XIII.

MODERN MYSTICS.

In a book which appeared a few years Good Friday in an since-a memoir of the wife and son of English Family. the late Archbishop of Canterbury, Dr. Tait-we find the description of a scene which, as occurring among intelligent and cultivated people, seems very singular. In her early life Mrs. Tait was much under the influence of a clergyman of the Church of England, her brother-in-law, Mr. Edward Fortescue, a young man of aristocratic birth and with the best education Oxford could give him. He was a ritualist and a high-churchman, and gave much attention to the religious training, after his own idea of what it should be, of this young girl of fifteen, with other young persons in the family. An account is given of the manner in which a certain Good Friday-the day commemorative in the Church of England of our Saviour's death upon the cross-was passed. The account, as we find it, reads thus:

"The day had been spent in fasting and prayer, in the solemn endeavour to realize the scenes of that terrible day in Jerusalem, and when the hours of darkness came, as they [the young people of the family] were alone in their rooms, there was an awful silence, broken at intervals by his [Mr. Fortescue's] deep voice through their open door, pronouncing the words of the dying Saviour upon the cross, this lasting through the three hours of agony he hung upon it."

The author of the memoir, himself a decided churchman, speaks of this as a very unsafe kind of religious training, and thinks it a fortunate thing for the young person who after

wards became Mrs. Tait, that in due time she came under a different sort of spiritual direction.

cal Side.

Mr. Fortescue, at Oxford, had been Dr. Newman's Mysti- under the influence of Dr. Newman, and like Dr. Newman, he went in due time into the Roman communion. The mystical spirit, as we may call it, shown in the scene just described, he had perhaps caught, in some degree at least, from Newman himself. In one part of the "history" he gives of his own "religious opinions," Newman thinks it worth his while to mention the following:

"When I was at Littlemore," he says-Littlemore being a Rarish near Oxford in which he served as a clergyman at the outset of his public career- "I was looking over old copybooks of my school days, and I found among them my first Latin verse-book; and in the first page of it there was a device which almost took away my breath with surprise. I have the book before me now, and have just been showing it to others. I have written in the first page, in my school-boy hand, John H. Newman, February 11, 1811, Verse-Book;' then follow my first verses. Between Verse' and 'Book,' I

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have drawn the figure of a solid cross upright, and next to it is, what may indeed be meant for a necklace, but what I cannot make out to be anything else than a set of beads suspended, with a little cross attached. At this time I was not quite ten years old."

The only importance in this little incident is the fact that to Dr. Newman in his mature age it should seem important. He appears to have viewed it as almost a supernatural preindication of his own future as a priest and teacher in the Roman church. A still more suggestive passage in the same record is where, in stating the doctrine which he held after becoming a preacher and author, as to the angels, he reveals to us very clearly his mystical turn of mind. "I viewed them," he says, "not only as the ministers employed by the Creator in the Jewish and Christian dispensations, as we find on the face of Scripture, but as carrying on, as Scripture also implies, the Economy of the Visible World. I considered.

them as the real causes of motion, light and life, and of those elementary principles of the physical universe, which, when offered in their development to our senses, suggest to us the notions of cause and effect, and of what are called the laws of nature. I have drawn out this doctrine in my sermon for Michaelmas day, written not later than 1834. I say of the Angels, Every breath of air and ray of light and heat, every beautiful prospect is, as it were, the skirts of their garments, the waving of the robes of those whose faces see God.'"

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As a poetical conception, we might say of this that it is beautiful and beautifully expressed. But when we find it to be an actual matter of belief and made the argument of a sermon, we cannot help viewing it as indicative of a very peculiar mental constitution. He goes on: Again, I ask what would be the thoughts of the man who, when examining a flower, or an herb, or a pebble, or a ray of light, which he treats as something so beneath him in the scale of existence, suddenly discovered that he was in the presence of some powerful being who was hidden behind the visible things he was inspecting, who, though concealing his wise hand, was giving them their beauty, grace and perfection, as being God's instruments for the purpose, nay, whose robe and ornaments these objects were which he was so eager to analyze ?"

Fenelon and Madame

Guyon.

We are trying to indicate in these incidents and passages what it seems safe to call the mystical mood of mind, and that, too, as something inwrought in the mind exhibiting it, as a part of the mind's very texture, not as a mere passing phase of the mental consciousness. We confine ourselves also, for the present, to individual manifestations, reserving what we have to say of the founders of mystical sects till further on. Perhaps no more engaging examples of such manifestation can be named than those of Fenelon and Madame Guyon. That in such society as was found in Paris in the time of Louis the Fourteenth, such exalted spirituality of religious experience and religious life as that of the latter, and in one of the highest positions of the French church at that time, such a pure

and lofty, yet devout and humble character as that of the former, should appear, argues in each something very different from the worldliness and time-serving of their age and immediate surroundings. Madame Guyon would command, however, from the present age a much higher eulogy if her personal piety could have preserved itself from the mystical extremes into which it so often ran. Fenelon shows far less of this. The mystical element in him, indeed, consists almost wholly in his adoption of certain views of Madame Guyon, with reference to the measure in which love to God may become utterly disinterested, and the soul be wholly given up to him. The excellent lady, his friend, whose influence over him during many years was so great, and whose cause he maintained in the face of danger and reproach, held views wholly mystical. "The soul," she says, "passing out of itself by dying to itself, necessarily passes into its divine object. This is the law of its transition. When it passes out of. self, which is limited, and therefore is not God, and consequently is evil, it necessarily passes into the unlimited and universal, which is God, and therefore is the true good. My own experience seemed to me a verification of this. My spirit, disenthralled from selfishness, became united with and lost in God, its sovereign, who attracted it more and more to himself. And this was so much the case, that I could seem to know

God only, and not myself." This reads almost like passages

from the sermons of Eckhardt and Tauler in the fourteenth century; at first almost seeming as if it must savor the mystical pantheism of the former. Yet this would be an unjust judgment. A life of peculiar trial, with a great burden of sorrow and vicissitude acted upon the mystical susceptibilities of Madame Guyon, in a way to result in what, for another, might have been mere extravagance, though in her so consonant with a mind and a spirit exalted and ethereal, as to make it all, not a mere rhapsody, but genuine experience; not a mystical philosophy, but an ethereal faith.

1 Quoted from Upham in Vaughan's "Hours with the Mystics," vol. ii., p. 228.

Mysticism as Defined.

2

It is hard to define with perfect exactness, this word, "Mysticism." In fact, the thing intended by it has so many phases and guises that an exact definition is perhaps impossible. Webster defines mystics as "a class of religious people who profess to have direct intercourse with the Spirit of God in calm and holy contemplation, and to receive such impressions as a true, religious knowledge. This is a just definition, so far as it goes. But it would apply only to one class of mystics. As we shall try to show directly, what we mean by mysticism may be intellectual in its manifestation, as readily and really as religious. It may be seen in the way minds of a certain order look at natural things, as well as in the way other minds look at spiritual things. It may as well take the form of an attribution of supernatural value and efficacy to the mere ceremonial of religion, as that of transcendental experiences real or fancied, in the inner life. It is often seen tinging the speculations of philosophy, ancient or modern; it inspired the dreams of eremites and monks, and colored the thought and faith of St. Bernard and St. Victor. What is related of the latter of these-Hugh St. Victor, founder of the school and monastery near Paris, which bore his name-may illustrate the point. The priest who attended upon him in his last hours, tells us this: "The day before he died, I went to him in the morning and asked him how he felt. Well,' he answered, 'in both soul and body.' He added, 'Are we alone?' I answered, 'Yes.' 'Have you said Holy Mass?" 'Yes.' 'Come and

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2 That conception of the word in its widest meaning which we adopt in this paper is well expressed in the following, taken from Vaughan's "Hours with the Mystics": "I have often been struck by the surprising variety in the forms of thought and the modes of action in which mysticism has manifested itself among different nations and at different periods. This arises, I should think, from its residing in so central a province of the mind-the feeling. It has been incorporated in theism, atheism and pantheism. It has given men gods at every step, and it has denied all deity except self. It has appeared in the loftiest speculation and in the grossest idolatry. It has been associated with the wildest license, and with the most pitiless asceticism. It has driven men out into action, it has dissolved them in ecstasy, it has frozen them to torpor." Vol. i., p. 21.