which is hostile to “spirit.”  This latter conception does not at present concern us; what we have to notice is the description of the upward path as an inner transit from the false isolation of the natural man into a state in which it is possible to say, “I live; yet not I, but Christ liveth in me.[95]” In the Epistle to the Galatians he uses the favourite mystical phrase, “until Christ be formed in you";[96] and in the Second Epistle to the Corinthians[97] he employs a most beautiful expression in describing the process, reverting to the figure of the “mirror,” dear to Mysticism, which he had already used in the First Epistle:  “We all with unveiled face reflecting as a mirror the glory of the Lord, are transformed into the same image from glory to glory.”  Other passages, which refer primarily to the future state, are valuable as showing that St. Paul lends no countenance to that abstract idea of eternal life as freedom from all earthly conditions, which has misled so many mystics.  Our hope, when the earthly house of our tabernacle is dissolved, is not that we may be unclothed, but that we may be clothed upon with our heavenly habitation.  The body of our humiliation is to be changed and glorified, according to the mighty working whereby God is able to subdue all things unto Himself.  And therefore our whole spirit and soul and body must be preserved blameless; for the body is the temple of the Holy Ghost, not the prison-house of a soul which will one day escape out of its cage and fly away.

St. Paul’s conception of Christ as the Life as well as the Light of the world has two consequences besides those which have been already mentioned.  In the first place, it is fatal to religious individualism.  The close unity which joins us to Christ is not so much a unity of the individual soul with the heavenly Christ, as an organic unity of all men, or, since many refuse their privileges, of all Christians, with their Lord.  “We, being many, are one body in Christ, and severally members one of another.[98]” There must be “no schism in the body,[99]” but each member must perform its allotted function.  St. Augustine is thoroughly in agreement with St. Paul when he speaks of Christ and the Church as “unus Christus.”  Not that Christ is “divided,” so that He cannot be fully present to any individual—­that is an error which St. Paul, St. Augustine, and the later mystics all condemn; but as the individual cannot reach his real personality as an isolated unit, he cannot, as an isolated unit, attain to full communion with Christ.

The second point is one which may seem to be of subordinate importance, but it will, I think, awaken more interest in the future than it has done in the past.  In the 8th chapter of the Epistle to the Romans, St. Paul clearly teaches that the victory of Christ over sin and death is of import, not only to humanity, but to the whole of creation, which now groans and travails in pain together, but which shall one day be delivered from the bondage of corruption into the glorious liberty of the sons of God.  This recognition of the spirituality of matter, and of the unity of all nature in Christ, is one which we ought to be thankful to find in the New Testament.  It will be my pleasant task, in the last two Lectures of this course, to show how the later school of mystics prized it.