f which no authority can again deprive it." The conflicts
between Mysticism and Church authority, he thinks, in no way militate
against _both_ being Catholic ideals, just as asceticism and
world-supremacy are both Catholic ideals, though contradictory. The
German mystics he disparages. "I give no extracts from their
writings," he says, "because I do not wish even to seem to countenance
the error that they expressed anything that one cannot read in Origen,
Plotinus, the Areopagite, Augustine, Erigena, Bernard, and Thomas, or
that they represented religious progress." "It will never be possible
to make Mysticism Protestant without flying in the face of history and
Catholicism." "A mystic who does not become a Catholic is a
dilettante."

Before considering these statements, I will quote from another attack
upon Mysticism by a writer whose general views are very similar to
those of Harnack.

23. _Herrmann_ (_Verkehr des Christen mit Gott_). "The most
conspicuous features of the Roman Catholic rule of life are obedience
to the laws of cultus and of doctrine on the one side, and Neoplatonic
Mysticism on the other.... The essence of Mysticism lies in this: when
the influence of God upon the soul is sought and found solely in an
inward experience of the individual; when certain excitements of the
emotions are taken, with no further question, as evidence that the
soul is possessed by God: when at the same time nothing external to
the soul is consciously and clearly perceived and firmly grasped; when
no thoughts that elevate the spiritual life are aroused by the
positive contents of an idea that rules the soul,--then that is the
piety of Mysticism.... Mysticism is not that which is common to all
religion, but a particular species of religion, namely a piety which
feels that which is historical in the positive religion to be
burdensome, and so rejects it."

These extracts from Harnack and Herrmann represent the attitude
towards Mysticism of the Ritschlian school in Germany, of which Kaftan
is another well-known exponent. They are neo-Kantians, whose religion
is an austere moralism, and who seem to regard Christianity as a
primitive Puritanism, spoiled by the Greeks, who brought into it their
intellectualism and their sacramental mysteries. True Christianity,
they say, is faith in the historic Christ. "In the human Jesus," says
Herrmann, "we have met with a fact, the content of which is
incomparably richer than that of any feel