Church seclusion is the mark of the religious life, and “the religious” are the monk and the nun, the “religious” and the “secular” being in opposition.  In truth, where the realisation of God outside himself is sought by the devotee, seclusion is a necessity for success, if only for the time which is required for meditation, the essential preliminary of ecstacy.  In the very rare Mystics of non-Catholic communions, full ecstacy is scarcely, if at all, known or even recognised; an overpowering sense of the divine Presence is experienced, but it is a Presence outside the worshipper; it is accompanied with a deliberate surrender of the will to God, and a feeling on the part of the man that he becomes an instrument of the divine Will; this he carries with him into outer life, and, undirected by love and the illuminated reason, it often lands the half-developed Mystic into fanaticism and cruelty; no one who has read Oliver Cromwell’s letters can deny that he was a Mystic, half-developed, and it is on him that Lord Rosebery founded his dictum of the formidable nature of the “practical Mystic”; the ever present sense of a divine Power behind himself gives such a man a power that ordinary men cannot successfully oppose; but this sense affords no moral basis, as, witness the massacre of Drogheda.  Such a Mystic, belonging to a particular religion, as he always does, takes the revelation of his religion as his moral code, and Cromwell felt himself as the avenging sword of his God, as did the Hebrews fighting with the Amalekites.  No man who accepts a revelation as his guide can be regarded as more than partially a Mystic.  He has the Mystic temperament only, and that undoubtedly gives him a strength far beyond the strength of those who have it not.

The true Mystic, realising God, has no need of any Scriptures, for he has touched the source whence all Scriptures flow.  An “enlightened” Br[=a]hma[n.]a, says Shr[=i] K[r.][s.]h[n.]a, has no more need of the Ve[d.]as, than a man needs a tank in a place which is overflowing with water.  The value of cisterns, of reservoirs, is past, when a man is seated beside an ever-flowing spring.  As Dean Inge has pointed out, Mysticism is the most scientific form of religion, for it bases itself, as does all science, on experience and experiment—­experiment being only a specialised form of experience, devised either to discover or to verify.

We have seen the Mystic who realises God outside himself and seeks Union with Him.  There remains the most interesting, the most effective form of Mysticism, the realisation by a man of God within himself.  Here meditation is also a necessity, and the man who is born with a high capacity for concentration is merely a man who has practised it in previous lives.  A life or lives of study and seclusion often precede a life of tremendous and sustained activity in the physical world.  The realisation is preceded by control of the body, control of the emotions and control