be withdrawn as an institution
publicly known to exist, and teaching was given more and more secretly
to those rarer and rarer souls, who by learning, purity, and devotion
showed themselves capable of receiving it. No longer were schools to be
found wherein the preliminary teachings were given, and with the
disappearance of these the "door was shut."

Two streams may nevertheless be tracked through Christendom, streams
which had as their source the vanished Mysteries. One was the stream of
mystic learning, flowing from the Wisdom, the Gnosis, imparted in the
Mysteries; the other was the stream of mystic contemplation, equally
part of the Gnosis, leading to the exstasy, to spiritual vision. This
latter, however, divorced from knowledge, rarely attained the true
exstasis, and tended either to run riot in the lower regions of the
invisible worlds, or to lose itself amid a variegated crowd of subtle
superphysical forms, visible as objective appearances to the inner
vision--prematurely forced by fastings, vigils, and strained
attention--but mostly born of the thoughts and emotions of the seer.
Even when the forms observed were not externalised thoughts, they were
seen through a distorting atmosphere of preconceived ideas and beliefs,
and were thus rendered largely unreliable. None the less, some of the
visions were verily of heavenly things, and Jesus truly appeared from
time to time to His devoted lovers, and angels would sometimes brighten
with their presence the cell of monk and nun, the solitude of rapt
devotee and patient seeker after God. To deny the possibility of such
experiences would be to strike at the very root of that "which has been
most surely believed" in all religions, and is known to all
Occultists--the intercommunication between Spirits veiled in flesh and
those clad in subtler vestures, the touching of mind with mind across
the barriers of matter, the unfolding of the Divinity in man, the sure
knowledge of a life beyond the gates of death.

Glancing down the centuries we find no time in which Christendom was
left wholly devoid of mysteries. "It was probably about the end of the
5th century, just as ancient philosophy was dying out in the Schools of
Athens, that the speculative philosophy of neo-Platonism made a definite
lodgment in Christian thought through the literary forgeries of the
Pseudo-Dionysius. The doctrines of Christianity were by that time so
firmly established that the Church could look upo