break with the external world is complete, we get those ecstatic visions in which mystics of a certain type actualize their spiritual intuitions.  The Bible is full of examples of this.  Good historic instances are the visions of Mechthild of Magdeburg or Angela of Foligno.  The first contain all the elements of drama, the last cover a wide symbolic and emotional field.  Those who have read Canon Streeter’s account of the visions of the Sadhu Sundar Singh will recognize them as being of this type.[97]

I do not wish to go further than this into the abnormal and extreme types of religious autism; trance, ecstasy and so forth.  Our concern is with the norm of the spiritual life, as it exists to-day and as all may live it.  But it is necessary to realize that image and vision do within limits represent a perfectly genuine way of doing things, which is inevitable for deeply spiritual selves of a certain type; and that it is neither good psychology nor good Christianity, lightly to dismiss as superstition or hysteria the pictured world of symbol in which our neighbour may live and save his soul.  The symbolic world of traditional piety, with its angels and demons, its friendly saints, its spatial heaven, may conserve and communicate spiritual values far better than the more sophisticated universe of religious philosophy.  We may be sure that both are more characteristic of the image-making and structure-building tendencies of the mind, than they are of the ultimate and for us unknowable reality of things.  Their value—­or the value of any work of art which the foreconscious has contrived—­abides wholly in the content:  the quality of the material thus worked up.  The rich nature, the purified love, capable of the highest correspondences, will express even in the most primitive duologue or vision the results of a veritable touching and tasting of Eternal Life.  Its psychic structures—­however logic may seek to discredit them—­will convey spiritual fact, have the quality which the mystics mean when they speak of illumination.  The emotional pietist will merely ramble among the religious symbols and phrases with which the devout memory is stored.  It is true that the voice or the picture, surging up as it does into the field of consciousness, seems to both classes to have the character of a revelation.  The pictures unroll themselves automatically and with amazing authority and clearness, the conversation is with Another than ourselves; or in more generalized experiences, such as the sense of the Divine Presence, the contact is with another order of life.  But the crucial question which religion asks must be, does fresh life flow in from those visions and contacts, that intercourse?  Is transcendental feeling involved in them?  “What fruits dost thou bring back from this thy vision?” says Jacopone da Todi;[98] and this remains the only real test by which to separate day-dreams from the vitalizing act of contemplation.  In the first we are abandoned to a delightful, and