possible manner, at the outset both of his Gospel and Epistle, the necessity of remembering that the Christian revelation was conveyed by certain historical events.  “The Word was made flesh, and tabernacled among us, and we have seen His glory.”  “That which was from the beginning, that which we have heard, that which we have seen with our eyes, that which we beheld, and our hands handled, concerning the Word of Life ... that which we have seen and heard declare we unto you.”  And again in striking words he lays it down as the test whereby we may distinguish the spirit of truth from Antichrist or the spirit of error, that the latter “confesseth not that Jesus Christ is come in the flesh.”  The later history of Mysticism shows that this warning was very much needed.  The tendency of the mystic is to regard the Gospel history as only one striking manifestation of an universal law.  He believes that every Christian who is in the way of salvation recapitulates “the whole process of Christ” (as William Law calls it)—­that he has his miraculous birth, inward death, and resurrection; and so the Gospel history becomes for the Gnostic (as Clement calls the Christian philosopher) little more than a dramatisation of the normal psychological experience.[68] “Christ crucified is teaching for babes,” says Origen, with startling audacity; and heretical mystics have often fancied that they can rise above the Son to the Father.  The Gospel and Epistle of St. John stand like a rock against this fatal error, and in this feature some German critics have rightly discerned their supreme value to mystical theology.[69] “In all life,” says Grau, “there is not an abstract unity, but an unity in plurality, an outward and inward, a bodily and spiritual; and life, like love, unites what science and philosophy separate.”  This co-operation of the sensible and spiritual, of the material and ideal, of the historical and eternal, is maintained throughout by St. John.  “His view is mystical,” says Grau, “because all life is mystical.”  It is true that the historical facts hold, for St. John, a subordinate place as evidences.  His main proof is, as I have said, experimental.  But a spiritual revelation of God without its physical counterpart, an Incarnation, is for him an impossibility, and a Christianity which has cut itself adrift from the Galilean ministry is in his eyes an imposture.  In no other writer, I think, do we find so firm a grasp of the “psychophysical” view of life which we all feel to be the true one, if only we could put it in an intelligible form.[70]

There is another feature in St. John’s Gospel which shows his affinity to Mysticism, though of a different kind from that which we have been considering.  I mean his fondness for using visible things and events as symbols.  This objective kind of Mysticism will form the subject of my last two Lectures, and I will here only anticipate so far as to say that the belief which underlies it is that “everything, in being