Mysticism has suffered.”  This kind of supernaturalism is destructive of unity in our ideas of God, the world, and ourselves; and it casts a slur on the faculties which are the appointed organs of communication between God and man.  A revelation absolutely transcending reason is an absurdity:  no such revelation could ever be made.  In the striking phrase of Macarius, “the human mind is the throne of the Godhead.”  The supremacy of the reason is the favourite theme of the Cambridge Platonists, two of whom, Whichcote and Culverwel, are never tired of quoting the text, “The spirit of man is the candle of the Lord.”  “Sir, I oppose not rational to spiritual,” writes Whichcote to Tuckney, “for spiritual is most rational.”  And again, “Reason is the Divine governor of man’s life:  it is the very voice of God.[31]” What we can and must transcend, if we would make any progress in Divine knowledge, is not reason, but that shallow rationalism which regards the data on which we can reason as a fixed quantity, known to all, and which bases itself on a formal logic, utterly unsuited to a spiritual view of things.  Language can only furnish us with poor, misleading, and wholly inadequate images of spiritual facts; it supplies us with abstractions and metaphors, which do not really represent what we know or believe about God and human personality.  St. Paul calls attention to this inadequacy by a series of formal contradictions:  “I live, yet not I”; “dying, and behold we live”; “when I am weak, then I am strong,” and so forth; and we find exactly the same expedient in Plotinus, who is very fond of thus showing his contempt for the logic of identity.  When, therefore, Harnack says that “Mysticism is nothing else than rationalism applied to a sphere above reason,” he would have done better to say that it is “reason applied to a sphere above rationalism.[32]”

For Reason is still “king.[33]” Religion must not be a matter of feeling only.  St. John’s command to “try every spirit” condemns all attempts to make emotion or inspiration independent of reason.  Those who thus blindly follow the inner light find it no “candle of the Lord,” but an ignis fatuus; and the great mystics are well aware of this.  The fact is that the tendency to separate and half personify the different faculties—­intellect, will, feeling—­is a mischievous one.  Our object should be so to unify our personality, that our eye may be single, and our whole body full of light.

We have considered briefly the three stages of the mystic’s upward path.  The scheme of life therein set forth was no doubt determined empirically, and there is nothing to prevent the simplest and most unlettered saint from framing his conduct on these principles.  Many of the mediaeval mystics had no taste for speculation or philosophy;[34] they accepted on authority the entire body of Church dogma, and devoted their whole attention to the perfecting of the spiritual life in the knowledge and love of God.