ligious man, is
a mystic; for he believes in an invisible world?" The answer is
found in the plain fact, that good Christians here in England do not
think so themselves; that they dislike and dread mysticism; would not
understand it if it were preached to them; are more puzzled by those
utterances of St. John, which mystics have always claimed as
justifying their theories, than by any part of their bibles. There
is a positive and conscious difference between popular metaphysics
and mysticism; and it seems to lie in this: the invisible world in
which Englishmen in general believe, is one which happens to be
invisible now, but which will not be so hereafter. When they speak
of the other world they mean a place which their bodily eyes will see
some day, and could see now if they were allowed; when they speak of
spirits they mean ghosts who could, and perhaps do, make themselves
visible to men's bodily eyes. We are not inquiring here whether they
be right or wrong; we are only specifying a common form of human
thought.

The mystic, on the other hand, believes that the invisible world is
so by its very nature, and must be so for ever. He lives therein
now, he holds, and will live in it through eternity: but he will see
it never with any bodily eyes, not even with the eyes of any future
"glorified" body. It is ipso facto not to be seen, only to be
believed in; never for him will "faith be changed for sight," as the
popular theologians say that it will; for this invisible world is
only to be "spiritually discerned."

This is the mystic idea, pure and simple; of course there are various
grades of it, as there are of the popular one; for no man holds his
own creed and nothing more; and it is good for him, in this piecemeal
and shortsighted world, that he should not. Were he over-true to his
own idea, he would become a fanatic, perhaps a madman. And so the
modern evangelical of the Venn and Newton school, to whom mysticism
is neology and nehushtan, when he speaks of "spiritual experiences,"
uses the adjective in its purely mystic sense; while Bernard of
Cluny, in his once famous hymn, "Hic breve vivitur," mingles the two
conceptions of the unseen world in inextricable confusion. Between
these two extreme poles, in fact, we have every variety of thought;
and it is good for us that we should have them; for no one man or
school of men can grasp the whole truth, and every intermediate
modification supplies some link in