There is always the gravest danger from blind rage and sullen wrath. The passionate resentment for the suffering of immemorial wrongs, when once it breaks through the dams of restraint, is an almost irresistible force; but sooner or later the sound, serious sense of the intelligent human race comes into play and brings the world back to order and system. The real gains in these crises are made not by the smashings and the blind iconoclastic blows, but by the wise, clear-sighted fulfillment of the slowly formed ideals which have been the inspiration of many lives before the crisis came. May it be so now! It must not be, it cannot be, that these millions of men shall have unavailingly faced death and mutilation. It was not wreckage and chaos they sought in their brave adventure with death. They went out to build a new world and to destroy, only that a new re-creation might begin. This is the time of incubation and birth, for ripening into reality those mighty hopes that make us men.
It means at once that we must deepen down our lives into the life of God, that we must suppress our petty individual passions and feel the sweep of God’s purposes for the new age. In a multitude of ways the world moves on, and as it moves the Spirit of God ends old forms and methods and brings fresh and living ways to light. May we have eyes to see what is of his divine hatching and what is empty shell!
CHAPTER IX
THE MYSTIC’S EXPERIENCE OF GOD
I
The revival of mysticism which has been one of the noteworthy features in the Christianity of our time has presented us with a number of interesting and important questions. We want to know, first of all, what mysticism really is. Secondly, we want to know whether it is a normal or abnormal experience. And omitting many other questions which must wait their turn, we want to know whether mystical experiences actually enlarge our sphere of knowledge, i.e., whether they are trustworthy sources of authentic information and authoritative truth concerning realities which lie beyond the range of human senses.
The answer to the first question appears to be as difficult to accomplish as the return of Ulysses was. The secret is kept in book after book. One can marshall a formidable array of definitions, but they oppose and challenge one another, like the men sprung from the dragon’s teeth. For the purposes of the present consideration we can eliminate what is usually included under psychical phenomena, that is, the phenomena of dreams, visions and trances, hysteria and dissociation and esoteric and occult phenomena. Thirty years ago Professor Royce said: “In the Father’s house are many mansions, and their furniture is extremely manifold. Astral bodies and palmistry, trances and mental healing, communications from the dead and ‘phantasms of the living’—such things are for some people to-day the sole quite unmistakable evidences of the supremacy of the spiritual world.” These phenomena are worthy of careful painstaking study and attention, for they will eventually throw much light upon the deep and complex nature of human personality, are in fact already throwing much light upon it. But they furnish us slender data for understanding what is properly meant by mystical experience and its religious and spiritual bearing.
We can, too, leave on one side the metaphysical doctrines which fill a large amount of space in the books of the great mystics. These doctrines had a long historical development and they would have taken essentially the same form if the exponents of them had not been mystics. Mystical experience is confined to no one form of philosophy, though some ways of thinking no doubt favor and other ways retard the experience, as they also often do in the case of religious faith in general. Mystical experience, furthermore, must not be confused with what technical expert writers call “the mystic way.” There are as many mystical “ways” as there are gates to the New Jerusalem: “On the east three gates, on the north three gates, on the south three gates, and on the west three gates.” One might as well try to describe the way of making love, or the way of appreciating the grand canyon as to describe the way to the discovery of God, as though there were only one way.