what she had written.  Those were golden hours indeed—­hours in which was fulfilled the saying that is written—­And it came to pass that while they communed together and reasoned, Jesus Himself drew near.  As I look back to the Sabbath evenings passed with her in such converse, they seem to me radiant still with the glory of the risen Christ.  Nor am I able to imagine what else than His presence could have rendered them, at the time, so soothing and blissful.

You refer to her fondness for the mystics.  She thought that Christian piety owes a large debt of gratitude to such writers as Thomas a Kempis, Madame Guyon, Fenelon, Leighton, Tersteegen, and others like them in earlier and later times, to whom “the secret of the Lord” seemed in a peculiar manner to have been revealed, and who with seraphic zeal trod as well as taught the paths of peace and holiness.  While she was writing the chapter on the Mystics, I showed her Coleridge’s tribute to them in his Biographia Literaria, which greatly pleased her.  It is her own experience that she puts into the mouth of Urbane, where he says, after quoting Coleridge’s tribute, “I have no recollection of ever reading this passage till today, but had toiled out its truth for myself, and now set my hand and seal to it.” [13] It is for her, too, as well as for himself, that Urbane speaks, where, in answer to Hermes’ question, “Who are the Mystics?” he says: 

They are the men and women known to every age of the Church, who usually make their way through the world completely misunderstood by their fellow-men.  Their very virtues sometimes appear to be vices.  They are often the scorn and contempt of their time, and are even persecuted and thrown into prison by those who think they thus do our Lord service.  But now and then one arises who sees, or thinks he sees, some clue to their lives and their speech.  Though not of them, he feels a mysterious kinship to them that makes him shrink with pain when he hears them spoken of unjustly.  Now, I happen to be such a man.  I have not built up any pet theory that I want to sustain; I am not in any way bound to fight for any school; but I should be most ungrateful to God and man if I did not acknowledge that I owe much of the sum and substance of the best part of my life to mystical writers—­aye, and mystical thinkers, whom I know in the flesh....  I use Christ as a magnet, and say to all who cleave to Him—­even when I can not perfectly agree with them on every point of doctrine:  You love Christ, therefore I love you.

Closely allied to her fondness for the Mystics was her delight in the doctrine of the indwelling Christ.  For more than thirty years it was a favorite subject of our Sunday and week-day talk.  The closing chapters of the Gospel of John, the Epistle to the Ephesians, and other parts of the New Testament, in which this most precious truth is enshrined, were especially dear to her.  So too, and for the same reason, was Lavater’s hymn beginning,