of the world, hard-headed business and professional men, who would seem to be the last persons to yield to such things, have often, especially in their later life, become subject to it, even in its morbid expression. The reader may well remember cases of such men devoting their declining years to theosophy and similar cults. It is the mystical element in Christian Science which in an age of materialism and cold denial, has attracted so many people of education and refinement; and it is precisely this element which has given them what is the best thing in life-peace and tranquillity.

The transcendental or mystical experience in its purer form never comes from the lower and grosser sides of our nature. All great mystics have been agreed in this, from the days of the Psalmist, when he exclaims:-" Who shall ascend into the hill of the Lord? Or who shall stand in His holy place? He that hath clean hands and a pure heart; who hath not lifted up his soul unto vanity, nor sworn deceitfully; "-to Emerson, who declares that

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the sublime vision comes to the pure and simple soul in a clean and chaste body."

This experience is never induced by selfish gratifications; by the pleasures of eating and drinking, although diet in a restrictive sense plays an important part in the practical rules of some kinds of mysticism, and although the indulgence of intoxicating liquors and the various kinds of narcotics may induce a false form of the true experience. So likewise in the contemplation of one's own prosperity, fine houses, social position, political influence, success in business, whatever feelings of exultation these things may induce, there is never anything approaching the transcendental experience.

In this there is a constant going out of ourselves, a yearning and stretching after the object desired. Just as a man stretches forth his hand to touch an object a little beyond his reach; just as in trying to remember a forgotten name or a forgotten dream, there is a mental reaching out; so in all transcendental states there is a similar spiritual reaching out

towards the invisible powers that draw the soul outward and upward. This spiritual reaching forth is especially characteristic of religious mysticism, and has found frequent expression in literature, as in the lines of Tennyson's "In Memoriam ":

I falter where I firmly trod

And falling with my weight of cares,
Upon the world's great altar stairs
That slope through darkness up to God;
I stretch lame hands of faith, and grope
And gather dust and chaff, and call
To what I feel is Lord of all,

And faintly trust the larger hope.

Hence, too, the involuntary lifting of the hand toward heaven, and the uplifted eye in prayer; attitudes which occur almost universally in all picturesque and statuesque depiction of prayer and ecstatic contemplation. This psychological sense of a stretching upward gives a quasi rational explanation of all those wonderful experiences of mediæval saints, in which the body is lifted from the ground in the ecstatic intensity of mystical contemplation. The straining upward of the

soul was supposed to have an actual physical effect on the body. Indeed this theory is gravely advanced in the above mentioned work of Görres.1

In all provinces in which the transcendental feeling is induced it comes only when we look away from the particular to the general, from the detail to the idea, from the outer form to the spiritual content. The sight of rivers and plains, flowers and trees, may give us pleasure, and yet have nothing mystical in it. The man who looks over his broad estates, who shows his garden to a friend, who is proud of the mountains of his native land, may yet be as prosaic as Peter Bell, of whom the poet wrote,

The primrose on the river's brim,
A yellow primrose was to him,
And it was nothing more;

1 These stories concerning the saints are not necessarily the result of voluntary deception. If a person in an excited state of nervousness, gazes steadily at a statue of the Virgin especially if a cloud of incense rises above it, it is very easy to imagine that it moves. So in the same way a feeling of lightness, of" treading on air,” as we call it, may make a person absorbed in contemplation really believe he has risen from the ground.

while to Thoreau, says Moncure D. Conway,

sexes.

every plant, flower, fish, frog, or lizard was transformed by the wand of his knowledge from the low form into which the spell of our ignorance had reduced it into a mystic beauty." The same thing is true of the relation of the The love of woman when merely sensual has nothing mystical about it; licentiousness is a sure means of destroying that sense of the "Ewig Weibliche" which has produced so much of the highest art and literature, and which is surely one of the greatest blessings of humanity. "As the alchemists strive to make gold out of base metals" even so is it with "those who would make love out of sensuality and self-interest."

We see then that the presence of physical desire or possession whether in nature or in love, is at variance with the sense of the Infinite. The world in which these mystic gleams visit us, must be a purified and altruistic one. This is likewise true of religious formalism, wherein whatever is a matter of form, lifeless and cold, or a matter of dogma or theological dispute,