hich
shall one day be delivered from the bondage of corruption into the
glorious liberty of the sons of God. This recognition of the
spirituality of matter, and of the unity of all nature in Christ, is
one which we ought to be thankful to find in the New Testament. It
will be my pleasant task, in the last two Lectures of this course, to
show how the later school of mystics prized it.

The foregoing analysis of St. Paul's teaching has, I hope, justified
the statement that all the essentials of Mysticism are to be found in
his Epistles. But there are also two points in which his authority has
been claimed for false and mischievous developments of Mysticism.
These two points it will be well to consider before leaving the
subject.

The first is a contempt for the historical framework of Christianity.
We have already seen how strongly St. John warns us against this
perversion of spiritual religion. But those numerous sects and
individual thinkers who have disregarded this warning, have often
appealed to the authority of St. Paul, who in the Second Epistle to
the Corinthians says, "Even though we have known Christ after the
flesh, yet now we know Him so no more." Here, they say, is a distinct
admission that the worship of the historical Christ, "the man Christ
Jesus," is a stage to be passed through and then left behind. There is
just this substratum of truth in a very mischievous error, that St.
Paul _does_ tell us[100] that he _began_ to teach the Corinthians by
giving them in the simplest possible form the story of "Jesus Christ
and Him crucified." The "mysteries" of the faith, the "wisdom" which
only the "perfect" can understand, were deferred till the converts had
learned their first lessons. But if we look at the passage in
question, which has shocked and perplexed many good Christians, we
shall find that St. Paul is not drawing a contrast between the
earthly and the heavenly Christ, bidding us worship the Second Person
of the Trinity, the same yesterday, to-day, and for ever, and to cease
to contemplate the Cross on Calvary. He is distinguishing rather
between the sensuous presentation of the facts of Christ's life, and a
deeper realisation of their import. It should be our aim to "know no
man after the flesh"; that is to say, we should try to think of human
beings as what they are, immortal spirits, sharers with us of a common
life and a common hope, not as what they appear to our eyes. And the
same principle appli