Mysticism; Practical Mysticism

"The Divine Persons," he says, "Who form one sole God, are in the fecundity of their nature ever active: and in the simplicity of their essence they form the Godhead and eternal blessedness. Thus God according to the Persons is Eternal Work: but according to the essence and Its perpetual stillness, He is Eternal Rest. Now love and fruition live between this activity and this rest. Love would ever be active: for its nature is eternal working with God. Fruition is ever at rest, for it consists above all will and all desire, in the embrace of the well-beloved by the well-beloved in a simple and imageless love; wherein the Father, together with the Son, enfolds His beloved ones in the fruitive unity of His Spirit, above the fecundity of nature. And that same Father says to each soul in His infinite loving kindness, Thou art Mine and I am thine: I am thine and thou art Mine, for I have chosen thee from all eternity.'"¹

Next the vision of the self's destiny: "Our activity consists in loving God and our fruition in enduring God and being penetrated by His love. There is a distinction between love and fruition, as there is between God and His Grace. When we unite ourselves to God by love, then we are spirit: but when we are caught up and transformed by His Spirit, then we are led into fruition. And the spirit of God Himself breathes us out from Himself that we may love, and may do good works; and again He draws us into Himself, that we may rest in fruition. And this is Eternal Life; even as our mortal life subsists in the indrawing and outgoing of our breath."²

"Understand," he says again, "God comes to us incessantly, both with means and without means; and He demands of us both action and fruition, in such away that the action never hinders the fruition, nor the fruition the action, but they strengthen one another. And this is why the interior man [ i.e., the contemplative] lives his life according to these two ways; that is to say, in rest and in work. And in each of them he is wholly and undividedly; for he dwells wholly in God in virtue of his restful fruition and wholly in himself in virtue of his active love. And God, in His communications, perpetually calls and urges him to renew both this rest and this work. And because the soul is just, it desires to pay at every instant that which God demands of it; and this is why each time it is irradiated of Him, the soul turns inward in a manner that is both active and fruitive, and thus it is renewed in all virtues and ever more profoundly immersed in fruitive rest.... It is active in all loving work, for it sees its rest. It is a pilgrim, for it sees its country. For love's sake it strives for victory, for it sees its crown. Consolation, peace, joy, beauty and riches, all that can give delight, all this is shown to the mind illuminated in God, in spiritual similitudes and without measure. And through this vision and touch of God, love continues active. For such a just man has built up in his own soul, in rest and in work, a veritable life which shall endure for ever, but which shall be transformed after this present life to a state still more sublime. Thus this man is just, and he goes towards God by inward love, in eternal work, and he goes in God by his fruitive inclination in eternal rest. And he dwells in God; and yet he goes out towards all creatures, in a spirit of love towards all things, in virtue and in works of righteousness. And this is she supreme summit of the inner life."³

Compare this description with the careers of the theopathetic mystics, in whom, indeed, "action has not injured fruition, nor fruition action," who have by some secret adjustment contrived to "possess their lives in rest and in work" without detriment to inward joy or outward industry. Bear in mind as you read these words—Ruysbroeck's supreme effort to tell the true relation between man's created spirit and his God—the great public ministry of St. Catherine of Siena, which ranged from the tending of the plague-stricken to the reforming of the Papacy; and was accompanied by the inward fruitive consciousness of the companionship of Christ. Remember the humbler but not less beautiful and significant achievement of her Genoese namesake: the strenuous lives of St. Francis of Assisi, St. Ignatius, St. Teresa, outwardly cumbered with much serving, observant of an infinitude of tiresome details, composing rules, setting up foundations, neglecting no aspect of their business which could conduce to its practical success, yet "altogether dwelling in God in restful fruition." Are not all these supreme examples of the state in which the self, at last fully conscious, knowing Reality because she is wholly real, pays her debt? Unable to rest entirely either in work or in fruition, she seizes on this twofold expression of the superabundant life by which she is possessed: and, on the double wings of eagerness and effort, takes flight towards her Home.

In dwelling, as we have done, on the ways in which the great mystic makes actual to himself the circumstances of the Unitive State, we must not forget that this state is, in essence, a fulfilment of love; the attainment of a "heart's desire." By this attainment, this lifting of the self to free union with the Real—as by the earthly marriage which dimly prefigures it—a new life is entered upon, new powers, new responsibilities are conferred. But this is not all. The three prime activities of the normal self, feeling, intellect, and will, though they seem to be fused, are really carried up to a higher term. They are unified, it is true, but still present in their integrity; and each demands and receives full satisfaction in the attainment of this fillal "honour for which man has been made." The intellect is immersed in that mighty vision of truth, known now not as a vision but as a home; where St. Paul saw things which might not be uttered, St. Teresa found the "perpetual companionship of the Blessed Trinity," and Dante, caught to its heart for one brief moment, his mind smitten by the blinding flash of the Uncreated light, knew that he had resolved Reality's last paradox: the unity of "cerchio" and "imago" — the infinite and personal aspects of God.⁴ The enhanced will, made over to the interests of the Transcendent, receives new worlds to conquer, new strength to match its exalted destiny. But the heart too here enters on a new order, begins to live upon high levels of joy. "This soul, says Love, swims in the sea of joy: that is, in the sea of delight, the stream of divine influences."⁵

"Amans volat, currit et laetatur: liber est et non tenetur,"⁶ said à Kempis: classic words, which put before us once and for ever the inward joyousness and liberty of the saints. They "fly, run, and rejoice"—those great, laborious souls, often spent with amazing mortifications, vowed to hard and never-ending tasks. They are "free, and nothing can hold them," though they seem to the world fenced in by absurd renunciations and restrictions, deprived of that cheap licence which it knows as liberty.

That fruition of joy of which Ruysbroeck speaks in majestic phrases, as constituting the interior life of mystic souls immersed in the Absolute—the translation of the Beatific Vision into the terms of a supernal feeling-state—is often realized in the secret experience of those same mystics, as the perennial possession of a childlike gaiety, an inextinguishable gladness of heart. The transfigured souls move to the measures of a "love dance" which persists in mirth without comparison, through every outward hardship and tribulation. They enjoy the high spirits peculiar to high spirituality: and shock the world by a delicate playfulness, instead of exhibiting the morose resignation which it feels to be proper to the "spiritual life." Thus St. Catherine of Siena, though constantly suffering, "was always jocund and of a happy spirit." When prostrate with illness she overflowed with gaiety and gladness, and "was full of laughter in the Lord, exultant and rejoicing. "⁷

Moreover, the most clear-sighted amongst the mystics declare such joy to be an implicit of Reality. Thus Dante, initiated into Paradise, sees the whole Universe laugh with delight as it glorifies God:⁸ and the awful countenance of Perfect Love adorned with smiles.⁹ Thus the souls of the great theologians dance to music and laughter in the Heaven of the Sun;¹⁰ the loving seraphs, in their ecstatic joy, whirl about the Being of God.¹¹ "O luce sterna che... ami ed arridi, " exclaims the pilgrim, as the Divine Essence is at last revealed to him,¹² and he perceives love and joy as the final attributes of the Triune God. Thus Beatrice with "suoi occhi ridenti"— so different from the world's idea of a suitable demeanour for the soul's supreme instructress—laughs as she mounts with him the ladder to the stars. So, if the deified soul has indeed run ahead of humanity and "according to his fruition dwells in heaven," he too, like Francis, will run, rejoice and make merry: join the eager dance of the Universe about the One. "If," says Patmore, "we may credit certain hints contained in the lives of the saints, love raises the spirit above the sphere of reverence and worship into one of laughter and dalliance: a sphere in which the soul says:—

"Shall I, a gnat which dances in Thy ray,

Dare to be reverent?'"¹³

Richard Rolle has expressed this exultant "spirit of dalliance" with peculiar insight and delicacy. "Among the delights which he tastes in so sweet love burning," he says of the true lover who "in the bond of the lovers' will stably is confirmed," "a heavenly privity inshed he feels, that no man can know but he that has received it, and in himself bears the electuary that anoints and makes happy all joyful lovers in Jesu; so that they cease not to hie in heavenly seats to sit, endlessly their Maker to enjoy. Hereto truly they yearn in heavenly sights abiding; and inwardly set afire, all their inward parts are glad with pleasant shining in light. And themselves they feel gladdened with merriest love, and in joyful song wonderfully melted.... But this grace generally and to all is not given, but to the holy soul imbued with the holiest is taught; in whom the excellence of love shines, and songs of lovely loving, Christ inspiring, commonly burst up, and being made as it were a pipe of love, in sight of God more goodly than can be said, joying sounds. The which (soul) the mystery of love knowing, with great cry to its Love ascends, in wit sharpest, and in knowledge and in feeling subtle; not spread in things of this world but into God all gathered and set, that in cleanness of conscience and shining of soul to Him it may serve Whom it has purposed to love, and itself to Him to give. Surely the clearer the love of the lover is, the nearer to him and the more present God is. And thereby more clearly in God he joys, and of the sweet Goodness the more he feels, that to lovers is wont Itself to inshed, and to mirth without comparison the hearts of the meek to turn."¹⁴

The state of burning love, said Rolle, than which he could conceive no closer reaction to Reality, was the state of Sweetness and Song: the welling up of glad music in the simple soul, man's natural expression of a joy which overpasses the descriptive powers of our untuneful speech. In the gay rhythms of that primordial art he may say something of the secret which the more decorous periods of religion and philosophy will never let him tell: something, too, which in its very childishness, its freedom from the taint of solemnity and self-importance, expresses the quality of that inward life, that perpetual youth, which the "secret child" of the Transcendent Order enjoys. "As it were a pipe of love" in the sight of God he "joying sounds." The music of the spheres is all about him: he is a part of the great melody of the Divine. "Sweetest forsooth," says Rolle again, "is the rest which the spirit takes whilst sweet goodly sound comes down, in which it is delighted: and in most sweet song and playful the mind is ravished to sing likings of love everlasting."¹⁵

When we come to look at the lives of the mystics, we find it literally true that such "songs of lovely loving commonly burst up" whenever we can catch them unawares; see behind the formidable and heroic activities of reformer, teacher, or leader of men the vie intime which is lived at the hearth of Love. "What are the servants of the Lord but His minstrels?" said St. Francis,¹⁶ who saw nothing inconsistent between the Celestial Melodies and the Stigmata of Christ. Moreover the songs of such troubadours, as the hermit of Hampole learned in his wilderness, are not only sweet but playful. Dwelling always in a light of which we hardly dare to think, save in the extreme terms of reverence and awe, they are not afraid with any amazement: they are at home.

The whole life of St. Francis of Assisi, that spirit transfigured in God, who "loved above all other birds a certain little bird which is called the lark,"¹⁷ was one long march to music through the world. To sing seemed to him a primary spiritual function: he taught his friars in their preaching to urge all men to this.¹⁸ It appeared to him appropriate and just to use the romantic language of the troubadours in praise of the perfect Love which had marked him as Its own. "Drunken with the love and compassion of Christ, blessed Francis on a time did things such as these. For the most sweet melody of spirit boiling up within him, frequently broke out in French speech, and the veins of murmuring which he heard secretly with his ears broke forth into French-like rejoicing. And sometimes he picked up a branch from the earth, and laying it on his left arm, he drew in his right hand another stick like a bow over it, as if on a viol or other instrument, and, making fitting gestures, sang with it in French unto the Lord Jesus Christ."¹⁹

Many a time has the romantic quality of the Unitive Life—its gaiety, freedom, assurance, and joy—broken out in "French-like rejoicings"; which have a terribly frivolous sound for worldly ears, and seem the more preposterous as coming from people whose outward circumstances are of the most uncomfortable kind. St. John of the Cross wrote love songs to his Love. St. Rose of Lima sang duets with the birds. St. Teresa, in the austere and poverty-stricken seclusion of her first foundation, did not disdain to make rustic hymns and carols for her daughters' use in the dialect of Old Castile. Like St. Francis, she had a horror of solemnity. It was only fit for hypocrites, thought these rejuvenators of the Church. The hard life of prayer and penance on Mount Carmel was undertaken in a joyous spirit to the sound of many songs. Its great Reformer was quick to snub the too-spiritual sister who "thought it better to contemplate than to sing": and was herself heard, as she swept the convent corridor, to sing a little ditty about the most exalted of her own mystical experiences: that ineffable transverberation, in which the fiery arrow of the seraph pierced her heart.²⁰

But the most lovely and real, most human and near to us, of all these descriptions of the celestial exhilaration which mystic surrender brings in its train, is the artless, unintentional self-revelation of St. Catherine of Genoa, whose inner and outer lives in their balanced wholeness provide us with one of our best standards by which to judge the right proportions of the Mystic Way. Here the whole essence of the Unitive Life is summed up and presented to us by one who lived it upon heroic levels: and who was, in fruition and activity, in rest and in work, not only a great active and a great ecstatic, but one of the deepest gazers into the secrets of Eternal Love that the history of Christian mysticism contains. Yet perhaps there is no passage in the works of these same mystics which comes to so unexpected, so startling a conclusion as this; in which St. Catherine, with a fearless simplicity, shows to her fellow-men the nature of the path that she has trodden and the place that she has reached.

"When," she says, in one of her reported dialogues—and though the tone be impersonal it is clearly personal experience which speaks—"the loving kindness of God calls a soul from the world, He finds it full of vices and sins; and first He gives it an instinct for virtue, and then urges it to perfection, and then by infused grace leads it to true self-naughting, and at last to true transformation. And this noteworthy order serves God to lead the soul along the Way: but when the soul is naughted and transformed, then of herself she neither works nor speaks nor wills, nor feels nor hears nor understands, neither has she of herself the feeling of outward or inward, where she may move. And in all things it is God Who rules and guides her, without the mediation of any creature. And the state of this soul is then a feeling of such utter peace and tranquillity that it seems to her that her heart, and her bodily being, and all both within and without is immersed in an ocean of utmost peace; from when she shall never come forth for anything that can befall her in this life. And she stays immovable, imperturbable, impassible. So much so, that it seems to her in her human and her spiritual nature, both within and without, she can feel no other thing than sweetest peace. And she is so full of peace that though she press her flesh, her nerves, her bones, no other thing comes forth from them than peace. Then says she all day for joy such rhymes as these, making them according to her manner:—

"Vuoi tu che tu mostr'io

Presto che cosa è Dio?

Pace non trova chi da lui si partiò.'"²¹

"Then says she all day for joy such rhymes as these"—nursery rhymes, one might almost call them: so infantile, so naive is their rhythm. Who would have suspected this to be the secret manner of communion between the exalted soul of Catherine and her Love? How many of those who actually saw that great and able woman labouring in the administration of her hospital—who heard that profound and instinctive Christian Platonist instructing her disciples, and declaring the law of universal and heroic love—how many of these divined that "questa santa benedetta" who seemed to them already something more than earthly, a matter of solemn congratulation and reverential approach, went about her work with a heart engaged in no lofty speculations on Eternity; no outpourings of mystic passion for the Absolute; but "saying all day for joy," in a spirit of childlike happiness, gay and foolish little songs about her Love?

Standing at the highest point of the mystic ladder which can be reached by human spirits in this world of time and space, looking back upon the course of that slow interior alchemy, that "noteworthy order" of organic transformation, by which her selfhood had been purged of imperfection, raised to higher levels, compelled at last to surrender itself to the all-embracing, all-demanding life of the Real; this is St. Catherine's deliberate judgment on the relative and absolute aspects of the mystic life. The "noteworthy order" which we have patiently followed, the psychic growth and rearrangement of character, the visions and ecstasies, the joyous illumination and bitter pain—these but "served to lead the soul along the way." In the mighty transvaluation of values which takes place when that way has at last been trod, these "abnormal events" sink to insignificance. For us, looking out wistfully along the pathway to reality, they stand out, it is true, as supreme landmarks, by which we may trace the homeward course of pilgrim man. Their importance cannot be overrated for those who would study the way to that world from this. But the mystic, safe in that silence where lovers lose themselves, "his cheek on Him Who for his coming came," remembers them no more. In the midst of his active work, his incessant spiritual creation, joy and peace enfold him. He needs no stretched and sharpened intuition now: for he dwells in that "most perfect form of contemplation" which "consists in simple and perceived contact of the substance of the soul with that of the divine."²²

The wheel of life has made its circle. Here, at the last point of its revolution, the extremes of sublimity and simplicity are seen to meet. It has swept the soul of the mystic through periods of alternate stress and glory; tending ever to greater transcendence, greater freedom, closer contact with "the Supplier of true life." He emerges from that long and wondrous journey to find himself in rest and in work, a little child upon the bosom of the Father. In that most dear relation all feeling, will, and thought attain their end. Here all the teasing complications of our separated selfhood are transcended. Hence the eager striving, the sharp vision, are not wanted any more. In that mysterious death of selfhood on the summits which is the medium of Eternal Life, heights meet the deeps: supreme achievement and complete humility are one.

In a last brief vision, a glimpse as overpowering to our common minds as Dante's final intuition of reality to his exalted and courageous soul, we see the triumphing spirit, sent out before us the best that earth can offer, stoop and strip herself of the insignia of wisdom and power. Achieving the highest, she takes the lowest place. Initiated into the atmosphere of Eternity, united with the Absolute, possessed at last of the fullness of Its life, the soul, self-naughted becomes as a little child: for of such is the kingdom of heaven.

Far from being academic or unreal, that history, I think, is vital for the deeper understanding of the history of humanity. It shows us, upon high levels, the psychological process to which every self which desires to rise to the perception of Reality must submit: the formula under which man's spiritual consciousness, be it strong or weak, must necessarily unfold. In the great mystics we see the highest and widest development of that consciousness to which the human race has yet attained. We see its growth exhibited to us on a grand scale, perceptible of all men: the stages of its slow transcendence of the sense-world marked by episodes of splendour and of terror which are hard for common men to accept or understand as a part of the organic process of life. But the germ of that same transcendent life, the spring of the amazing energy which enables the great mystic to rise to freedom and dominate his world, is latent in all of us, an integral part of our humanity. Where the mystic has a genius for the Absolute, we have each a little buried talent, some greater, some less; and the growth of this talent, this spark of the soul, once we permit its emergence, will conform in little, and according to its measure, to those laws of organic growth those inexorable conditions of transcendence which we found to govern the Mystic Way.

Every person, then, who awakens to consciousness of a Reality which transcends the normal world of sense—however small, weak imperfect that consciousness may be—is put upon a road which follows at low levels the path which the mystic treads at high levels. The success with which he follows this way to freedom and full life will depend on the intensity of his love and will, his capacity for self-discipline, his steadfastness and courage. It will depend on the generosity and completeness of his outgoing passion for absolute beauty, absolute goodness, or absolute truth. But if he move at all, he will move through a series of states which are, in their own small way, analogous to those experienced by the greatest contemplative on his journey towards that union with God which is the term of the spirit's ascent towards its home.

As the embryo of physical man, be he saint or savage, passes through the same stages of initial growth, so too with spiritual man. When the "new birth" takes place in him, the new life-process of his deeper self begins, the normal individual, no less than the mystic, will know that spiral ascent towards higher levels, those oscillations of consciousness between light and darkness, those odd mental disturbances, abrupt invasions from the subliminal region, and disconcerting glimpses of truth, which accompany the growth of the transcendental powers; though he may well interpret them in other than the mystic sense. He too will be impelled to drastic self-discipline, to a deliberate purging of his eyes that he may see: and receiving a new vision of the world, will be spurred by it to a total self-dedication, an active surrender of his whole being, to that aspect of the Infinite which he has perceived. He too will endure in little the psychic upheavals of the spiritual adolescence: will be forced to those sacrifices which every form of genius demands. He will know according to his measure the dreadful moments of lucid self-knowledge, the counter-balancing ecstasy of an intuition of the Real. More and more, as we study and collate all the available evidence, this fact—this law—is borne in on us: that the general movement of human consciousness, when it obeys its innate tendency to transcendence, is always the same. There is only one road from Appearance to Reality. "Men pass on, but the States are permanent for ever."

I do not care whether the consciousness be that of artist or musician, striving to catch and fix some aspect of the heavenly light or music, and denying all other aspects of the world in order to devote themselves to this: or of the humble servant of Science, purging his intellect that he may look upon her secrets with innocence of eye: whether the higher reality be perceived in the terms of religion, beauty, suffering; of human love, of goodness, or of truth. However widely these forms of transcendence may seem to differ, the mystic experience is the key to them all. All in their different ways are exhibitions here and now of the Eternal; extensions of man's consciousness which involve calls to heroic endeavour, incentives to the remaking of character about new and higher centres of life. Through each, man may rise to freedom and take his place in the great movement of the universe: may "understand by dancing that which is done." Each brings the self who receives its revelation in good faith, does not check it by self-regarding limitations, to a humble acceptance of the universal law of knowledge: the law that "we behold that which we are," and hence that "only the Real can know Reality." Awakening, Discipline, Enlightenment, Self-surrender, and Union, are the essential phases of life's response to this fundamental fact: the conditions of our attainment of Being, the necessary formula under which alone our consciousness of any of these fringes of Eternity—any of these aspects of the Transcendent—can unfold, develop, attain to freedom and full life.

We are, then, one and all the kindred of the mystics; and it is by dwelling upon this kinship, by interpreting—so far as we may—their great declarations in the light of our little experience, that we shall learn to understand them best. Strange and far away though they seem, they are not cut off from us by some impassable abyss. They belong to us. They are our brethren; the giants, the heroes of our race. As the achievement of genius belongs not to itself only, but also to the society that brought it forth; as theology declares that the merits of the saints avail for all; so, because of the solidarity of the human family, the supernal accomplishment of the mystics is ours also. Their attainment is the earnest-money of our eternal life.

To be a mystic is simply to participate here and now in that real and eternal life; in the fullest, deepest sense which is possible to man. It is to share, as a free and conscious agent—not a servant, but a son—in the joyous travail of the Universe: its mighty onward sweep through pain and glory towards its home in God. This gift of "sonship," this power of free co-operation in the world-process, is man's greatest honour. The ordered sequence of states, the organic development, whereby his consciousness is detached from illusion and rises to the mystic freedom which conditions instead of being conditioned by, its normal world, is the way he must tread if that sonship is to be realized. Only by this deliberate fostering of his deeper self, this transmutation of the elements of his character, can he reach those levels of consciousness upon which he hears, and responds to, the measure "whereto the worlds keep time" on their great pilgrimage towards the Father's heart. The mystic act of union, that joyous loss of the transfigured self in God, which is the crown of man's conscious ascent towards the Absolute, is the contribution of the individual to this, the destiny of the Cosmos.

The mystic knows that destiny. It is laid bare to his lucid vision, as our puzzling world of form and colour is to normal sight. He is the "hidden child" of the eternal order, an initiate of the secret plan. Hence, whilst "all creation groaneth and travaileth," slowly moving under the spur of blind desire towards that consummation in which alone it can have rest, he runs eagerly along the pathway to reality. He is the pioneer of Life on its age-long voyage to the One: and shows us, in his attainment, the meaning and value of that life.

This meaning, this secret plan of Creation, flames out, had we eyes to see, from every department of existence. Its exultant declarations come to us in all great music; its magic is the life of all romance. Its law—the law of love—is the substance of the beautiful, the energizing cause of the heroic. It lights the altar of every creed. All man's dreams and diagrams concerning a transcendent Perfection near him yet intangible, a transcendent vitality to which he can attain—whether he call these objects of desire God, grace, being, spirit, beauty, "pure idea"—are but translations of his deeper self's intuition of its destiny; clumsy fragmentary hints at the all-inclusive, living Absolute which that deeper self knows to be real. This supernal Thing, the adorable Substance of all that Is—the synthesis of Wisdom, Power, and Love—and man's apprehension of it, his slow remaking in its interests, his union with it at last; this is the theme of mysticism. That twofold extension of consciousness which allows him communion with its transcendent and immanent aspects is, in all its gradual processes, the Mystic Way. It is also the crown of human evolution; the fulfilment of life, the liberation of personality from the world of appearance, its entrance into the free creative life of the Real.

Further, Christians may well remark that the psychology of Christ, as presented to us in the Gospels, is of a piece with that of the mystics. In its pain and splendour, its dual character of action and fruition, it reflects their experience upon the supernal plane of more abundant life. Thanks to this fact, for them the Ladder of Contemplation—that ladder which mediaeval thought counted as an instrument of the Passion, discerning it as essential to the true salvation of man—stretches without a break from earth to the Empyrean. It leans against the Cross; it leads to the Secret Rose. By it the ministers of Goodness, Truth, and Beauty go up and down between the transcendent and the apparent world. Seen, then, from whatever standpoint we may choose to adopt—whether of psychology, philosophy, or religion—the adventure of the great mystics intimately concerns us. It is a master-key to man's puzzle: by its help he may explain much in his mental makeup, in his religious constructions, in his experience of life. In all these departments he perceives himself to be climbing slowly and clumsily upward toward some attainment yet unseen. The mystics, expert mountaineers, go before him: and show him, if he cares to learn, the way to freedom, to reality, to peace. He cannot rise in this, his earthly existence, to the awful and solitary peak, veiled in the Cloud of Unknowing, where they meet that "death of the summit," which is declared by them to be the gate of Perfect Life: but if he choose to profit by their explorations, he may find his level, his place within the Eternal Order. He may achieve freedom, live the "independent spiritual life."

Consider once more the Mystic Way as we have traced it from its beginning. To what does it tend if not to this?

It began by the awakening within the self of a new and embryonic consciousness: a consciousness of divine reality, as opposed to the illusory sense-world in which she was immersed. Humbled, awed by the august possibilities then revealed to her, that self retreated into the "cell of self-knowledge" and there laboured to adjust herself to the Eternal Order which she had perceived, stripped herself of all that opposed it, disciplined her energies, purified the organs of sense. Remade in accordance with her intuitions of reality, the "eternal hearing and seeing were revealed in her." She opened her eyes upon a world still natural, but no longer illusory; since it was perceived to be illuminated by the Uncreated Light. She knew then the beauty, the majesty, the divinity of the living World of Becoming which holds in its meshes every living thing. She had transcended the narrow rhythm by which common men perceive but one of its many aspects, escaped the machine-made universe presented by the cinematograph of sense, and participated in the "great life of the All." Reality came forth to her, since her eyes were cleansed to see It, not from some strange far-off and spiritual country, but gently, from the very heart of things. Thus lifted to a new level, she began again her ceaseless work of growth: and because by the cleansing of the senses she had learned to see the reality which is shadowed by the sense-world, she now, by the cleansing of her will, sought to draw nearer to that Eternal Will, that Being, which life, the World of Becoming, manifests and serves. Thus, by the surrender of her selfhood in its wholeness, the perfecting of her love, she slid from Becoming to Being, and found her true life hidden in God.

Yet the course of this transcendence, this amazing inward journey, was closely linked, first and last, with the processes of human life. It sprang from that life, as man springs from the sod. We were even able to describe it under those symbolic formulae which we are accustomed to call the "laws" of the natural world. By an extension of these formulae, their logical application, we discovered a path which led us without a break from the sensible to the supra-sensible; from apparent to absolute life. There is nothing unnatural about the Absolute of the mystics: He sets the rhythm of His own universe, and conforms to the harmonies which He has made. We, deliberately seeking for that which we suppose to be spiritual, too often overlook that which alone is Real. The true mysteries of life accomplish themselves so softly, with so easy and assured a grace, so frank an acceptance of our breeding, striving, dying, and unresting world, that the unimaginative natural man—all agog for the marvellous—is hardly startled by their daily and radiant revelation of infinite wisdom and love. Yet this revelation presses incessantly upon us. Only the hard crust of surface-consciousness conceals it from our normal sight. In some least expected moment, the common activities of life in progress, that Reality in Whom the mystics dwell slips through our closed doors, and suddenly we see It at our side.

It was said of the disciples at Emmaus, "Mensam igitur ponunt panes cibosque offerunt, et Deum, quem in Scripturae sacrae expositione non cognoverant, in panis fractione cognoscunt." So too for us the Transcendent Life for which we crave is revealed and our living within it, not on some remote and arid plane of being, in the cunning explanations of philosophy; but in the normal acts of our diurnal experience, suddenly made significant for us. Not in the backwaters of existence, not amongst subtle arguments and occult doctrines, but in all those places where the direct and simple life of earth goes on. It is found in the soul of man so long as that soul is alive and growing: it is not found in any sterile place.

This fact of experience is our link with the mystics, our guarantee of the truthfulness of their statements, the supreme importance of their adventure, their closer contact with Reality. The mystics on their part are our guarantee of the end towards which the Immanent Love, the hidden steersman which dwells in our midst, is moving: our "lovely forerunners" on the path towards the Real. They come back to us from an encounter with life's most august secret, as Mary came running from the tomb; filled with amazing tidings which they can hardly tell. We, longing for some assurance, and seeing their radiant faces, urge them to pass on their revelation if they can. It is the old demand of the dim-sighted and incredulous:—