ings which arise within
ourselves,--a fact, moreover, which makes us so certain of God that,
our reason and conscience being judges, our conviction is only
confirmed that we are in communion with Him." "The mystic's experience
of God is a delusion. If the Christian has learnt how Christ alone has
lifted him above all that he had even been before, he cannot believe
that another man might reach the same end by simply turning inward
upon himself." "The piety of the mystic is such that at the highest
point to which it leads Christ must vanish from the soul along with
all else that is external." This curious view of Christianity quite
fails to explain how "our reason and conscience" can detect the
"incomparable richness" of a revelation altogether unlike "the
feelings which arise within ourselves." It entirely ignores the
Pauline and Johannine doctrine of the mystical union, according to
which Christ is _not_ "external" to the redeemed soul, and most
assuredly can never "vanish" from it. Instead of the "Lo I am with you
alway" of our blessed Lord, we are referred to "history"--that is,
primarily, the four Gospels confirmed by "a fifth," "the united
testimony of the first Christian community" (Harnack, _Christianity
and History_). We are presented with a Christianity without knowledge
(Gnosis), without discipline, without sacraments, resting partly on a
narrative which these very historical critics tear in pieces, each in
his own fashion, and partly on a categorical imperative which is
really the voice of "irreligious moralism," as Pfleiderer calls it.
The words are justified by such a sentence as this from Herrmann:
"Religious faith in God is, rightly understood, just the medium by
which the universal law becomes individualised for the particular man
in his particular place in the world's life, so as to enable him to
recognise its absoluteness as the ground of his self-certainty, and
the ideal drawn in it as his own personal end." Thus the school which
has shown the greatest animus against Mysticism unconsciously
approaches very near to the atheism of Feuerbach. Indeed, what worse
atheism can there be, than such disbelief in the rationality of our
highest thoughts as is expressed in this sentence: "Metaphysics is an
impassioned endeavour to obtain recognition for thoughts, the contents
of which have no other title to be recognised than their value for
us"? As if faith in God had any other meaning than a confidence that
what