate with life. They have ceased to look upon matter as the ultimate reality, for they are catching glimpses of a spiritual force behind it of which it is the outbirth; and are beginning to admit that within and beyond the world of outward phenomena there is a spiritual world which microscope and telescope cannot penetrate.

But while materialism as a philosophy has well-nigh run its course, materialism as a habit of life has a stronger hold upon the world than ever before. Never was the tyranny of the material more powerfully felt, never was man so dependent upon material things; and never was the world so full of interest, or so imperative in its demands. This increase of interest in the visible, accounts in part for the decrease of interest in the invisible. Men do not feel the need
of heaven to compensate for earth's privations and miseries. "The fond desire, the longing after immortality" of which the poet speaks, is not as strong as it once was. Yet never was there more restlessness of spirit, more heart hunger for the spiritual, than at present. Man is too great to be long satisfied with what the world has to give. He cannot live by bread alone. Earthly things offer no finality to his desires. The deep within him is for ever calling to the deep without and beyond him; and upon his ear is ever breaking the murmur of that * far-off sea in whose cool waters the feverish spirit pants to lave.

The spiritual realm is the true home of man's soul. He had a spiritual origin, and can only be satisfied with a spiritual end. "He stands with his feet on earth and his head in heaven." The mystical world to which the vision of God brings him is immeasurably greater than the world which he sees and handles, and within it lie his most priceless treasures. In the midst of the din, and dust, and drudgery of the present mechanical age the upper world is ever calling upon him to look up and survey its glories, and to aspire after its eternal delights. It is entreating him to come out of his underground burrow and stand on the sunlit heights of open vision. Interesting as that world is which lies beneath his feet, the world which opens above his head is of still greater interest. Out of it come some of life's deepest and noblest motives. What it has yet to reveal is of immense and ever-increasing importance. As life's mysteries thicken, we long for some hint of the secrets which it guards so well. And while the full vision, which would dazzle and blind, is wisely withheld, hints are freely given. When sorely bestead, harassed with doubt, burdened with care, wrung with sorrow, we are lifted above the cloudline into the sunlight, by receiving an earnest of the inheritance which is "incorruptible, undefiled, and that fadeth not away." When the heart has sickened at our failures to reach our ideals, we are comforted by the reflection that life cannot be known in itself; and that under the limitations of the present
its ideals cannot be fully worked out; and that it needs a whole eternity of the spiritual world to complete the development of a soul.

The present-day reaction from the spirit of other-worldliness which marked the religion of even a few years ago, is a healthy one. But every reaction is an extreme, and this one is no exception. The substitution of sociology for theology is only a temporary make-shift. Men need to know more about society, they need to know about their social relations and obligations, but they need still more to know about God, and about their higher relations and obligations. Men dwell in two worlds. They are citizens of two kingdoms; and while the duties to the one sphere do not necessarily conflict with the duties of the other, it is the duties of the higher sphere which they are in the greatest danger of neglecting. The earth-side of religion is much more tangible than the heaven-side. A land flowing with milk and honey is to the multitude much more appealing than a vague immortal hope. It is this that is giving socialism its power. It is winning converts because it is proclaiming a gospel palatable to this material age. If religious teaching moves in the same way, there is danger of that condition of things being repeated which came to ancient Rome when the heavens were emptied of the gods. The prophetic vision of the triumph of social ideals, which Christianity holds out, is indeed
that of a new Jerusalem coming down out of heaven from God; but in that city man has no eternal habitation. His true and enduring home is beyond it. From the seen he is to reach out to the unseen; from the temporal he is to reach
out to the eternal.

What a poor thing life becomes when the soul's dearest hopes are materialised, and its wistful questionings and reverential wonderings are treated as visionary. Speaking from the world point of view, Mr. Theodore Watts Dunton,
the English poet and novelist, has said that "the old impulse of wonder, which came to the human race in its infancy, has to come back and triumph before the morning of the final emancipation of man can dawn." Something of the
same kind has to take place within religion before it can fulfil it highest ministry. It has to excite wonder, stir hope, inspire worship. It has to send men with trembling awe into the presence of the sublime realities of the spiritual
world that they may wait for the opening of the clouds and the down-shining of the divine glory. While others are seeking to bring the world back to "the old nurse, the Platonic philosophy," the Christian teacher must seek to bring it back to that higher idealism set forth in the words, "See that thou make all things according to the pattern shown to thee on the mount" (Heb. viii. 5). Men need something more than earthly ideals; they need to follow a flying goal which is for ever beyond them, and which leads them to what heaven alone can consummate.

The mission of mysticism has ever been to proclaim the primacy of the spiritual and the eternal; to keep men alive to the mysteries that surround them; to make them see and feel that they are spiritual beings living for the present in mortal bodies; to prevent them from making the body the tomb of the soul; to keep them from becoming submerged in the mire of material- ism ; to help them live on the inside of life and to awaken within them a keener appetite for immortality. Turn to the writings of John Bunyan, the mystic of Puritanism, and see how little he was affected by the affairs of the body compared with the affairs of the soul, and by the affairs of time compared with the affairs of eternity. He does not speak of life's difficulties, but of the unseen forces with which he had to contend. What was taking place in the world around him was of secondary interest to what was taking place in the city of Mansoul. The
prizes of earth were as the small dust on the balance compared with the prizes of heaven. The figures of his symbolical mysticism he was compelled to borrow from earth, but the pigments with which they were coloured were the heavenly pigments with which rainbows are painted. But that which has made his allegories immortal is the fact that they deal with what is essential and enduring. The writings of Paul the Jewish mystic and Bunyan the English mystic, survive for the same reasons; to wit, because they speak to man's inner nature, reveal to him his spiritual
environment, and call upon him to "follow the gleam."

8. That the living God is the ultimate of human thought; and union and communion with Him the ultimate of human experience.--This is the central, comprehensive, and inclusive thing in the message which comes from Paul's mysticism to the present age. It is also the fundamental thing in all the varied forms of religious mysticism. For mysticism is at bottom a search for the ultimate reality. It is born of the unappeased hunger of the heart for God. It is based upon the conviction that an intimate relationship exists between the finite and the Infinite, and that because of that relationship 
God can hold direct communication with man, and man can hold direct communication with God. Its faith in a God who is at once immanent and personal is voiced in the words of Tennyson:

"Speak to Him thou for He hears, and Spirit with Spirit can meet--
Closer is He than breathing, and nearer than hands or feet."

Divine communion was with Paul conscious and personal. It was not communion with the Soul of the Universe, but with the heart of the Eternal Father. It was, as Smith of Cambridge has expressed it, "the knitting of a man's centre
with the centre of divine being." Frequently, by reducing God to an abstraction, mysticism has rendered anything like real communion impossible. Coming in originally as a protest against anthropomorphism in religion, it has begun by declaring that God is greater than all the forms in which He has been or ever can be expressed, and has ended by discarding all forms whatsoever, forgetful that apart from forms of some kind it is impossible to conceive of God at all. The consequence has been that God has been represented as a luminous haze rather than as a light shining in the soul. But this pantheistic tendency is, as Inge reminds us, "a pitfall for mysticism to avoid, not an error involved in its first principles." To the true mystic God has always been a living being, the source of personal inspiration, the object of personal fellowship. He has not thought of himself in his union with God as sucked up into the vortex of nothingness, but as drawn up into the heart of Primal Love, and made one with it in all its tender sympathies and affections. His life in God has been a life of individual moral completeness.

The God with whom Paul the Mystic sought to dwell in the union of love, was to him neither unthinkable nor unknowable. He passed knowledge, yet He was apprehended of knowledge. If the fulness of His knowledge was too great to be poured into one tiny cup, what the cup contained was real knowledge. It was a sample of the ocean from which it had been taken. Incalculable harm has come to religion from the influence of the Kantian philosophy, which has denied the directness of knowledge. Kant held that we do not know things in themselves, but only in their thought-forms. He did not deny that knowledge has an objective reality, and that grounds for the rationality of its certainty exist; but he maintained that all we really know is what is in our minds. To find a basis for the certainty which man's ethical necessities require, he carried over from pure reason the contents of which he robbed it, and bestowed them upon what he called the practical reason. To the practical reason he attributed the knowledge of a supersensible world, of a supreme being, and of a moral imperative, in the grip of which all men are held. This splitting up of man's reason is as confusing as it is unphilosophic. The mind of man is a unit. The certainty given by Kant to the moral nature must not be denied to the intellectual nature. It is with the mind that man knows God; and he knows Him because He is objectively real. What he possesses is not only the knowledge of a thought-form of God, but the knowledge of God Himself. To substitute a thought-form for the objective reality of which it is but the image, is to give a stone to them who ask for bread. Man's soul cries out for God--the living, loving, personal, present God; and it will be satisfied with nothing else, and with nothing less.

Immediacy of knowledge is implied in the fact that knowledge merely perceives and does not create its object. It can perceive God because He is there for the seeing. If anyone fails to see Him it is because he does not look deep enough. Let the scientist look beneath the surface of things and he will find force; let him look still deeper and he will find will; let him look deeper still and he will find heart; let him go one step further and he will find God. God is not only the heart's ultimate, He is also the mind's ultimate. To speak of Him as essentially "an object of feeling, not of the intellect," is to ascribe to Him too narrow a place in the sphere of religion. He may indeed be spoken of as "an unutterable sigh lying in the depths of the heart," but He is also a felt necessity of the intellect. He is, in fine, the final resting-place of man's entire spiritual nature.

It is at this point that Dr. W. Robertson Nicoll, in his book entitled The Garden of Nuts, reaches his somewhat mystical definition of mysticism. After declaring that the inward way in which, according to mysticism. God is to be found constitutes "the central doctrine of mysticism," he says, "All Christian mysticism rests on the primordial facts that we came out of the great centre, and that our duty and rest are in that centre. Mysticism is accordingly counsel to the
exiled. It assumes that God is to be found, and that therefore there is and can be only one great work in life, that work being to accomplish an individual reversion to the fontal source of souls." This definition gets near to the heart of mysticism, It brings to view the practical aim of mysticism, which has ever been the return of the soul to the source of its life in God

The possibility of finding God and opening up direct communication with Him ought hardly to be doubted by those who consider the present-day marvels of communication between one human spirit and another. In the electrical
department of the St. Louis Exhibition,--which was well named the Wonder House,--besides the wireless telegraph there was the radiophone, ù a wireless telephone by which a human voice can travel astride an electric wave across the ocean; and the teleautograph by which a person may write a message upon an electric cylinder at one end of the wire, and a /ac-simile of the message will be written at the other end. These new methods of communication are suggestive of still subtler methods of communication in the spiritual realm. Telepathy is not a proved hypothesis, nor perhaps can it ever be, but it is a working hypothesis. When friend is separated from friend, the conviction is often expressed, "Across the world I speak to thee." Intercourse of soul with soul is not merely possible, it is probable:

"Star to star vibrates light: may not soul to soul 
Strike through some finer element than its own ?"

Modern scientists like Flammarion believe in the possibility of establishing communication between the earth and Mars. The greatest wonder of all is that communication has actually been established between earth and heaven.
This we owe to Jesus. For did He not define His mission to be the opening of heaven, and the bringing of heaven and earth into closer relationship? (see John 1. 51). Yet how lightly is the wonder passed over that man can speak with God and God can speak with him. Sometimes God's message comes with overpowering force as it did to George Fox in the valley of Beavoir. To quote his own words: "One morning a great cloud came upon me, and a temptation
beset me; and it was said, All things come by nature; and the elements and the stars came over me so that I was in a manner quite clouded with it. And as I sat still under it and let it alone, a living hope arose in me, and a true voice which said, `There is a living God who made all things.' And immediately the cloud and temptation vanished away, and life rose over it all, and my heart was glad, and I praised the living God." It is this sense of God, let it come as it may, that is the essential thing in religion. And the ground of its possibility lies in the fact that God is near, and is in constant connection with the spirit of man.

But this consciousness of God, of which George Fox, in common with all religious mystics, speaks, has behind it more than the fact of an established connection between God and man; it has also behind it the fact that God is
actively seeking man, and is endeavouring to get from him some response to his messages. The reason why anyone finds God is because God has first of all found him; and the reason why God has found him is because He has sought
him. The unending search of God after man is perhaps the most distinguishing thing in the Christian revelation. Other religions represent man as seeking God, Christianity alone represents God as seeking man. Man is "for ever haunted
by the Eternal mind." The divine voice resounds in his soul as the shell is fancied to murmur the music of the sea. The object of God in all His outgoings after man is to awaken within him a sense of His presence. Like the mother crooning over her babe, He tries to get some response, however faint, to His brooding tenderness. He touches man on every side of his spiritual nature; applying the kinds of stimuli fitted to arouse him from his moral dormancy. He speaks to him through his conscience, his imagination, his reason, and his heart. He wants to be recognised; He wants to be known; He wants to be loved; He wants to open up intercourse with every man so that He may be of help to
him. He is not content that men should know something about Him; He wants them to know Himself as one spirit knows another. It is life eternal to know God in this personal and experimental way. To attain personal knowledge of
God, and directness of connection with Him, has ever been the goal of mysticism. With a devout mystic such as Paul, this was the Ultima Thule of the spirit's quest.

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