III.
This particularist genius and his fellows represent the keenest moment in one of those periods in its religious experience when humanity becomes aware of the wider life to which it belongs, when working on, God-led and God-inspired, part blind, part seeing, making in dark and desert places the uttermost venture of faith, suddenly, on an instant, it finds God.
A subsequent enormously enhanced fruitfulness, the amazing development of “thought” and “science,” our long sojourn amidst the great desert of “facts,” the final well-nigh despairing state of spiritual aridity that synchronised with the neo-Darwinian mechanistic definitions of life, is now once more in our day giving place to a home-coming, a new phase of spiritual realization.
It is just at this turning moment, in the dawn-light of this new liberating contact, world-wide this time, free altogether from the swathing bands of cloister and cult that we begin to have a clearer understanding of the message of the mystics in general and in particular of the challenge of our own George Fox.