reach anything like full realization of it, to attain those heights of serenity and calm where one can take life and all its experiences with perfect equanimity, abiding in the Divine as the branch abides in the Vine, that cannot be an easy matter. The great mystics seem almost out of sight as we look up at them moving toward these summits. But perhaps they made the way too steep, the ladder too high. At all events there may be a consciousness of harmony with God-better, perhaps, called unison-which is most normal and which many a saintly character in the knowledge of all of us has attained.

We may even ask whether that exceptional mystical experience, the so-called Ecstasy, or Rapture, is, after all, quite so remote and unallied as both the mystics themselves and their biographers have sometimes assumed it to be. I am thinking now, not of the psychological phenomena of self-hypnotism, coma, etc., but of forms of experience of a far less abnormal character. Is there not something closely approaching ecstasy, for instance-as

15 Writing of ecstasy, Inge says: "I regard these experiences as neither more or less 'supernatural' than other mental phenomena. Many of them are certainly pathological; about others we may feel doubts; but some have every right to be considered as real irradiations of the soul from 'the light that forever shines,' real notes of the 'harmony that is in immortal souls' (Christian Mysticism, p. 18).

Fleming suggests-in canto xcv of the "In Memoriam," or-as Inge points out-in Wordsworth's description of the

Serene and blessed mood

In which the breath of this corporeal frame,
And even the motion of our human blood,
Almost suspended, we are laid asleep

In body and become a living soul

And see into the life of things.

Coleridge's "Hymn before Sunrise in the Vale of Chamounix" suggests something approaching rapture in such lines as:

Till the dilating soul, enrapt, transfused,
Into the mighty vision passing-there

As in her natural form, swelled vast to Heaven.

Certainly, Charles G. Finney's experience was hardly less than an ecstasy when he sat alone in his office and felt the love of God roll over him in waves. James Russell Lowell recounts in one of his letters, reproduced by William James, an experience that seems to fall not very far short of ecstasy:

As I was speaking [on spiritual matters] the whole system rose up before me like a vague destiny looming from the abyss. I never before so clearly felt the Spirit of God in me and around me. The whole room seemed to me

full of God. The air seemed to waver to and fro with the presence of Something, I know not what. I spoke with the calmness and clearness of a prophet. 16

In many of these experiences there is lacking the sense of an intensely intimate realization of the Divine Personality such as appears in Paul's conversion, or in Dante's beatific vision, or in the trances of Saint Teresa and Saint Catherine. There is more in them of the cosmic sense that has come into our modern thought; and yet that does not mean that this consciousness is out of keeping with Reality as Personal.

One would not wish in any wise to belittle the thrilling and solemn raptures of the mediæval saints; and yet it is quite possible that they have been too far segregated and canonized. May there not be minor, as well as major, ecstasies, in which the soul receives, not all the raptures of seraphic saintliness, but enough of the breath of the Spirit to waft it for a brief moment out upon the ocean of the infinite, where it is caught away from itself into communion with the Eternal? It is well to remember that the trance, which so often attended ecstasy, bore a supernatural aspect to the mediæval mind which it has lost to us.

16 Varieties of Religious Experience, p. 66.

V

Have we essayed a vain undertaking in attempting to bridge the gap between these far-away saints, mounting their high and stony way toward the Perfect, and the saints of our own days treading their humbler, more prosaic pathway? Must we put down "the saints of old" as neurotics and extremists and our presentday saints as no saints at all? It is useless to attempt to ignore the wide chasm between their intrepid, other-worldly, sense-scorning, world-repressing piety and that of our own time. And yet, may it not be that the partakers of the mystic life to-day are so far one with them that "they without us should not be made perfect." These skyey saints were doubtless far more human than a distant view of them reveals. Had they not "eyes, hands, organs, dimensions, senses, affections, passions"? And have not we men of to-day, even in our "brassy bosoms and rough hearts of flint," something of the incipient qualities of sainthood? If you prick us with the reproach of an unrealized

17 Since writing the above I find that A. B. Sharpe, Roman Catholic though he is, after setting apart the mystics as having a supernatural experience peculiar to themselves, nevertheless finds himself compelled to ask whether, after all, the ordinary Christian does not share something of their experience. He concludes: "It can hardly be denied that an aspect which it is difficult to distinguish from that of genuine mysticism seems at times to belong to some of the inward experiences of ordinary persons who have no thought or knowledge of the contemplative life" (Mysticism, p. 191).

ideal, do we not bleed? If a sunset smites us with the glory that never was on land or sea, do we not yearn? If a noble, sacrificial, love-lit character crosses our pathway, do we not long to be like him? Are men so earthly, after all, as we have thought,

"Finished and finite clods, untroubled by a spark"?

Such is not the conviction of our better moments.

Our soul, in its rose-mesh

Pulled ever to the earth, still yearns for rest.

And not for rest only. Life will not let us rest content upon the lower levels. Something, or Someone, is ever calling us to higher aims and nobler ideals.