studied, and those which we have but touched with our plummet, may disclose their blessing to us, and fill higher the measure of our joy.

Nor is this all. We gather both instruction and comfort from the spiritual history of others who have passed through the same darkness, doubt, or sorrow, which we ourselves have either encountered, or may be on our way to meet. How glad was Christian when he heard the voice of a fellow-pilgrim in the Valley of the Shadow of Death! And when suns are bright, and the waters calm, and the desired wind blows steadily, he is the wise mariner who employs his leisure in studying the records of others who have made voyage already in those latitudes; who learns from their expedients, their mishaps, or their deliverances, how best to weather the storms, or to escape the quicksands that await him. Of all who have sailed the seas of life, no men have experienced a range of vicissitude more wide than has fallen to the lot of some among the mystics. Theirs have been the dazzling heights; the lowest depths also have been theirs. Their solitary vessels have been swept into the frozen North, where the ice of a great despair has closed about them like the ribs of death, and through a long soul's winter they have lain hidden in cold and darkness, as some belated swallow in the cleft of a rock. It has been theirs, too, to encounter the perilous fervours of that zone where never cooling cloud appears to veil insufferable radiance, and to glow beneath those glories with an ardour so intense that some men, in their pity, have essayed to heal it as a fever, and others, in their wrath, to chain it as a frenzy. Now afflicted, tossed with tempest, and not comforted, ere long there hath been built for them at once a palace and a place of rest; their foundations have been laid with sapphires, their windows have been made of agates, and their gates of carbuncles, and all their borders of pleasant stones.

c. 6.]

Rest.

263

A place of rest! Yes, in that one word REST lies all the longing of the mystic. Every creature in heaven above, and in the earth beneath, saith Master Eckart, all things in the height and all things in the depth, have one yearning, one ceaseless, unfathomable desire, one voice of aspiration: it is for rest; and again, for rest; and ever, till the end of time, for rest! The mystics have constituted themselves the interpreters of these sighs and groans of the travailing creation; they are the hierophants to gather, and express, and offer them to heaven; they are the teachers to weary, weeping men of the way whereby they may attain, even on this side the grave, a serenity like that of heaven. What the halcyon of fable is among the birds, that are the mystics among their kind. They essay to build them a marvellous nest, which not only floats upon the waves of life, but has the property of charming those waves to a glassy stillness, so that in mid-winter, and the very heart of storms, their souls enjoy, for a season, what the ancients called 'the halcyon days,'-that wondrous week of calm ordained for the favoured bird when the year is roughest. 'Tis pity, murmurs old Montaigne, that more information hath not come down to us concerning the construction of these nests. Tradition has it, that the halcyon first of all fashions the said nest by interlacing the bones of some fish. When it is put together she takes it, like a boat ready for launching, and lays it on the beach the waves come up: they lift it: they let it fall: they toss it gently among the rocks and pebbles; what is faultily made their play breaks, or makes to gape, so that the bird discovers the weak places, and what parts must be more duly finished; what is well knit together already, their strokes only season and confirm. Now when we read the lives of the mystics-each of whom has a method, more or less his own, of weaving such a nest, in other words, his Theory and Practice of Quietude-we see the structure on trial. Experience, with

its buffeting, tests each man's method for the attainment of Rest. If we watch carefully, we shall see that some things in the doctrine of many of them break away under trial, while others are rendered only more compact and buoyant thereby. The examination of the appliances and the processes adopted by these searchers after the Divine Stillness, ought to be very helpful to ourselves. As far as we have their history before us, we can try them by their fruits. We ask, in the case of one man, by what divine art was it that his ark was so skilfully framed as to out-ride those deluges of trouble as though they had been the waters of some windless mere? We ask, in the case of another, by what fault came it in the structure of his sailing nest, that the waters entered, and he sank, or seemed to sink, finding not the rest of soul he sought, but the vexation of soul he fled? We ask, in the several most signal examples of the class, how far did their mysticism help them to realize true manhood-make them strong to bear and strong to do? How far did it tend, or did it not tend, towards the complete development and consecration of their nature?

To derive from such inquiries their full benefit, two qualifications are indispensable :-the judgment must be clear, the sympathies must be warm. The inquirer must retain self-possession enough not to be too readily fascinated, or too scon offended, by certain strange and startling forms of expression; he must not suppose, that because, for a long time, the mystics have been unduly depreciated, it is wisdom now to cover them with thoughtless and indiscriminate praise. He must not suppose that the mystics are an exception to the ordinary limitations of mortals-that the glorious intensity of some among them was realized without any diminution of breadth, and that their view embraced, with equal fondness and with equal insight, every quarter in the heaven of truth. And, on the other hand, let him beware how he seeks to understand these men without

c. 6.] Spirit in which Mysticism should be studied. 265

fellow-feeling and without love. The weak and volatile nature is smitten, on a first interview with the mystics, with a rage for mysticism is for turning mystic straightway, and is out of patience, for six weeks, with every other form of Christianity. The cold and proud nature scorns their ardour as a phantasy, and (to its own grievous injury) casts out the warmth they bring. The loving nature and the wise says not, I will be blind to their errors,' but, I will always look at those errors in the light of their excellences.'

'The critic of Tauler no man has a right to become, who has not first ascertained that he is a better man than Tauler." What are we to understand by these words? If such an assertion be true at all, it cannot be true for Tauler only. Would Mr. Kingsley say that no man has a right to become the critic of Augustine, of Luther, of Calvin, of Wesley, of George Fox, who has not first ascertained himself a better man? Ought every biographer, who is not a mere blind eulogist, to start with the presumption that he is a better man than he of whom he writes? Ought the historian, who forms his critical estimate of the qualities possessed or lacking-of the service rendered in this direction or in that, by the worthies of the Church, to suppose himself superior to each in turn? As in art he who estimates the worth of a poem is not required to write better poetry, so in morals, he who estimates the worth of a character is not required to display superior virtue. Or is it the opinions, rather than the character of Tauler, which only a better man than Tauler may criticise? Any one who, on being made acquainted with certain opinions, differs from them, is supposed to have criticised them. In as far as Mr. Kingsley may not agree with some of the well-known opinions of Augustine, Luther, or Fox, so far has he ventured to be their critic; yet he does not suppose himself a better man. Why should

Preface to Taule:'s Life and Sermons by Susanna Winkworth.

Tauler alone be thus fenced about with a statement that virtually prohibits criticism? Such advocacy harms a client's cause. People are apt to suspect that their scrutiny is feared, when such pains are taken to keep them at a distance. So confident am I that the dross in Tauler is as nothing beside the gold, that I would invite, rather than deter, the most candid and sober exercise of the critical judgment with regard to him. Perhaps Mr. Kingsley may be, in reality, much of the same mind; if so, he should not write as though he thought quite otherwise.

I cannot suppose that Mr. Kingsley would seriously maintain that the mystic ought, from the very nature of his claims, to be exempt from that scrutiny to which history continually subjects the fathers, the schoolmen, and the reformers. Yet there are those who would have us hearken to every voice professing to speak from the 'everlasting deeps' with a reverence little more discriminating than that which the Mussulman renders to idiocy and madness. Curiously ignorant concerning the very objects of their praise, these admirers would seem to suppose that every mystic repudiates the exercise of understanding, is indifferent to the use of language, and invariably dissolves religious opinion in religious sentiment. These eulogists of mysticism imagine that they have found in the virtues of a Tauler, a platform whence to play off with advantage a volley of commonplaces against 'literalisms,' 'formulas,' 'creeds,'' shams,' and the like. It is high time to rescue the mystics from a foolish adoration, which the best among them would be the most eager to repudiate. So far from forbidding men to try the spirits, the most celebrated among the mystics lead the way in such examination. It is the mystics themselves who warn us so seriously that mysticism comprises an evil tendency as well as a good, and has had its utterances from the nether realms as well as from the upper.

The great