CHAPTER V

IN RELATION TO RELIGION

The operation of the Mystic Sense in relation to religion is commonly called faith. Conversely, faith under another name is that operation of the Mystic Sense which promotes health of body, which affords a starting point for all intellectual, scientific, and other productive pursuits, which leads character from strength to strength. The subjective conditions under which, and the spheres in which, the Mystic Sense is employed, differ. But the faculty itself and its _modus operandi_ are always the same. Just as the sense of bodily sight which views the dirt beneath our feet is the same sense which contemplates the blue sky, so the inner sense of sight which perceives an electron, an ideal, or a hypothesis is the same sense which sees God. It is as possible to see God as to see a hypothesis, and as possible (not more and probably less), to see a hypothesis as to see God.[23]

It is fitting that the most exalted operation of the Mystic Sense should be dignified by a distinctive term, provided that in so doing no room is given for the implication that there is a faculty, or set of faculties, used in religion alone. A man has religious capacity because he is man, and not because he is a specially favored individual of his kind. Man, unless he abdicates his manhood, a task so difficult as to verge on the impossible, must live by his Mystic Sense; he must keep touch with the unseen, or cease to be a man. To be a man, rounded and proportioned, complete and splendid, he must use his Mystic Sense not merely here and there but everywhere. The Mystic Sense has as true an existence in the whole personality, and relation to it, as the physical sense of touch, and is as acutely sensitive to the stimulus of the spiritual phase of reality as the body is to that of the material. It is analogous to all the sub-divisions of the nervous system but chiefly to sight and hearing, the most distinguished of the senses.[24]

To perceive an ideal is as real a sensation as to look at a flower. An impression is left behind not unlike the photograph of the flower retained on the retina of the eye and revived by act of memory and will. But the visualizing has nothing to do with physical sense perception, and the part of the personality thus impressed is spiritual. To characterize tactual sensation of the body as real necessitates a like characterization of the tactual sensation of the spirit. If it be argued that in the latter relationship there is no certainty as to what is phantasm and what reality, let it be remembered that the history of science is largely a series of corrections of imperfect sense records. A highly developed power of observation with ability for accurate registration and correlation is the distinguishing feature of culture. The Mystic Sense, like the bodily senses, is capable of increasingly accurate perception by skilful and disciplined use. It takes its beginnings in gropings like the awkward jerks of a baby’s limbs, and develops into ordered and reliable movement by exercise and experiment, which includes mistakes and the profit accruing to the experience. Superstition bears the same relation to faith that a false scientific hypothesis bears to ascertained fact. The Mystic Sense in its infant working catches a distorted view of the ideal, as when Darwin propounded his conception of heredity by pangenesis, and leads us astray in science; in like manner in religion a glimpse, through a mist of ignorance and moral deficiency, of the Absolute, eventuates in superstition. Both are necessary stages in the training of the Mystic Sense. Similarly to the way in which the theory of pangenesis stimulated discussion and research so as to aid the Mystic Sense to a more accurate perception of the true hypothesis of the manner of heredity, the superstitions of the nations conceived in sincerity, crude and even repulsive though they be, have contributed to the complete knowledge of God and His character which forms our most valuable heritage.

It is not hazardous to say that the ideals and hypotheses which are still waiting for the cognition of the Mystic Sense transcend gloriously those thus far apprehended. This means that science is in its infancy. It is equally true to assert that religion, so far from having fallen into decline, is but girding itself to scale heights impatient to feel the tread of human feet. That which is good and true in itself must persist, whatever its crudeness and blemishes. The Mystic Sense in relation to religion is only at the beginning of its history. Human, that is mystic, life began at so remote a period as to be beyond the reach of research. The operation of the Mystic Sense through many thousands of years[25] prior to human records led the way to that ordered approach to God which we call religion. The possibilities of its growth for the race at large are indicated and emphasized by individual instances taken from the common crowd. The world is just at this moment engrossed in seeing that every one should have an opportunity of developing fine physique and of acquiring information. It is assumed that under proper conditions a high average may be reached. The same is to be postulated for the development of the Mystic Sense in relation to the highest and best in religion. Under a sufficient stimulus the average man will be able to apprehend what now is reached only by a minority. This, however, can not come to pass until a whole world of men strain their inner eye and quicken their inner ear in the same direction, each contributing of his own strength to the rest, and all to each.

The history of Christianity and its immediate progenitor, Judaism, is the record of the highest development of the Mystic Sense in religion. In the course of its progress the Absolute rises from a dim shadow to the greatest Reality. It is distinctively the religion of orderly and rational mysticism. At first, men, feeling the working of the Mystic Sense, used it in a childish way. What was splendid in them would be culpable in us. Abraham could consider it a call of God to slay his son: a man of to-day could only think of it as a monstrous crime against God and society, revolting even to contemplate. It marked a stage in the rationalizing of faith when at the last moment Abraham saw mystically that it was not God’s purpose that any human being should ever do at His bidding an inhuman deed.

The most perfect individual life of faith ever lived was that of Jesus Christ. His Mystic Sense never erred. He was never so exclusively Divine as not to be completely human. He was God living the life of man. He walked by faith, not by sight. Visions and ecstasies found rare and momentary place in His experience. He reached His goal by the use of those gifts and endowments which we have in common with Him, and proclaimed forever to the race of men that it is the simple, steady, patient exercise of the Mystic Sense toward a God who is revealed as Love, which exalts human life and puts it in the way of winning incomparable power and beauty. His reply to the query, What shall we do, that we might work the works of God, is, This is the work of God, that ye _believe_—believe on Him whom He hath sent. Further, He makes the astounding prophecy, Assuredly I announce that he that believeth on me, the works that I do shall he do also; and greater works than these shall he do. The early Christians were distinguished from their fellows as men who exhibited in high degree the faculty of belief so as to be in a unique sense “Believers,” and their religion was one in which faith played so prominent a part as to merit the name of “The Faith.” The whole Christian era has been an era of faith or the exercise of the Mystic Sense. No great work can be found in it, in science, literature or religion which has not been made possible by the stimulus given to faith by the influence of Jesus. Miracles do not cease to be miraculous when they cease to be mysterious, and the Christian centuries are strewn with such miracles—many of them, works of healing and moral restoration, as great as those of Jesus. But the greater works than His still lie before us when we have sufficiently shed materialism and committed ourselves more implicitly to the life of faith.[26]

The disappearance into the spirit world of Jesus has made that world human,[27] so that the Mystic Sense can be as truly at home in it as it is in scientific research. He prepared for His withdrawal thither by centring the attention of His friends upon it. His manifestations after His death on the cross were primarily to the Mystic Sense of His followers. That is to say, those unaccustomed to use the Mystic Sense in a religious way were incapable of seeing Him. It was impossible for Him to show Himself to the irreligious or enemies of God. This does not mean that it was only to the Mystic Sense of believers that He manifested Himself, but also to their bodily senses by way of the Mystic Sense. There is much that comes to the cognizance of the Mystic Sense through physical perception, and unless there is a refined and cultured nervous organism there is no mystical connotation. A Peter Bell could not find the mystical in nature.

“A primrose by a river’s brim A yellow primrose was to him, And it was nothing more.”

The same primrose to a Linnæus or an Asa Gray would reveal an unseen world. Conversely, there are some things which cannot affect our physical being except by the way of mystical experience. Striking instances of this sort have been suitably termed by von Hügel “psycho-physical.” They are possible only where there is extraordinary sympathy between the mystical and physical, the latter having been made very completely the servant of the former. Only the mystic, or the specialist in the use of the Mystic Sense, is eligible for such experiences. The tremendously real fellowship with the Risen Lord of the disciples was of an ecstatic or psycho-physical order. It degrades the Resurrection manifestations to overemphasize their physical reality as though this, rather than the mystical, were the important feature. Their dominant note is spiritual. The physical perception came through the mystical. The experience of the disciples could not be reproduced in after times with other men, for the necessary conditions were wanting. Here and there among spiritual giants there is a well authenticated psycho-physical experience, but it is of phenomenal rather than of spiritual or moral value. And yet it is within our power to see the Christ as really and effectively as the Apostles did, though not wholly after the same manner.

St. Paul did not begin his life of faith when he had his psycho-physical experience on the road to Damascus. He reached there a turning point in its history. He was converted, turning his mystic powers in a new direction. Those who were with him were not sufficiently developed to see all that he saw or hear all that he heard.[28] His vision of Jesus was momentary but his life of faith was continuous. If faith was at its beginning when Abraham made his venture, it reached an illustrative and inviting climax when St. Paul made his. It was greater for St. Paul to espouse the cause of the Christ than to have a vision of Jesus. The phenomenal or extraordinary does not always culminate in such courage and devotion as his. It was because he was a mystic that he had his vision, not because he had a vision that he became a mystic. The Apostles who knew Jesus in the flesh had a lesser opportunity for faith than St. Paul who saw Him but once and then after psycho-physical fashion, and who never apprehended Him with all his bodily senses like those who saw “with their eyes” and “beheld,” and whose “hands handled” the Word of Life. It was fitting that St. Paul should give Christianity the impetus which made it a world religion. The highest development of faith has assigned to it the biggest undertaking. St. Peter with undeveloped intellectual gifts and faith based on sight could not do what St. Paul with highly developed reason and singular faith could do. The Risen Jesus Himself declared that faith dependent upon physical or psycho-physical experience is of a lower order than that in which the mystic sense is independent of phenomenal action of the bodily sense—Because thou hast seen me, thou hast believed: blessed are they that have not seen, and yet have believed.

The great multitude of mortals will always be outside of psycho-physical experiences. There is no religious loss in the fact. Rather the contrary. That which gives the soul its permanent hold upon moral and spiritual realities and regard for them in mystics is not their rare psycho-physical experiences, but the same exercise of the Mystic Sense in the daily round of commonplace religious duty which is open to every human being, with like wonderful results upon character. A phenomenal spiritual occurrence in the case of one who was not living a religious life would be a mere wonder, perhaps even productive of spiritual harm.[29] Such experiences are never to be sought for. If they come their peril is not less than their inspiration.

“The trivial round, the common task, Will furnish all we need to ask, Room to deny ourselves, a road To bring us daily nearer God.”

It is a great barrier to religious effort among the crowd, for those living the life of faith, to give the impression that their experience is one of a series of ecstasies. It is no more so than is that of a student of science or higher mathematics. It is the life of faith open to all men which forms the religious life of the best men and the best religious life of all men—the constant placing of God before the Mystic Sense in a way not dissimilar from that in which the scientist approaches his hypothesis.

“Think not the Faith by which the just shall live Is a dead creed, a map correct of heaven, Far less a feeling fond and fugitive, A thoughtless gift, withdrawn as soon as given; It is an affirmation and an act That bids eternal truth be present fact.”

Though the Mystic Sense is not the sole religious faculty, it holds the primacy here as in every distinctively human activity. Used with reason its operation becomes reasonable or rational faith. Its opposite is not reason but sight, that is to say, the unaided findings of the bodily senses of which sight, being the most princely, is representative. Hence St. Paul’s contrast—we walk by faith, not by sight. Even here it is hardly fair to say there is antagonism. Sight is the enemy of faith only when it refuses to be an ally. Sight sees, faith in-sees and therefore fore-sees. Sight has boundaries which it cannot pass. Faith has horizons which retreat as it advances.

Faith has become increasingly rational as the world has grown older and experience has been added to experience. Its explorations in the world of ideals have been more frequent and daring with the advance of time. Consequently the man of to-day makes his flights thitherwards with a fulness of assurance on rational grounds or grounds of high probability which would have been impossible to an Abraham. If the triumphs open to faith have multiplied, so have the deterrent forces holding it back or set in battle array to thwart or otherwise impair it. The commonest injury wrought upon faith is the deflecting of it from the worthy to the unworthy or less worthy. If a man’s Mystic Sense, acute in other directions, is dormant or sluggish in religion, the reason is usually to be found, I think, in circumstances analogous to those which make a student of _belles lettres_, for instance, indifferent to science, or a philosopher careless of the exploits of commerce, cases of which are not wanting. The mind finds higher pleasure among certain persons in being exclusive and technical than in being catholic. So the Mystic Sense can fall short of its highest employment simply because there is not in its possessor the will to employ it commensurately with its capacity. The explanation why some men are not actively religious must be sought elsewhere than in the contention that they are short a faculty. The Mystic Sense, which by virtue of their humanity they possess, is not employed by them religiously from whatever reason—defective interest, prejudice, antagonism, environment. Nevertheless the same inner sense is pushed to its fullest activity in other directions. The faculty which by a daring leap fixes on the evolutionary hypothesis, or with imaginative subtlety suggests the plot of a novel, is the self-same one which enables us to say, “Our Father, which art in heaven.” The consideration of vicious men who are irreligious does not come within the purview of this discussion. Religion and vice are mutually exclusive, though piety and immorality are not, so that we have the anomaly of immoral character revelling in pious practices.

One thing remains to be said. The use of the Mystic Sense in religion, more perhaps than in any other sphere, cannot begin and end in individualism. It is requisite for each to submit the results of his mystic excursions and explorations to the conclusions of the most advanced religion. Mystic observation and experience must have the support and purification of universal mystic experience that will distinguish between the false and the true, phantasm and reality, and deliver the individual from eccentricity and extravagance. In other words, a church is more necessary than a chamber of commerce, a national government, or an academy of science. Mystic experience must be organized like all other experience. As the world grows older and man wiser, organization develops and broadens. National societies and alliances become international and a parliament of man seems a reasonable goal toward which to press. Human life in its individual aspect finds its fullest freedom in organization and not apart from it. The idea of the Catholic Church is as old as Christianity. One Body, one spirit, one Lord, one Faith, one Baptism, said St. Paul before Christianity was fifty years old—and the use of the Mystic Sense independently of organized Christian experience cannot hope to reach valuable results. Reformers of religion are eccentrics and detract from their service so far as they ignore the religious experience of the ages by assuming exclusive positions or lifting a doctrine out of its setting. Our Lord never broke with the faith of His fathers. His last act was to partake of the Passover according to the law. It was the Jews who broke with Him. He came not to destroy but to fulfill. The only setting for any one part of the truth is all the rest of the truth. The only relationship big enough for any one man is all the rest of mankind. When at last the disturbed and broken Christian Church comes to rest in the large scheme of unity planned by its Founder, then the mystical life of man will gain a power and splendor which now is but a vision and a hope.

* * * * *

This concludes my endeavor to credit the Mystic Sense with that dignity and position of importance which belongs to it by right. The attempt is crude and the brilliant vision which I had at the beginning of my task has become dimmer under the process of putting it into words. Whatever has been written stands as a contribution of thought and experience which cannot be of much value until it has been purified from the dross of individualism through the findings of religion and science, and lost in the great volume of truth to which I submit it with reverence and loyalty.

FOOTNOTES

[1] It is only partially true to say that concept follows upon percept. Their action is simultaneous more nearly than consecutive. Conceptualism as a complete system cannot perhaps stand but in its origin it was a healthy reaction against both nominalism and realism, as well as a mediator combining the good in both.

[2] Heb. xi:1.

[3] VON HÜGEL, _The Mystical Element of Religion_, vol. ii, p. 264.

[4] Mk. x:23.

[5] Mk. x:24, 25.

[6] Ψυχικὸς δὲ ἄνθρωπος οὐ δέχεται τὰ τοῦ Πνεύματος τοῦ Θεοῦ; μωρία γὰρ αὐτῷ ἐστι, καὶ οὐ δύναται γνῶναι, ὅτι πνευματικῶς ἀνακρίνεται. 1 Cor. ii, 14.

[7] “True priority and superiority lies, not with one of these constituents against the other, but with the total subjective—objective interaction or resultant, which is superior, and indeed gives their place and worth to, those interdependent parts.”—VON HÜGEL’S _Mystical Element of Religion_, vol. ii, p. 114.

[8] TYRRELL’S _Christianity at the Cross Roads_, p. 240.

[9] Quoted by VON HÜGEL, vol. ii, p. 18.

[10] CHARLOTTE PERKINS STETSON’S _In this our World_.

[11] _The Mystical Element of Religion_, vol. ii, pp. 57, 58.

[12] ROYCE’S _The World and the Individual_, First Series, p. 58.

[13] See MACFIE’S _Science, Matter and Immortality_, an admirable volume on this entire topic.

[14] DARWIN’S _Autobiography_.

[15] Sir JOSEPH LARMOR in his Wilde Lecture (1908) quoted by Sir OLIVER LODGE in _Reason and Belief_, p. 172.

[16] _Reason and Belief_, p. 181.

[17] _The Mystical Element of Religion_, vol. ii, p. 265.

The author quotes KANT—“we can be mediately conscious of an apprehension as to which we have no distinct consciousness.” “The field of our obscure apprehensions,—that is, apprehensions and impressions of which we are not directly conscious, although we can conclude without doubt that we have them—is immeasureable, whereas clear apprehensions constitute but a very few points within the complete extent of our mental life.”

[18] “Literature consists of those writings which interpret the meanings of nature and life in words of charm and power, touched with the personality of the author, in artistic forms of permanent interest.”—VAN DYKE’S _The Spirit of America_, p. 242.

[19] “The wealthy class in Rome and all over Italy began to conform to that conventional code of propriety by which the rich seem always destined, in the progress of civilization, to become more and more enslaved, till finally they lost all feeling for what is serious and genuine in life. The new generation followed their example with alacrity, and preached the new conventions with a passionate vehemence which must have been highly exasperating to those of their seniors who were still attached to the simplicity of primitive manners. Amongst those who protested against this development there was, however, one prominent figure of the younger age, Marcus Porcius Cato, a man of rich and noble family, and a descendant of Cato the Censor. His puritan spirit revolted against the tyranny of fashion to which the golden youth of Rome wished to make him conform; he would walk in the streets without shoes or tunic, to accustom himself, as he said, only to blush at things which were shameful in themselves, and not merely by convention.”—FERRERO’S _Greatness and Decline of Rome_, vol. i, pp. 135, 136.

[20] KIPLING’S _If—_.

[21] DONCASTER’S _Heredity in the Light of Recent Research_ (1910), p. 113 ff.

[22] CRASHAW.

[23] A hypothesis receives passively our quest: God moves to meet us.

[24] NEWMAN in his _Dream of Gerontius_ endows the disembodied soul with perceptive powers analogous to those of the body, saying only the sense of sight. Thus:

_Soul._ “I cannot of thy music rightly say Whether I hear, or touch, or taste the tones.”

... “How comes it then That I am hearing still, and taste, and touch, Yet not a glimmer of that princely sense Which binds ideas in one, and makes them live?”

_Angel._ “Nor touch nor taste, nor hearing hast thou now; Thou livest in a world of signs and types, The presentation of most holy truths, Living and strong, which now encompass thee. A disembodied soul, thou hast by right No converse with aught beside thyself; But, lest so stern a solitude should load And break thy being, in mercy are vouchsafed Some lower measures of perception, Which seem to thee, as though through channels brought, Through ear, or nerves, or palate, which are gone. ... How, even now, the consummated Saints See God in heaven, I may not explicate; Meanwhile, let it suffice thee to possess Such means of converse as are granted thee, Though, till that Beatific Vision, thou art blind.”

The idea underlying the Beatific Vision is the complete apprehension of God by the complete man. Sight is chosen to denote this bliss because it is a princely co-ordinating sense, and our Lord spoke of the heritage of the pure in heart as being the vision of God, a heritage let it be noted, however, for now and not merely for hereafter. It seems reasonable to suppose that our powers of perception after death will be those mystic powers which we enjoy and use now, though then they will be rapidly developed as being our only perceptive powers.

This suggests the investigation in progress of psychic phenomena by scientific methods. The result may lead to an increase of our knowledge regarding the nature of such phenomena. But I do not see how, if communication with the departed be possible at all, we can expect to reach, and be reached by, them except through the Mystic Sense. The invocation of Saints seems to me more in line with what is probable than some of the experiments of the day. Disembodied spirits presumably approximate the nature of God and can approach or be approached only after a purely spiritual or mystical fashion, excepting in those rare psycho-physical instances which are themselves contingent upon a highly developed mystical character and experience.

[25] Progressive civilization may be said to have begun 8,000 B. C.

[26] Two things must be remembered in connection with the interpretation of Jno. xiv ff. In the first place, these chapters, bursting as they are with startling promises which the critic claims have not been made good, were addressed to a select and specially trained group of followers. For instance, Whatsoever ye shall ask in my name, that will I do, constitutes a promise that could not have been made to a heterogeneous crowd. It presupposes an understanding of the mind of Christ that keeps prayer within its appointed limits. A promise of this sort made to a St. John would be fulfilled, whereas it could not be fulfilled in the case of a man who thought that a prayer for the success of his lottery ticket, or the triumph of a competitive business scheme stained with dishonor, might be offered in the name of Jesus. In the second place, these chapters were written down and became accepted Scripture not less than three quarters of a century after they were spoken, by one who, in common with like-minded companions, had experienced the faithfulness of our Lord’s promises. These men knew them to be true, not merely because our Lord had said them, but also because Christian experience, had verified them. This is so of the entire Gospel record. That was remembered and recorded which _Christian_ experience had verified.

[27] Similarly His advent into our human world made it Divine.

[28] Acts ix, 7; xxii, 9.

[29] The miracles of Moses before Pharaoh are illustrative of that which abounds in history—wonders hardening further an irreligious life.