es, Crashaw, and others, who
have all drunk of the same well. Let it suffice to say that the
student who desires to master the history of Mysticism in Britain will
find plenty to occupy his time. But for the religious public in
general the most useful thing would be a judicious selection from the
mystical writers of different times and countries. Those who are more
interested in the practical and devotional than the speculative side
may study with great profit some parts of St. Augustine, the sermons
of Tauler, the _Theologia Germanica_, Hilton's _Scale of Perfection_,
the Life of Henry Suso, St. Francis de Sales and Fenelon, the Sermons
of John Smith and Whichcote's _Aphorisms_, and the later works of
William Law, not forgetting the poets who have been mentioned. I can
think of no course of study more fitting for those who wish to revive
in themselves and others the practical idealism of the primitive
Church, which gained for it its greatest triumphs.

I conclude this Preface with a quotation from William Law on the value
of the mystical writers. "Writers like those I have mentioned," he
says in a letter to Dr. Trapp, "there have been in all ages of the
Church, but as they served not the ends of popular learning, as they
helped no people to figure or preferment in the world, and were
useless to scholastic controversial writers, so they dropt out of
public uses, and were only known, or rather unknown, under the name of
mystical writers, till at last some people have hardly heard of that
very name: though, if a man were to be told what is meant by a
mystical divine, he must be told of something as heavenly, as great,
as desirable, as if he was told what is meant by a real, regenerate,
living member of the mystical body of Christ; for they were thus
called for no other reason than as Moses and the prophets, and the
saints of the Old Testament, may be called the spiritual Israel, or
the true mystical Jews. These writers began their office of teaching
as John the Baptist did, after they had passed through every kind of
mortification and self-denial, every kind of trial and purification,
both inward and outward. They were deeply learned in the mysteries of
the kingdom of God, not through the use of lexicons, or meditating
upon critics, but because they had passed from death unto life. They
highly reverence and excellently direct the true use of everything
that is outward in religion; but, like the Psalmist's king's daughter,