are probably not ten thorough mystics among all our millions; the
mystic philosophers are very little read by our scholars, and read
not for, but in spite of, their mysticism; and our popular theology
has so completely rid itself of any mystic elements, that our divines
look with utter disfavour upon it, use the word always as a term of
opprobrium, and interpret the mystic expressions in our liturgy--
which mostly occur in the Collects--according to the philosophy of
Locke, really ignorant, it would seem, that they were written by
Platonist mystics.

We do not blame them either, save in as far as teachers of men are
blameworthy for being ignorant of any form of thought which has ever
had a living hold upon good and earnest men, and may therefore take
hold of them again. But the English are not now a mystic people, any
more than the old Romans were; their habit of mind, their destiny in
the world, are like those of the Romans, altogether practical; and
who can be surprised if they do not think about what they are not
called upon to think about?

Nevertheless, it is quite a mistake to suppose that mysticism is by
its own nature unpractical. The greatest and most prosperous races
of antiquity--the Egyptians, Babylonians, Hindoos, Greeks--had the
mystic element as strong and living in them as the Germans have now;
and certainly we cannot call them unpractical peoples. They fell and
came to ruin--as the Germans may do--when their mysticism became
unpractical: but their thought remained, to be translated into
practice by sounder-hearted races than themselves. Rome learnt from
Greece, and did in some confused imperfect way that which Greece only
dreamed; just as future nations may act hereafter, nobly and
usefully, on the truths which Germans discover, only to put in a book
and smoke over. For they are terribly practical people, these
mystics, quiet students and devotees as they may seem. They go, or
seem to go, down to the roots of things, after a way of their own;
and lay foundations on which--be they sound or unsound--those who
come after them cannot choose but build; as we are building now. For
our forefathers were mystics for generations; they were mystics in
the forests of Germany and in the dales of Norway; they were mystics
in the convents and the universities of the Middle Ages; they were
mystics, all the deepest and noblest minds of them, during the
Elizabethan era.

Even now the few mystic writers of thi