point out in the chapter on the apocalypses, it is like the appeal of music. Sooner or later it loses itself in a region which is for almost everyone an unprofitable void. On the other hand, as Professor James has shown in his Varieties of Religious Experience, the hither borders of this region are also those of all religious and spiritual experience; and what value mysticism has it derives from its ability to lift the soul to the certitude of such experiences. The capacity of men for such spiritual experiences differs; and in consequence each one of us sets a different estimate on the profitableness of mysticism. But these writings of the New Testament will be a witness, except to the kind of man of science who swallows his Herbert Spencer whole, that the things of the spirit lie part way at any rate within the confines of another order of experience.

Coming back to a somewhat more sober way of looking at the subject, and considering it from the side of the style, we can see that the chief distinction between this mystical reason and the modern analytical reasoning is that in the former there is a large and inseparable element of the emotional. Psychologists to-day, as we have seen, hold that feeling is inseparable from the sensations; and it is a truth in literature that the appeal to the emotions must be made through the concrete. It is only as the

abstract approaches the rarefaction of the mathematical or of pure logic that all element of the emotional is stripped away. Now since the mystical reasoning is so largely figurative, it is couched in terms of the concrete, and therefore retains the strong emotional coloring which goes with the concrete. In the end it is still bound to terms which are more than half constituted of the non-rational element of feeling. In the figure of the light which is so dear to the author of the Fourth Gospel one feels that the connotation of the figure,—all the cloud of feelings and associations which throng about our idea of light,—is more important than the actual denotation. If the idea were made really abstract its value and stimulating power would fade away. Mysticism is like poetry in that without emotion it would be a contradiction in terms.

Here again, then, we get back to the same truth which lies behind the wisdom books of the Old Testament: from the point of view of literature power lies in the capacity of the written word to stir up feeling. Therefore in literature Bacon's apothegm, "Dry light is ever the best," has no place. The sensations and emotions of man, which do not change with the ages, are the permanent foundation of the mental life: the glory of the sun and the moon and the stars affects us in the same way that it did St. Paul; and we to-day at the call of his words rise

on similar uprushes of feeling to a region above the dust and turmoil of the present life. He had the genius for expressing these inexpressible thoughts; and he does so now by the pregnant figure of the sowing of the grain, now by a pure ejaculation of the triumph of the soul over matter, as in the cry, "O death, where is thy sting? O grave, where is thy victory?"

We can go a step farther, I think, without stepping out of a strictly literary study of these great masterpieces of expression into the field of theology: we can say that St. Paul was compelled to be partly mystical in the sense in which I have used the word here. If the message which was burned into his soul on the road to Damascus was of eternal significance, if it concerned the inscrutable things of God, it could not be reduced to the definiteness which some philosophers vainly hope to reach. At best man can attain only to glimpses of such truths, and then necessarily by intuition, not by reasoning; and such glimpses of supernatural truths can be communicated to other men through words only by such nobly figurative language as St. Paul had the genius to use: for by such language alone can the imagination be set soaring. The history of all literature will bear out the conclusion that follows from the study of the Bible, its greatest monument in English, that reasoning is

here impotent. It is only by virtue of the deep infusion of feeling which always goes with knowledge attained by intuition that the human mind can soar to the eternal and the infinite. St. Paul himself has said it once for all: "Now we see as in a glass, darkly": and these shadowy glimpses of the transcendent realities can be brought within the powers of language only by the adumbrations and kindling figures of a half-poetic speech.

CHAPTER VI

THE PROPHECY

I

We have seen in discussing the other forms of the Biblical literature that the narrative, except for a small portion of the Acts of the Apostles, is extremely simple in style, and that it has neither complications nor subtleties of construction; that the poetry, with an equal simplicity, sets forth directly, through powerful and concrete imagery, the fundamental and lasting emotions of mankind, but that, like the narrative, it never arrived at the point of creating characters and situations; that the wisdom literature of the Old Testament, limited like the narrative and the poetry by the nature of the Hebrew language, never arrived at reasoning in the modern sense, but stopped content with the truths which can be reached by intuition: and that it is not until we reach the Fourth Gospel and the epistles of St. Paul that we pass over to the mental life of the modern