[Greek:  theos] was a very fluid concept in the early centuries, and because our notions of personality are very different from those which were prevalent in antiquity.  On this latter point I shall have more to say presently; but the evidence for the belief in “deification,” and its continuance through the Middle Ages, is too voluminous to be given in the body of these Lectures.[22] Let it suffice to say here that though such bold phrases as “God became man, that we might become God,” were commonplaces of doctrinal theology at least till after Augustine, even Clement and Origen protest strongly against the “very impious” heresy that man is “a part of God,” or “consubstantial with God.[23]” The attribute of Divinity which was chiefly in the minds of the Greek Fathers when they made these statements, was that of imperishableness.

As to the means by which this union is manifested to the consciousness, there is no doubt that very many mystics believed in, and looked for, ecstatic revelations, trances, or visions.  This, again, is one of the crucial questions of Mysticism.

Ecstasy or vision begins when thought ceases, to our consciousness, to proceed from ourselves.  It differs from dreaming, because the subject is awake.  It differs from hallucination, because there is no organic disturbance:  it is, or claims to be, a temporary enhancement, not a partial disintegration, of the mental faculties.  Lastly, it differs from poetical inspiration, because the imagination is passive.

That perfectly sane people often experience such visions there is no manner of doubt.  St. Paul fell into a trance at his conversion, and again at a later period, when he seemed to be caught up into the third heaven.  The most sober and practical of the mediaeval mystics speak of them as common phenomena.  And in modern times two of the sanest of our poets have recorded their experiences in words which may be worth quoting.

Wordsworth, in his well-known “Lines composed above Tintern Abbey,” speaks of—­

                “That serene and blessed mood,
  In which ... the breath of this corporeal frame,
  And even the motion of our human blood,
  Almost suspended, we are laid asleep
  In body, and become a living soul: 
  While with an eye made quiet by the power
  Of harmony, and the deep power of joy,
  We see into the life of things.”

And Tennyson says,[24] “A kind of waking trance I have often had, quite from boyhood, when I have been all alone.  This has generally come upon me through repeating my own name two or three times to myself silently, till all at once, out of the intensity of the consciousness of individuality, the individual itself seemed to dissolve and fade away into boundless being:  and this not a confused state, but the clearest of the clearest, and the surest of the surest, the weirdest of the weirdest, utterly beyond words, where death was an almost laughable impossibility, the loss of personality (if so it were) seeming no extinction, but the only true life.”