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power of spontaneous creation: breaking out on new paths" (p. 34). And still again: "More and more as we proceed, the peculiar originality of the true Christian mystic becomes clear to us. We are led towards the conclusion-a conclusion which rests on historical rather than religious grounds-that the first person to exhibit in their wholeness the spiritual possibilities of man was the historic Christ; and to the corollary, that the great family of the Christian Mystics-that is to say, all those individuals in whom an equivalent life-process is set going and an equivalent growth takes place-represents to us the substance of things hoped for, the evidence of things not seen, in respect of the upward movement of the racial consciousness. This family constitutes a true variation of the human species . . .” (p. 41). If these and such deliverances mean anything, they mean that with Jesus Christ something new came into the world, something so new that all that had been in the world before it is inadequate to its explanation. And yet Miss Underhill proposes to treat it as only an instance of "the Mystical type", and on the ground that it manifests "the characteristically mystical consciousness" to explain it from general Mysticism of which it is obviously only a specific manifestation!

The expedient by which Miss Underhill escapes from the impasse into which she has brought herself by her isolation of Christian Mysticism as a new creation in the world, is as remarkable as the exaggerations by which she has brought herself into it. Having separated Christian Mysticism off from all other so-called Mysticisms as something (in the "biological" sense) specifically different, she cheerfully proceeds at once to mix it up again with them all. Here is the passage in which she does it (p. 42). "This new form of life, as it is lived by the members of this species, the peculiar psychic changes to which they must all submit, whatever the historic religion to which they belong, may reasonably be called Christian, since its classic expression is seen only in the Founder of Christianity. But this is not to limit it to those who have accepted the theological system called by His name. There is', says Law, 'but one salvation for all mankind, and that is the Life of God in the soul. God has but one design or intent towards mankind, and that is to introduce or generate His own Life, Light, and Spirit in them. . . . There is but one possible way for man to attain this salvation, or Life of God in the soul. There is not one for the Jew, another for a Christian, and a third for a Heathen. No; God is one, human nature is one, salvation is one, and the way to it is one.' We may, however, define the Christian life and the Christian growth as a movement towards the attainment of this Life of Reality; this spiritual consciousness. It is a phase of the cosmic struggle of spirit with recalcitrant matter, of mind with the conditions that hem it in. More abundant life, said the great Mystic of Fourth Gospel, is its goal; and it sums up and makes effective all the isolated struggles toward such life and such liberty which earlier ages had produced." If we understand this paragraph (in which Christ ceases to be the first to become only the classic expression of Christian Mysticism)

it amounts to saying that we may fairly call by the name of Christian Mysticism, any spiritual movement in which we may discover those characteristics which we have discovered in the movement which we have designated by that name. And this would seem to amount to nothing less than saying that the element common to all Mystical movements is not their Mysticism but their Christianity! It is a complete bouleversement of values. Something was originated by Christ. We will say it was Mysticism. But Mysticism obviously was not originated by Christ; it exists apart from Him, it existed before Him. But that can be remedied by recognizing all Mysticism by virtue of our agreement that Mysticism was originated by Christ, as Christian! If Christianity is just Mysticism, why of course Mysticism is Christianity and Christianity, since Mysticism has nothing to do with Him, has nothing to do with Christ.

We do not intend to enter into the details of Miss Underhill's elaborate explaining away of the whole supernatural element of Christianity in her effort to transmute it into just Mysticism, to her reduction of the prophet to "a spiritual genius", of Paul's mighty works to "a growth of automatic powers", of the Son of Man to "the forwardmarching spirit of humanity". There is nothing distinctive about the processes she employs or the conclusions she reaches. We may briefly allude only to her dealing with what she calls "the confused poem of the resurrection" as an instance in point. The only fact that emerges clear from it, she tells us, is that "a personal and continuous life was veritably recognized and experienced; recognized as belonging to Jesus though raised to ‘another beauty, power, glory', experienced as a vivifying force of enormous potency which played upon those 'still in the flesh'" (p. 149). This cannot be accounted for, she thinks, on purely subjective lines. The thing seized upon was "the indestructibility and completeness of the new, transfigured humanity; the finished citizen of the Kingdom of God" (p. 150). The vision then was "of a whole man, body, soul and spirit, transmuted and glorified-a veritable 'New Adam' who came from heaven" (p. 151). And it was of course by the intuition, not the senses, that he was 'seen' (p. 152). Certainly, no such "whole man" existed as the Jesus that was seen. As the Ascended Christ (p. 233), so naturally the Resurrected Christ was "discarnate". All this, of course, we have heard before: Miss Underhill's rationalism is certainly of the commonest garden variety. Take this amazing specimen (p. 219, note 2), relatively to the employment of "John" to designate the author of the Fourth Gospel: "I retain for convenience sake this traditional name, which may well be that of the actual author: 'John' was a common name in Christian circles." Surely enough there are five hundred and ninety-five "Johns" listed in Smith and Wace. But what made "John" so favorite a name "in Christian circles"? And how does Miss Underhill know that "John" was a common name in Christian circles at about the time the Fourth Gospel was written, say at the turning-point of the first and second centuries? None of Smith and Wace's five hundred and ninety

five "Johns" belong to that period except one ("The Presbyter John") -and he was not invented until later. The irruption of "Johns" in Christian circles means an earlier date by a generation for the Gospel of John; for it is not allusions to John in other books but the writings attributed to him which have made the name of John precious to Christians.

That there are elements-fortunately extensive, even dominating elements-in that historical phenomenon which we know as "Christian Mysticism" that derive from Christ and what He brought into the world, of course no one will deny. It is these elements which constitute this Mysticism that particular variety of Mysticism which we call Christian Mysticsm, and which justify, or rather require, that it should be studied apart, as Henri Delacroix has done in his excellent volume on Les Grandes Mystiques Crétiennes (1908) which Miss Underhill misquotes in her efforts to make Christian Mysticism out to be a wholly new creation in the world. We shall all approve of Delacroix's going to the great Christian Mystics by preference to learn what Christian Mysticism is, lest, as he says, he should see only the lower characteristics of it and so miss the greatness of these great men. And we shall all approve also of his going rather to those of them who have lived and practiced Mysticism than to those who have merely written about it. But we shall not doubt any more than he doubts that a doctrine underlies the practice of even these practical Mystics, or that this doctrine by virtue of which they are Mystics derives not from Christ but from Plotinus. "No doubt," he writes, "and we shall show it in this book-doctrine intervenes in experience, and there is, to speak it out, no great Mystic who has not grounded his experience in a doctrine and who has not up to a certain point made doctrinal preoccupations intervene in the constitution of his experience. . . . We have shown that throughout the whole course of Christianity there has been an almost continuous mystical doctrine deriving from Neoplatonism. . . . We shall find it again as a substructure and an implicit theory in the Mysticism of experience" (p. iv). In a sense the source of all of Miss Underhill's woes is her determination that Christian Mysticism, as it is Mysticism, shall find its starting point in Christ and not in Plotinus. "Above all," she writes, "we shall be in conflict with those who . . . consider the Mystical element in Christianity to be fundamentally unchristian and ultimately descended from the Neoplatonists" (p. 58). Nevertheless it was she herself who when not so deeply intoxicated with this theory, told us that "Christian philosophy, especially that Neoplatonic theology which, taking up and harmonizing all that was best in the spiritual intuitions of Greece, India and Egypt, was developed by the great doctors of the early and mediaeval Church, supports and elucidates the revelations of the individual mystic as no other system of thought has been able to do" (Mysticism, p. 125); that "we owe . . . above all to Dionysius the Areopagite, the great Christian contemporary of Proclus, the preservation of that mighty system of scaffolding which enabled the Catholic Mystics to build up the towers and bulwarks of the City of God" (p. 125).

Least of all can any one deny that there is a sense, a wide sense, a sense too wide for the historical meaning of the term Mysticism, in which Christianity is mysticism. It is of the very essence of Christianity that God has immediate access to the human soul and that the Christian enjoys direct communion with God: it is of the very essence of Christianity that it is in Christ that every Christian lives and that it is Christ who lives in every Christian. If there is nothing that shocks the Christian more in Mysticism than its tendency to seek God apart from Christ-as W. Herrmann says "to leave Christ behind" (Communion, E. T. p. 30), he is equally shocked when Herrmann on his own part declares: "There can be no such thing as communion with the exalted Christ" (p. 291). We shall not turn our backs on Mysticism therefore to throw ourselves into the arms of that Ritschlianism in which Miss Underhill, perhaps rightly, sees the most determined modern enemy of all mysticism. But neither need we in revolt from Ritschlianism cast ourselves into the arms of that Mystical individualism which would throw man back on what we have seen Miss Underhill speaking of as the "revelations of the individual" (Mysticism, p. 125). There are some words of Herrmann's which, deeply vitiated though they are by his inadequate view of the person and work of our Lord, and of the relation of the Christian to Him, may yet bring us a needed warning here. "The Christian," says he (p. 193), “can never even wish that God should specially appear to him or speak down to him from heaven. He receives the revelation of God in the living relationships of the Christian brotherhood, and its essential contents are that personal life of Jesus which is visible in the Gospel and which is experienced in the lives of the redeemed." It certainly is not merely in the communion of saints that we have communion with God; it is not only in and through the community of Christian men that we receive the impression of the living Christ; "the personal life of Christ”, that is, the aroma of His holy personality lingering behind Him in the world, does not constitute the essential contents of the revelation of God; the whole conception of the work of Christ and of the substance of the Gospel here outlined is in direct contradiction with what the Gospel itself proclaims. But it is true that the Christian ought to be, and will be, satisfied with the revelation of God in Christ, and cannot crave special and particular revelations, each one for himself. The one revelation of His grace which God has given to His people in His Son is enough for the needs of all and floods the souls of all with a sense of its completeness and its allsufficiency. As Dr. A. Kuyper beautifully expresses it, God the Lord does not feed His people each by Himself but spreads a common table of the abundant supply of which He invites His whole family to partake. But just because the common supply is enough for all, He gives in it personal communion with Him, the Master of the feast, to each and all; and in that communion abundance of life. "Humanity," says A. H. Strong (Philosophy of Religion, pp 220-2) finally "is a dead and shattered vine, plucked up from its roots in God, and fit only

for the fire. But in Christ, God has planted a new vine, a vine full of His own divine life, a vine into which it is His purpose one by one to graft these dead and withered branches so that they may once more have the life of God flowing through them and may bear the fruits of heaven." "It is a supernatural and not a natural process," he adds. And it is only "in Christ", we may add with the utmost emphasis.

Princeton.

BENJAMIN B. WARFIELD.

Eternal Life: A Study of Its Implications and Applications. By Baron FRIEDRICH VON HÜGEL, Member of the Cambridge Philological Society, Author of "The Mystical Element of Religion, as studied in Saint Catherine of Genoa and her Friends". Edinburgh: T. and T. Clark. New York: Imported by Charles Scribner's Sons. 1912. Elaborate Contents and Index. 8vo; pp. 1, 443.

It is important to understand from the outset that this book was prepared originally as an article for Dr. Hastings' Encyclopaedia of Religion and Ethics, and has been published in book-form rather than as an encyclopaedia article only because it had grown too big for its original destination. There are characteristics of the mode of treatment of its theme which can be explained only from this circumstance. On the other hand it must be said that there probably never was an encyclopaedia article not merely more diffusely written but more diffusely thought. There are few subjects connected with religious philosophy and especially with the recent history of religious philosophy which do not receive as full discussion in it as "eternal life". Indeed it is doubtful if it can be accurately said that Baron von Hügel ever comes to the serious discussion of his proper subject, and we are not sure that the average reader will not lay the book down without having learned anything of importance about it. What the book really is, is a survey of recent religious philosophy, in connection with its historical antecedents, with some, apparently incidental, application to the problem of eternal life. This survey is admirably done and the reader as he passes through the book forms a high opinion of the acuteness, sobriety and balance of Baron von Hügel's own thought. Penetrating expositions and criticisms meet us on every page and occasionally exceedingly felicitous summaries of Baron von Hügel's own views are interjected, which quite illuminate the subject which happens to be in hand. Meanwhile it is only by a hint here and there that the reader is kept reminded that the professed subject of the book is "eternal life".

It is in recent philosophy that Baron von Hügel shows himself most at home. The least satisfactory portions of the discussion are those which deal with the Biblical material. Here Baron von Hügel has fallen into the hands of the Philistines: he orders his material under the direction of the radical critics and he accepts for its exposition the guidance of its least sympathetic interpreters. He who commits himself to the leading of Wellhausen and H. J. Holtzmann can never hope to understand either the Prophets of Jehovah or the

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